Our second and final day of instructor training was Friday. One of the most valuable components for me was thinking about and practicing live coding. Talking through your actions as you write code allows you to troubleshoot errors as they occur, which happens all the time even to the most competent practitioners but can totally overwhelm novices. Demonstrating the actual practice of writing code helps learners develop the necessary mental models to become competent practitioners themselves.

We spent a good portion of the day talking about equity in instruction, with some interesting relevant ideas for software and data carpentry (e.g. live coding isn't very helpful for visually-impaired learners). I learned that 3M brand sticky notes of different colors look different even to colorblind learners, which is useful! In these workshops, sticky notes are often used to facilitate interactions between learners and instructors, with specific colors assigned to specific flags (i.e. green: I'm following the material, red: I need assistance, yellow: I have a question, and blue: I need a break).

We also talked a bit about designing lessons, starting with writing good learning objectives (using thoughtful verb choices from Bloom's taxonomy, see below), then writing summative assessments (e.g. exam questions) and rubrics, then the lessons themselves.

All in all, it was a valuable experience! I look forward to teaching programming and data management more effectively in the future.

I'm taking part in an instructor training for Software/Data Carpentry held online (using Blue Jeans and Etherpad, as well as additional media, and led by Greg Wilson). Day 1 involved on discussion, theory, and practice focused on educational psychology and instructional design. We practiced tiny lessons, wrote multiple choice questions with distractors, created concept maps, and developed "faded design" programming exercises. So far, I'm impressed with how much I've learned!

Important takeaways (with useful links):

• Novices in a particular area often struggle with knowing where to start/what is important/how to troubleshoot, because they lack a working mental model.
• Taking frequent breaks and avoiding exhaustion/sleep deprivation are important to productivity.
• Also important to learning: frequent, formative feedback.
• Experts in a particular area are often not great at teaching in that area, because they don't need to reason through problems (anymore).
• Especially in programming, having authentic tasks with tangible artifacts (e.g. a plot) will increase learner retention.