Trial Run Debrief

Overview

Teaching: 60 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What did I learn about my lesson?

• What will I do differently next time I teach?

• What will I change in my lesson material before I next teach it?

• What will I do differently when developing the rest of my lesson?

• What do I need help with?

• How did backwards design help me with this trial run?

Objectives

• Identify three things that worked well in their episode.

• Identify three things that could be improved in their episode.

• Track problems with their lesson and potential improvements as issues on their repository.

Reading List

• The discussion prompts below.

Discussion Prompts

• How successful was your trial run? Consider this both from the perspective of the learners - how successfully do you think they learned the skills you were aiming to teach? - and your own - how helpful was the trial run as an exercise in gathering feedback about the ongoing development of your lesson?
• What worked well about the material you have developed?
• What needs changing before next time? Consider what needs changing about both the lesson and your approach to teaching it.
• How well did you estimate how long the episode(s) would take to teach?
• What do you need help with to improve your lesson?
• Now that you have followed the process of backwards design from first steps to teaching the new lesson for the first time
  • what are some benefits of the backwards design approach to lesson development?
  • what are some of the disadvantages?
• What do you wish you had known - or that you had been told - when you began developing this lesson?

Homework Tasks

Note for groups of participants collaborating on a single lesson: ALL: a task to be done by all collaborators on a lesson; ONE: a task to be done by only one participant per lesson, ideally after discussion with their collaborators.

• (ALL) Create more issues on your lesson repository, as a way to keep track of outstanding tasks and improvements that could be made.
• (ALL) Read Section A.3 (Using GitHub Issue Labels) of CDH Appendix A: The Carpentries Incubator.
• (ONE) Add help-wanted and good-first-issue labels to the issues on your repository as appropriate.
• (Optionally, ONE) ask the Curriculum Community Developer to include your lesson in the listing on the Help Wanted page of The Carpentries website.
• (ALL) Read Chapter 6: Community Development Roles and Chapter 7: Lesson Life Cycle of the Curriculum Development Handbook.
• (ALL) Open at least one Pull Request to fix an issue on another lesson repository in The Carpentries Incubator.

Key Points

• Key points will be defined during discussion.