Review slides for the workshop, including the text in the speaker notes. Make sure no important slides have been hidden by a previous instructor.
If you are teaching online via Zoom, open the Zoom room no less than 10 minutes before the start of the workshop so that you can make sure that you can successfully log on, and test that your camera and microphone are working properly.
Teaching Tips:
Be Excited! Instructors who are excited about what they are teaching are typically more effective in helping their students to learn than non-excited teachers. An instructor’s excitement can be infectious.
What’s the Big Idea: What is the big idea that will capture the imagination of your learners at the start of your face-to-face session?
Guide on the Side: Lead the workshop as a “Guide on the Side” rather than lecturing like a “Sage on the Stage.” Put as much instructional material as possible into the pre-workshop videos so that the majority of the face-to-face time can be used for hands-on learning.
Workshop Introductions: At the beginning of the workshop, ask participants to introduce themselves (unless it’s a really large group, in which as you can ask them to introduce themselves in the Zoom chat). It can be helpful to know the background of participants, as well as what they hope to get out of the workshop so that you, as an instructor, can customize the workshop on the fly to best meet the needs of participants. Here are some sample prompts:
What is your name?
Which faculty or department are you from on campus?
What is one thing they hope to get out of the workshop?
Make workshop activities directly relevant: Encourage participants to use their own data, or customize the in-class activities so that they can tackle one of their own projects as they learn new skills during the workshop (if possible).
Positive Feedback: Give positive feedback to participants as often as you can. This is particularly important for learners who are struggling or in introductory workshops where learners are still mastering the basics. Positive feedback for novices is a much more effective motivator than critiques or negative feedback.
Trial Runs:
Assist someone who has experience teaching the workshop, or do a trial run workshop from start to finish with a group of in-house novices, so you can practice leading the workshop.
Don’t forget to solicit feedback on the pre-workshop materials and how the workshop was led.
