Session Lead
The Session Leads’s role is that of a director. You are tasked with taking control of the flow of the session and making sure it proceeds in a way that is beneficial not only to trainees but to volunteers as well. In the classroom, people will look to you as a figure of authority and leadership. As a Session Lead, you are ultimately responsible for what is taught in the session, the pace and the involvement of our other volunteers. It is an important and impactful role where you can have a huge impact on our trainees' education.
Responsibility
Your responsibility as a Session Lead is to teach the learning goals for each week and make sure that all trainees can keep up with the session.
Coordinate
Plan
Teach
Your primary role as a Session Lead is to coordinate and control the session. It is your job to guide the trainees and teaching assistants through the lesson plan and understand when people need more time or more guidance. Use your teaching assistants to help guide you in these efforts.
Before each lesson, you should organize with the other mentors what and how you are planning on delivering the content. It is so important that you - and the rest of the people you’re teaching with - thoroughly understand the content being taught and are prepared to deliver it to the team. Before each lesson you should understand the schedule for the day, when each exercise will be taught and how they will be delivered.
Teaching should always take the smallest amount of your time as you should move to examples as soon as you feel the trainees are ready. Where possible you should practice Active Teaching which means that you are responsive to the trainees' questions and misunderstandings.
Jobs in Sessions
Before
During
After
Introduce yourself and the session mentors
Introduce the learning objectives for the day
Be aware of which trainees are struggling
Solicit answers from all trainees
Thank trainees for asking questions
Give a recap of the learning objectives
Thank the volunteers
Attend the retro to feedback on trainees
Teaching at HackYourFuture - Copenhagen
At HackYourFuture we give our teachers lots of freedom to teach the way they want to. The only thing you need to do is teach the learning goals for each week. That is because the assignments are based on these learning goals and we don't want our trainees to struggle too much with completing them.
The way you teach the session is up to you. There is a lesson plan for each module, but it's up to you if you want to use it.
Running the session
The session can be run in two different ways:
Flipped classroom. Here the trainees watch the material before the session. That means that the session can be used for clearing up things, questions, exercises and assignments. This approach is about maximizing active learning which has been found to increase learning effectiveness.
Normal approach. The trainees come to the session and are taught the topics of the week. When the teaching is over the trainees have time for exercises.
It's up to you what approach you want to use. But we would like to encourage using flipped classroom, as most trainees report preferring this way of learning.
The same goes for experiential learning (hands-on work) and peer-assisted learning (trainees helping one another). This has also shown to work well for our trainees. In practice this means that we try to use as few powerpoint slides as possible (ideally none) and focus on Live coding examples, group exercises and anything else that keeps people's hands on their keyboards and makes them apply their skills and practice them.
Practicalities
Recording of sessions. We use Zoom for online sessions & recording. A staff member can either provide you login info to a HYF-owned Zoom account, or you can also use your own. In Zoom, remember to record the session and post the recorded video on the team's Slack channel. Optionally, when using HYF's Zoom accounts, record to the cloud and a HYF staff will share the recording
Talk with your session assistant Before a session try and talk to your session assistant(s) about how you want to work together. Should the session assistant fx. help introduce some topics, is it okay if the session assistant interrupts, etc.
Assignment status Get an overview of how the team is doing. Use the Homework Checker tool (deprecated) to get a bit of an overview of how the team is doing, or scroll through the team's Slack channel. With an overview you can teach more targeted towards clearing out misconceptions in the session.
Breaks We take a long break around 14:00, to have lunch. (About 20 minutes). Otherwise, make sure to remember to take short breaks about every 45 minutes as it is a lot to take in for trainees and concentration will understandably drop if we don't take breaks.
Don't forget about the fun If you have an idea about how to combine the teaching with some more fun exercises - do it. Our curriculum is challenging and sometimes dry (it has to be), but that doesn't mean we can't take some digressions to have some fun and get the energy levels in the session up. Mitigating 'code scare' or demystifying the world of programming can be super important, especially in the start. A good resource for fun exercises is the teaching_tips_and_tricks repo. It's a collaborative effort between all HYF chapters and Pull Requests are more than welcome!
Online sessions
We try to run all sessions in person, but circumstances can sometimes require that we do the workshop online (epidemics, location issues, force majeure). In any case, we always record the workshops online with Zoom. Always make sure to post the link into the team channel, so people following remotely (due to e.g. illness) can join live.
Here are some things we learned from having all sessions online during Covid:
When you do exercises, make small groups of 3 people in breakout rooms
In Zoom you can raise your hand. Use that to figure out if people are following or if people have questions
Suggested Teaching Techniques
Live Coding
As a team you should work through a programming problem together. Ideally you should be the ‘hands’ 👐 and the trainees should be the ‘brain’ 🧠. They should direct every keystroke of the solution. This is a great way of de-mystifying the coding process and slowly taking trainees through a concept or problem. The speed of your typing will limit the speed that you can deliver content and so is an ideal tool for pacing the lesson.
Worked Example
Bring a programming problem that you thoroughly understand and have prepared for. Your job as a Session Lead is to slowly reveal sections of the solution as trainees understand the different parts of it. It is important to move slowly and not reveal too much.
Peer instruction
Peer instruction is an interactive teaching method in which trainees discuss underlying concepts with each other during the lecture. Learning comes from the trainees helping each other explain concepts. Read more here.
Useful Links
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