Welcome

This site hosts materials for "The Workshop Workshop," AKA "Build a quick, effective coding tutorial" or "Data Science and Programming Workshop Design"

By: Christina Maimone and Colby Witherup-Wood, Northwestern IT Research Computing Services

Welcome to what we've been calling The Workshop Workshop!

These materials will help you create an interactive, one-hour data science or programming tutorial. We generally use "workshop" and "tutorial" interchangeably throughout these materials. We tend to call synchronous sessions where we're teaching "workshops," but the materials you create can also work well as self-guided tutorials if you add sufficient details and text.

Creating teaching materials can be hard and time consuming. This template and approach to building materials will help you incorporate best practices, develop materials more efficiently, and help you create a tutorial that will be effective for your learners. At least it does for us!

Benefits for teachers:

• Create materials that work well in different formats: remote workshops, in-person workshops, and self-guided learning.

• Create materials that are modular and easy to combine or separate to accommodate different length teaching sessions.

• Help keep you focused both while creating teaching materials and actually teaching them.

• Focus on teaching rather than software installation issues.

• Teach more learners effectively with the same number of teachers/helpers.

Benefits for learners:

• Easy to stay engaged.

• Easy to follow along and know where the instructor is if they get distracted.

• Learn by doing exercises.

• Do not have to listen/watch and type at the same time.

• Can focus on a single window on their computer.

What these materials are NOT

This is not a pedagogy tutorial or a tutorial on effective teaching practices. While this template and process help support many effective teaching practices, it is just one tool. You'll need more that just a tutorial template to teach effectively.

To learn more about teaching technology effectively, we recommend Teaching Tech Together by Greg Wilson. He also provides his own list of additional resources for further learning. An additional shout out to The Carpentries for helping thousands of people learn to teach technology effectively. The Carpentries Instructor Training materials include a list of recommended books and papers on teaching as well.

We are making no claim that this is THE way to teach or create tutorials. This method has been effective for us, saved us stress and time, and received positive feedback from our workshop participants. This approach is not appropriate for teaching all topics. If it doesn't work well for you, that's OK!

Please take what works for you and leave what doesn't. Even we deviate from our own recommendations to fit the circumstances of a particular topic or tutorial. Trust the Dalai Lama: “Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”

If you have suggestions to share of things that have worked well for you - particularly if you're teaching topics and technology that we're less familiar with - we'd love to hear them!