Pre-workshop Preparation

These things will help you get the most out of this workshop, by giving you a broad overview at the beginning that you might only get later on during the workshop.

Read “How to help someone use a computer” (5 min)

How to help someone use a computer, by Phil Agre.
Summary: Most of our teaching challenge is helping people to overcome bad user interface design.

Prepare a short teaching demo (20 min)

Think about a topic that you know well, that you’ve taught before, or that you want to teach in the future. Think about a hands-on approach to how to teach it and prepare a 3-5 minute demo. It’s good if the demo is based on a sequence of steps that you prepare and explain during the demo.

During the instructor training workshop you will be asked to teach this topic to a small group of other participants and receive feedback. Your 3-5 minute demo does not need to be complete; it’s fine if you only include the initial steps of a larger thing.

Since this workshop is focused on teaching technical topics, it might be useful if your topic is also technical and involves showing shell commands, programming constructs or similar. But it can also involve navigating a graphical user interface (GUI) or using some computational tool.

Browse an ENCCS lesson (5 min)

Take 5 minutes and go through an ENCCS lesson to understand the general layout (which is based on the principles presented in this workshop). You don’t need to go in-depth to any of the material (unless you want, obviously).

Some example lessons:

(Optional) Read “The science of learning” (20 min)

Read this short paper The Science of Learning which provides a brief overview of some key evidence-based results in teaching. This paper is also used by The Carpentries for their Instructor Training workshops.

Remark

Don’t worry if there are sections you do not understand. The main objective is to have a baseline for our discussions during the instructor training workshop.