Welcome
Last updated on 2025-10-15 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 60 minutes
Overview
Questions
- What can I expect from this Training?
- What is expected of me in this Training?
Objectives
By the end of this session, participants should be able to…
- describe the format of the Trainer Training program and sessions.
- summarise the lesson development experience of the participants in the cohort.
Reading List
- The Carpentries Code of Conduct
- Sections 1-3 of Course design: Considerations for trainers - a Professional Guide by Allegra Via et al, 20201.
Introductions
The first discussion session will begin with a full round of Introductions, where trainees and facilitators will be given the opportunity to share some details about themselves and their past experience with curriculum development and The Carpentries.
About this Training
The goal of this training is to prepare participants to teach The Carpentries Collaborative Lesson Development Training (CLDT).
The training will involve weekly discussion calls attended by trainees and facilitators, as well as reading tasks and occasional, more practical, homework tasks. The reading and other tasks have been selected to provide trainees with insight into the CLDT curriculum, some of the literature on which it is based, and the experience participants will have when in the lesson development training.
Weekly training structure
Each episode of this lesson site corresponds to a week of Trainer Training, and contains Reading List, Discussion Questions and Homework/Reading for Next Week blocks.
- Reading List: these are the resources trainees should read before joining the weekly discussion call. When reading episodes from the CLDT curriculum, please make sure that you are viewing the page in Instructor View so that inline Instructor Notes are displayed on the page.
- Discussion Questions: these questions will form the basis for the agenda of the weekly discussion call, though discussions are likely to elaborate on and stray away from these starting questions.
- Homework/Reading for Next Week: this block provides trainees with an overview of the tasks they are expected to complete before the next weekly discussion call.
The final episode provides a list of tasks trainees need to complete before they can be certified as a Lesson Developer Trainer.
Collaborative Lesson Development Training is Changing!
Informed by experience and feedback gathered over the first few years of teaching and administering the training program, a redesigned version of CLDT will be launched in January 2026. We will talk more about what has changed and why as we progress through this training. For now, it is essential for trainees to be aware that many of the links for reading in this Trainer Training will point to a preview of the updated version of the CLDT curriculum. This redesigned content will be merged into the official version of the curriculum at the end of 2025.
Curriculum is a work in progress
Any lesson or curriculum has room for improvement, especially when it is relatively new and not extensively tested.
If you think that something is wrong, missing, or could be improved in this training curriculum or the CLDT curriculum, please report it by opening an issue on the source repository(source for this training; source for CLDT) or - even better - open a pull request to suggest the improvement.
The curriculum belongs to the community - let’s develop it together!
Discussion Questions
- What questions do you have about this training?
- In your experience, what are some good practices people can adopt to help them develop better lessons/curriculum?
- What topics are you hoping to find are covered in the Collaborative Lesson Development Training curriculum?
Reading for Next Week
- CLDT episode: Lesson Design
- Section 4 (Nicholls’ five phases of curriculum design) of Course design: Considerations for trainers - a Professional Guide by Allegra Via et al, 20202
- The training program will provide an overview of the Collaborative Lesson Development Training curriculum, the key concepts and principles behind it, and opportunities to discuss all of this with the other members of the cohort.
- In addition to attending weekly discussion sessions, trainees are required to complete reading and occasional homework tasks before they become certified Trainers.
Via A, Palagi PM, Lindvall JM et al. Course design: Considerations for trainers – a Professional Guide [version 1; not peer reviewed]. F1000Research 2020, 9:1377 (document) (https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1118395.1)↩︎
Via A, Palagi PM, Lindvall JM et al. Course design: Considerations for trainers – a Professional Guide [version 1; not peer reviewed]. F1000Research 2020, 9:1377 (document) (https://doi.org/10.7490/f1000research.1118395.1)↩︎