For Current Carpentries Instructors¶

Professional development for Instructors¶

As part of welcoming and orienting new Instructors to our community, and enriching and building skills and community among continuing Instructors, we have a number of ways to support you.

Mentoring and Development¶

The Instructor Development Committee (formerly known as the Mentoring Subcommittee) manages the mentoring program, which supports Instructors as they progress through training, teaching, curriculum development, and other community-related activities.

Community discussions¶

These hour-long sessions are organised by the Instructor Development Committee and serve a number of purposes. Trainee Instructors use them as part of their checkout process. There they can raise questions about teaching workshops and other matters and get advice from more experienced Instructors. All sessions are run by volunteers. Instructors preparing to teach can attend to ask questions, get tips, and find useful examples or analogies they can use. Instructors who have recently taught can attend to debrief about what went well, and what might have gone better, so they can plan for next time. Sessions are coordinated through this etherpad.

Mentoring groups¶

Mentoring is a professional development opportunity that the Carpentries offers our growing Instructor pool to help community members learn and grow. Whether you are a new Instructor preparing to teach your first workshop, a seasoned Instructor hoping to run workshops in a new community, or an Instructor excited about getting involved with lesson development and maintenance, mentoring groups will help you gain the confidence, technical skills, and teaching skills you need to reach your goal. Mentoring groups run in specified rounds at regular intervals. See the Mentoring Groups section for more information.

Carpentries Champions¶

If you are interested in building a local community, then consider joining the Carpentries Champions. Champions calls are run quarterly and you can hear from more experienced community members about what strategies you can try to build grassroots communities. There is already a Carpentries Community Cookbook, with ‘recipes’ you can adapt for your local needs. There is a Champions mailing list, and you can also join the #champions channel on Slack.

Meetups page¶

If you are attending a conference or event and would like to network with other Carpentries community members, please add the details of the event and your own details to our meetups etherpad.

Instructor Profile¶

We maintain a record of information for each of our instructors in our AMY database system. To keep your AMY profile up-to-date you can login to AMY using your GitHub account. If you are unable to login to AMY, please submit your GitHub username to team@carpentries.org and the administrative team will get your profile updated allowing you to login. We use instructor profiles to help us identify instructors for workshops and to keep track of when and where you teach workshops. We also ask for social profile information as well as your ORCID and personal website. All of this information will be published on the instructor page of our website if you consent. Being included on our website is strictly opt-in. You must login to your instructor profile and check the box “consent to publish profile” or your instructor information will not be included in our listing. AMY Database tool login window, allowing login with username/password or GitHub account

Teaching¶

Setting up a workshop¶

Please see our Teaching and Hosting section for instructions on setting up and running workshops. This includes links to our checklists and describes the surveys we use to assess learners’ and Instructors’ experiences. Also check out our Workshop Administration section

Setting up a workshop website¶

For instructions on setting up a website for a workshop, please see the workshop template home page.

Other ways to contribute¶

There are many other ways you can contribute to the Carpentries beyond teaching workshops. These include helping keep lessons updated by becoming a maintainer; coordinating Carpentries-based workshops, helping grow the Instructor pool by becoming a Trainer; contributing to email lists like Discuss or topic- or region-specific lists; serving on committees such as Instructor Development; serving on Task Forces such as CarpentryCon; helping translate our lessons into other languages; running a mentoring group; hosting discussion sessions - the list goes on. You can find a number of contacts for specific areas of work on our Get Involved page. Please email us if you’d like to help but are not sure who to approach.