I’m writing up what I learned from teaching a jQuery workshop this past month. I’ve already posted on my theoretical basis and pacing. Today, stuff I did to create a positive classroom climate and encourage people to leave the workshop motivated to learn more. (This is actually an area of relative weakness for me, teaching-wise, so I really welcome anyone’s suggestions on how to cultivate related skills!)
Post-it notes
I distributed a bunch of them and had students put them on their laptops when they needed help. This lets them summon TAs without breaking their own work process. I also had them write something that was working and something that wasn’t on post-its at the end of Day 1, so I could make a few course corrections for Day 2 (and make it clear to the students that I care about their feedback and their experience). I shamelessly stole both tactics from Software Carpentry.
Inclusion and emotion
The event was conducted under the DLF Code of Conduct, which I linked to at the start of the course material. I also provided Ada Initiative material as background. I talked specifically, at the outset, about how learning to code can be emotionally tough; it pushes the limits of our frustration tolerance and often (i.e. if we’re not young, white men) our identity – “am I the kind of person who programs? do people who program look like me?” And I said how all that stuff is okay. Were I to do it over again, I’d make sure to specifically name impostor syndrome and stereotype threat, but I’ve gotten mostly good feedback about the emotional and social climate of the course (whose students represented various types of diversity more than I often see in a programming course, if less than I’d like to see), and it felt like most people were generally involved.
Oh, and I subtly referenced various types of diversity in the book titles I used in programming examples, basically as a dog-whistle that I’ve heard of this stuff and it matters to me. (Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl, which I was reading at the time and which interrogated lots of stuff in my head in awesome ways, showed up in a bunch of examples, and a student struck up a conversation with me during a break about how awesome it is. Yay!)
As someone who’s privileged along just about every axis you can be, I’m clueless about a lot of this stuff, but I’m constantly trying to suck less at it, and it was important to me to make that both implicit and explicit in the course.
Tomorrow, how ruthless and granular backward design is super great.
andromeda yelton 