Should We Combine Debriefing and Lesson Discussion?

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Belinda Weaver recently posted a proposal for helping instructor trainees finish. While reading her post and writing out the current instructor training workflow for the benefit of GSoC students, I started wondering if it might also make sense to combine the workshop debriefing sessions with the trainee mentoring sessions: a couple of regularly-scheduled slots each week (times chosen to accommodate all comers) would be easier to wrangle, and trainees would get to meet more existing instructors and hear about their in-class experiences. We’d still need some sort of sign-up mechanism to keep numbers manageable, and we’d need someone to report back on which trainees had asked well-informed questions, and it would mean less coupling between the discussion and the specific lesson(s) trainees were working on, but the first two aren’t new work (we’re doing them already) and the third might actually be a good thing, particularly if we follow up on another suggestion and have people attend a discussion before submitting their lesson change. Please add comments to this blog post to let us know what you think of the idea, and to Belinda’s to give her feedback as well.