Tips for Teaching

Some practical tips for teaching with your new tutorial materials

Exercises

Exercise Timers: When pausing for participants to complete an exercise, make sure to tell them how long they have. You can even set a timer with the countdown.

Don't talk during exercises: When you pause for participants to complete an exercise, STOP TALKING! If you're talking, participants will listen to you instead of working on the exercise. They can't do both at once. Use that time to look ahead and prepare yourself, take a drink of water, or answer questions that may have come up in the chat. If you do answer questions in the chat that may be of general interest, briefly summarize what you shared when everyone is back after the exercises.

Label the Exercises: Clearly label the exercises as such in your file. Make them easy for people to find.

Provide Answers: Sharing answers to exercises in a separate file is a good idea. Participants will ask for them, and it allows people who are learning with your materials on their own or catching up from a missed session to check their learning. Remember, it's up to your participants to choose to learn the material; if they want to cheat and not do the exercises, that's up to them.

Other Tips

Timing: Participants are more upset if you can't cover all of your material (even if you planned it that way), than if you leave time for questions and end early because you don't get many. You can always have bonus topics that you save to talk about at the end of there aren't questions of you get done early. Refine your workshop until you can fit it into one hour comfortably. If you have more material than fits in one hour, make another tutorial.

Enlist advanced learners to help: Encourage participants to use the chat on Zoom to ask questions, and encourage participants to answer questions that they know the answer to. This is particularly helpful for getting questions answered that arise from someone not having the prerequisite knowledge or someone having missed something you said. The learner gets their answer, the person who answers feels good about their knowledge, and you don't have to stop to repeat something for just one person or get sidetracked from your main topic.

Platform variations: Be aware of differences that users may encounter compared to what they see on your screen - will the platform look different on a Mac vs. a PC? will they need a slightly different command or see slightly different results if they are running a previous or newer version of Python or R? will files need to be uploaded differently if they are using the online option instead of running locally?

Use what your learners will use: You want what participants see/experience on their end to match what you're showing them. Teach from the same platform you suggest they use; avoid dark mode or other custom settings.