Hi all,
On 12/12/2014 11:00 PM, Bill Mills wrote:
- There appears to be overwhelming support for starting the
instructor journey the oldschool way - by attending or helping at a
workshop. I also will join the chorus of agreement, since this is
certainly the best way to understand what actually goes on at the
event proper. But in that case, shall we make it official, and promote
previous workshop attendance as a hard requirement for future
instructor training? Greg and I have chatted about this previously,
too - perhaps it's time to set it on the path to enshrinement.
I've been teaching at only one workshop up to now, and never attended
one before. I thus want to voice a mitigated opinion.
If the attendance requirement had been in place, I wouldn't be an
instructor today, I wouldn't have taught at a workshop and I wouldn't be
discussing here… and that would be sad :'( for me.
Here is my story.
I have a reasonable computer and teaching experience. I registered for
the instructor training because I was happy to find a community that
cared about teaching basic computer skills to scientists. My weekly
planning was very busy but I though: ok, I can pack a few more hours,
it's worth it. And it was: I really appreciated the dynamics of the
instructor training (it seems it even improved since then).
While preparing the first workshop a few month later, I obviously had a
lot of interrogations. Part of them were about what the typical workshop
looks like, and obviously, having attended a workshop would have helped
a lot.
However, a lot of my interrogations won't go away for my hopefully next
workshops, as they are inherent to teaching: who is the audience, what
should be targeted for them, how much can we cover, ...
Another part of my interrogations were about organization, planning with
the hosts, and introducing the workshop. I had the chance to be with an
amazing mentor, Aleksandra Pawlik, that handled most of it.
Overall, I managed teaching a workshop without attending one before, and
I feel the attendees were not harmed.
I think a lot of us have limited time resources (and traveling takes a
lot of it) and we might loose some people with a hard rule.
Cheers,
Rémi
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