Yesterday was Round 2 of Instructor Hangouts, our bi-weekly event to meet instructors from across many different workshop offerings. This week, we tried something a bit different: a roundtable discussion in the first session, and our first video teaching review in the second session. Many thanks go out to Rachel Sanders from PyLadies and Naupaka Zimmerman from SWC for their illuminating comments at the roundtable; those conversations were so interesting, I’ll be posting thoughts and reflections from them in their own posts throughout the day. Stay tuned!

Teaching Feedback: How Can We Improve?

So – nobody came to the 9 PM PDT Instructor Hangout to try out giving feedback on Damien Irving‘s new videos from Research Bazaar‘s latest SWC workshop. I’d love to know what about this didn’t work for you – was it the time, or the day? Was the subject not interesting? Was the format unappealing? Did you have questions on how this would work? Something totally different? Please – let me know in the comments, or on the thread at Mozilla Science Lab’s brand new forum, and I will be happy to rework things to suit what the community wants.

There’s been plenty of discussion lately about the need for more feedback for our instructors, and one thing is clear: no one solution is going to serve everyone. I think it’s going to take a whole bunch of different strategies working together, including live observation & feedback, private teaching demos in hangouts (which I and others will gladly make time for), and video reviews like these to accommodate our instructors that don’t have easy access to local live events they can interact in. We can make a great support network together – tell us on the thread linked above just what you’d like to see.