Review slides for the workshop, including the text in the speaker notes. Check to make sure that 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.
Start sharing your screen before the workshop starts so that you can organize the Zoom windows on your screen, like the participants and chat windows, so that you don’t spend valuable workshop time doing this.
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.
Workshop Introductions: Before the workshop starts, individually ask participants to introduce themselves as they arrive (see the bullet point prompts below). If there are a lot of participants, ask as many as possible to introduce themselves verbally, and then once the start time for the workshop arrives, ask anyone who hasn’t had a chance to introduce themselves to do so in the chat with the following prompts:
Which faculty or department are you from on campus?
What is one thing you hope to get out of the workshop today?
Guide on the Side: Lead the workshop as a “Guide on the Side” rather than lecturing like a “Sage on the Stage.” Lecture for only as much time is needed to introduce the topic so that participants can spend the majority of the face-to-face workshop working through activities of their choice.
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?
Screen Sharing by Participants: Once you’ve finished your introduction, shown participants with no external monitor how to organize their screen, and shared a link to the workshop activities, then walk them through the process of how to share their screen with you in Zoom so that only you and your assistant can virtually wander around the Zoom room and check in with people like you’d do in a physical classroom. If you’re unsure how to do this, please ask Rich to show you how.
Positive Feedback: Throughout the workshop, 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.
