Carpentry Trainer Training Program: Glossary

Key Points

Week 1 Discussion Questions
  • The Instructor Trainer role comes with powers and responsibilities. Some powers are limited to preserve sustainability of The Carpentries, but we will work with you to meet your goals as closely as possible.

  • Teaching and learning are separate, though related, processes. And then there is learning to teach!

  • Most popular texts do not aim to onboard readers to engaging with primary literature in a field. This presents barriers to responsible engagement across disciplines, particularly in education.

Week 2 Discussion Questions
  • Prior knowledge about teaching strategies varies among trainees in Instructor Training workshops. Being attentive to this will improve your impact.

  • Pre-assessment surveys are a critical component of all Carpentries workshops. Help us make them useful for you!

  • Carpentries curriculum templates provide some support for knowledge organization. Instructors can implement additional strategies to help learners create useful connections.

  • Concept maps are a challenging, minimally structured task. They are useful for exploring concepts and relationships prior to teaching because they can make the organization of knowledge more explicit.

Week 3 Discussion Questions
  • Learner motivation in Instructor Training can be very different from the motivation we see in technical workshops.

  • Instructors can influence learner motivation with three ‘levers’ of value, expected efficacy, and a supportive environment.

  • Carpentries Instructor Training aims to teach several component skills of teaching. However, this does not guarantee that all skills will be actively used. Trainers can prepare trainees to bridge this gap by explicitly discussing application as well as supporting practice and feedback.

  • Trainers experience expert awareness gaps and cognitive overload too!

Week 4 Discussion Questions
  • The cognitive level of a task is directly related to the action expected from learners – not the complexity of the material or the stage of a workflow. Bloom’s Taxonomy and associated verb charts are useful tools for evaluating the level of cognition required.

  • Exercises and other classroom practices that keep learners actively engaged can provide many small opportunities for practice and feedback.

  • Co-Instructors and co-Trainers can have a different perspective on instruction compared with learners, but we do not have a systematic way of collecting this feedback. A little advance planning and communication can help ease the awkwardness of sharing between peers.

Week 5 Discussion Questions
  • The Carpentries Code of Conduct is one of many features that creates a positive classroom climate for Carpentries workshops.

  • Instructor trainees will face challenges as they develop skill in teaching. As in technical workshops, a core goal of our two-day training is to prepare them to encounter and surmount those challenges.

Week 6 Discussion Questions
  • The Carpentries Instructor Training curriculum offers many opportunities to model, as well as to teach, good practices.

  • Skill acquisition models explain challenges faced by learners and Instructors, Instructor trainees and Trainers.

  • Expert teachers may have filled in awareness gaps in subjects they teach, but may still have gaps on the subject of teaching.

  • Going slowly is a challenge that takes constant effort and compromise.

  • There are many approaches and supporting documents available to teach Instructor Training. Many of these are referenced in the Instructor Notes.

Week 7 Discussion Questions
  • Convincing trainees to collect feedback is a fundamental goal. Teaching them to use it is the next step.

  • Developing awareness of demotivating scenarios is a fundamental goal. Teaching trainees to cope with them is the next step.

  • Many trainees may have a growth mindset with regard to computational skills and a fixed mindset with regard to teaching skills.

  • New Instructors should start their improvement process with ‘low hanging fruit’ – teaching techniques they can easily adopt. For some, this might center on presentation style while for others, it might have more to do with classroom mechanics. Focusing on one thing at a time to improve on can help people evaluate and prioritize their goals as they progress.

Week 8 Discussion Questions
  • Thinking critically about Bloom’s Taxonomy is typically beyond the Blooms’ level we can expect Instructor trainees to perform at. Examine your learning objectives carefully to calibrate your expectations for this episode and meet learners where they are.

  • Instructors are unlikely to face a Code of Conduct violation, but need to know what to do if this occurs. Reassurance of team support and clear instructions on reporting are the most important elements to communicate.

  • Trainees may be intimidated by many elements of checkout. It is important to emphasize that teaching demonstrations are a friendly opportunity to give and receive feedback, not a high-stakes test, and that our Core Team is there to support them with any questions they may have during the checkout process.

  • Participatory live coding keeps participants engaged, generates immediate feedback, and creates opportunities to model a healthy response to error. These features explicitly support learning and motivation.

  • With instructional support, repeated practice and feedback can lead trainees to examine the component skills of teaching.

Week 9 Discussion Questions
  • Introducing a workshop has an outsized impact on the overall experience of the workshop. In addition to emphasizing preparation, it can be helpful to encourage trainees to think about this as a teaching challenge.

  • At the end of the workshop, we ask our trainees to take some time to organize some of the information they have learned. This is also a useful exercise to practice when preparing to teach the workshop!

Week 10 Discussion Questions

Glossary

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