# The Carpentries Lesson Development Study Groups Notes ## Group 2: Tuesday 16 February 2021 14:00-15:00 UTC This document can be used for note-taking and resource sharing during Study Group discussions. ## Important Links 1. [The Carpentries Code of Conduct](https://docs.carpentries.org/topic_folders/policies/code-of-conduct.html) 1. [Study Groups "lesson" pages](https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/study-groups/index.html) 1. [The Carpentries Curriculum Development Handbook](https://cdh.carpentries.org) 1. [Teaching Tech Together](https://teachtogether.tech/) ## Participants Please add your name, preferred pronouns (if any), GitHub username, and (when you have it) a link to your lesson repository below. See first line for an example. - Sue McClatchy / she/her / smcclatchy / [Statistical Inference for Biology](https://github.com/smcclatchy/statistical-inference-for-biology) / [lesson design notes](https://codimd.carpentries.org/v6w3bBXUT1OB6lDzW_XaSg?both) - Dan Kerchner / @kerchner / see Sue's link - Peter Steinbach / github:@psteinb, twitter:@psteinb_ / https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/deep-learning-intro/issues - Aleks Nenadic / she, her / gh: anenadic - Mateusz Kuzak / he, him / gh: mkuzak - Mosè Giordano / he, him / gh: giordano - Colin Sauze / he, him / gh: colinsauze - Maria Dermit (add more lines as needed) ## Roles **Group Facilitator(s)**: **Discussion Lead**: Sue McClatchy **Notetaker**: Mateusz and Aleks ## Agenda 1. Welcome & Icebreaker What is your favorite food? It may be a meal or snack, something you eat often, something from your childhood, or something only for special occasions. Write your favorite food below, state it verbally to the group, or do both as you prefer. - Peter, Hefeklöße - yeast dumplings (I think); in my region, we have a tendency to have sweet dishes for lunch, my international colleagues always sniff their noses on this , but this is something I like and have a lots of memories with - Colin - chocolate, specifically mint flavoured - Maria- lasagna, I cooked a huge on Sunday and finished it already. - Dan - falafel, lately discovered a great addition of preserved lemons - Mateusz - reasenlty preparing or ordering a lot of Indian food, interchanged with Thai - Aleksandra - generally a food lover, favourite food in the lockdown: pizza (cliché, I know) - Mosè - lasagna - Sue - arequipe, the Colombian version of dulce de leche 2. Discussion questions Please respond to the questions below in writing, either here or in your own private notes. We will discuss these verbally after everyone has had an opportunity to write their responses. When you are finished with the first three questions below, please type "done" in the Zoom chat. #### **_Who is the training for?_** Sue: identifying audience is critical, for whom is the training intended, how does it fit their needs. We spend some time identifying our audience and writing learner profiles - characterisation of a typical member of our audience (2-3 profiles), skills that a representative of audience will have and what skills they want to have and the training should bridge that gap. 1. What are some of the potential benefits of writing specific learner profiles rather than stopping after answering the audience definition questions? - PS: it preserves the key points about the audience for my future self or the lesson community (helps to mentally interact with). - Defining the audience, it ie very hard and often chances from workshop to workshop, how do you know who will show up, who will be in the audience - Dan: personas define who could come and to stay flexible during the workshop, get feedback to assess the level of who is there - Aleks: use pre-workshop survey to fix that - Mateusz: act on results of the pre-workshop survey, have a meeting before the workshop to address this, act on the composition of the audience e.g. with respect to the communication tools - Sue - communication is key - it often makes or breaks training - Colin: It makes the audience more relatable to you. If you don't have a real person, you will create a persona which is the hybrid of several people - Maria: It could help clarifying misconceptions straight away, you can identify better the missconceptions and use it to better design the lesson - Sue: Learner profiles provide a deeper, more specific understanding of the audience. They specify what skills the audience already has, what skills they need, and how the training will help them in their work. The training will have greater impact when learner profiles are used, rather than a general description of the audience. - Dan: going from theory to applied and making sure we are writing for real people - Sue: like to have a real life person rather than imaginary person and understand their pain points. Make the audience more relatable to you and you emphaise more with them - you think of them and their needs, you can identify their needs better. - Maria: problem with surveys too - people sometimes do not know how to respond to a survey and self-assess their skills in a different way - they over or under estimate their skills or knowledge it is hard to guess right who will come, will it fit with your expectations? 2. What are some of the challenges of writing a lesson aimed at novices? - Colin: teaching them enough of the fundamentals to do something useful, without spending much time on those fundamentals. Difficult to trade off "trust me this is how it works" with "let me explain how this works" - it takes time to build a mental model - PS: discarding expert bias all the way through the process - Dan: Going slowly enough. - Dan: To motivate learners, we want to provide opportunities for early successes, but constructing meaningful successes can be challenging with novice skills. - how to construct early successes? the more it is a small step that can be applied in the research context. Something directly relevant for their work. - Maria : expert bias can be a problem, but could be aleviated with peer-instruction 3. How would you respond to someone who enthusiastically and insistently states: - I want to teach X because X is great and I'm an expert in X - Dan: Fantastic! We need people who are enthusiastic about X to teach X! How can you orient your teaching to people who are NOT experts in X, and have never used X before? What was it like for you to learn X for the first time? - PS: That is great to hear. Let's say you teach X to a group of 12, which topics do you teach and consider essential? - what is essential and what is necessary? Only teach the essential. - Colin: What features of X are you going to be able to get a group who've never used before to use and understand in a few hours? Are there any essential features that can't be taught in that time frame? - Everyone needs to learn tool Y because they don't know how to use it and it's an important tool - Dan: Why is it an "important tool"? For what types of problems or tasks is it an important tool? (Perhaps some people, not "everyone", have different problems for which another tool/s would be more helpful) - PS: What is the concept that you consider essential about Y? (which makes you observe that it should be mandatory for everyone) - Sus: In a classrom, who is the most important person? - Sue: as a school teacher, she was taught to put the students first. In higher education, we tend to put the instructor first. This is not how it should be - we need to change that from the lesson design to delivery. - Everyone needs a thorough and comprehensive understanding of computer science before they can truly know how to program - Mosè: you don't need to be a mechanical engineer to drive a car. Having a thorough understanding of the fundamentals does help, but people can learn the basics withot that. Also, they can reach that level of understand step by step. - Dan: Do you know people who started to program without a computer science background? How did it turn out for them? - Colin: But can they get enough understanding to do something useful without a comprehensive understanding of computer science? I think they can, because plenty of people do this! We aren't asking them to make a novel contribution to computer science. - PS: Computer Science is such a vast field. Finding this person that thoroughly and comprehensively understands it will be a scientific enterprise within its own right. #### **_Motivation_** 1. What motivates learners to come to training? 2. What motivates instructors to teach? Notes: Notes are inline #### Key points - training should be based on training needs, not on an instructor's desire to teach a favorite topic or on opinions about what others need - common training needs can be identified from those who do the same kind of work (an audience) - defining an audience can help to clarify training needs - defining a learner persona specifies the immediate obstacles this person needs to overcome and the skills needed to overcome them - clearly and correctly specifying audience, typical learner, and training needs are critical to producing training that has impact - homework (see https://carpentries-incubator.github.io/study-groups/02-audience/index.html): - Read the Technological Introductions chapter of the CDH and follow the steps to set up your repository as described in the template README file. - Read section A.2 of CDH Appendix A: The Carpentries Incubator, and add topics to your lesson repository. (If you cannot add the complete set of topic tags yet, do not worry: you will be able to add more and remove topics whenever you like.) - Note down any questions you have about the lesson template and, if you got stuck, how far you had progressed with the setup beforehand. - Add a link to your lesson repository to the Study Group’s shared notes document. - **Weekly "Sticky Note" feedback**: please give us your feedback about this week by [filling out this two-question form][sticky-notes-link] ## Resources Add any relevant resources you found/discussed this week to the list below. - [The Science of Training and Development in Organizations: What Matters in Practice](https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/38817736/The_effect_of_strategic_factors_and_the_role_of_relationship_quality_as_mediator_on_brand_equity_of_automotive_industry.pdf?1442635959=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DThe_Science_of_Training_and_Development.pdf&Expires=1613421027&Signature=IlRpbA30JOqgEm1aZ03eKIozV0Tib0UJHCeHclIklBIsCRQyFbMCNcD-7p7LqiMG-SfBz7tRZK2mC~JsnE9Yj5e4F-kbD8CCMpNbzWKBqwO2B6PDjw3LwSCbvFTee6M4bzXAferu4-JnFxoFryzvlcosc0i57prHabGhEQPGS1Lj8yLkppqQ1Nqdzdepkwk-O85yuHN12HD9yDNuqh9KR1NKdNXPgbsQHTOkmL8Lzo~Ht~KZsfxfvBtGJLZJzOT6lQtic2BwtYMTIl7mlicvSDJ24pUyZ9twI-7VZUNr6gktDEk0K-gtt9RwcpFFR~mDPDg0anCdVeqxC5XW5Hihaw__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA) Table 3 provides a checklist of steps to take before training - - [sticky-notes-link]: https://forms.gle/6Mc1iU9To6VSBnJr7