Carpentry Instructor Training

Carpentry instructor training focuses on helping those who are already familiar with programming and data analysis tools, to teach better. Specifically to novices.

About Carpentry Instructor Training

Over the last hundred years, researchers have discovered an enormous amount about how people learn and how best to teach them. Unfortunately, much of that knowledge has not yet been translated into common classroom practice, especially at the university level.
This two-day class has the following overall goals:
Introduce you to evidence-based best-practices of teaching. Teach you how to create a positive environment for learners at your workshops. Provide opportunities for you to practice and build your teaching skills. Help you become integrated into the Carpentry community. Prepare you to use these teaching skills in teaching Carpentry workshops.
Because we have only two days, some things are beyond the scope of this class. We will not be learning:
How to program in R or Python, use git, or any of the other topics taught in Carpentry workshops. How to create your own lessons from scratch (although you will have a good start on the principles behind that sort of work if you’re inspired to learn more).

Adopted from https://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/

What is happening in South Africa?

Between 2015 - 2019 almost 150 South African researchers, students, as well as IT and library staff have participated in local instructor training events.

Due to the requirements for qualification (participate in a 2-day workshop and complete three additional online exercises afterwards), several of our trained instructors have not yet qualified. In 2018 we ran additional online mentorship sessions and continued to seek funding to increase mobility of our instructors to gain valuable experience in teaching.

The following instructor training activities were run under RCCPII

Date	Venue	Collaborators	Workshop Website
2018-02-21	Kleinmond Public Library	Not applicable	https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/2018-02-21-South-Africa-ttt/
2018-09-06	Birchwood Hotel & Conference Facilities	SADiLaR	https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/2018-09-06-ttt-CarpentryConnect-JHB/
2019-03-18	University of KwaZulu-Natal	UKZN Big Data & Informatics Flag Ship Project	https://tenet-rccpii.github.io/2019-03-18-UKZN-ttt/

How can you get trained as Carpentry instructor?

Please complete the online Carpentry instructor training application form to request training. Alternatively contact the Regional African Coordinator.