Feedback on preparing to teach Carpentries Lessons

[kariljordan]

On December 30, 2019, @rgaiacs raised an issue in the private Executive Council repository. The text is provided below

When talking with instructors about the election for 2020 Executive Council seats, I received the following feedback

I no longer enjoy teaching the basics using the Carpentries materials. Every time I'm preparing a workshop, 
I notice outdated or questionable details in the lessons, so I always get into a death spiral of

sending a PR,
waiting for the merge, or
sometimes having to defend the PR against sometimes shallow counter-arguments.
needing to practice the lesson again with that change

Because there is so often so much admin work going on in parallel to preparing to teach, I haven't felt well-prepared or focused on the lesson content for along time.

The question @rgaiacs asked to explore is: How to make teaching enjoyable again for long time instructors, however @amyehodge offered the following:

I'm wondering if this is specifically about improving the process/speed with which PRs are 
addressed for lessons or if it's a more general topic of "making teaching more enjoyable." 
If the former, I would suggest this is an issue for the specific Lesson Program(s) or the lesson 
maintainers group to address. If the latter, this is perhaps a good topic for discussion sessions.

@lexnederbragt offered the following:

A quick thought (sorry if this issue should move): we could do lesson releases at regular intervals, 
but not too frequent. Released lessons don't change unless there is a critical issue with them. 
Improvements happen on a 'dev' branch. Instructors can then teach the latest release or the bleeding 
edge from the 'dev' branch with the latest changes. Release notes indicate clearly the changes from 
the last release. This maybe does not solve the problem indicated above but would at least make 
teaching the same lesson multiple times in certain period more straightforward.

@rgaiacs shared:

The instructor who provided the feedback was talking of having a 'dev' branch and releases. 
This is one of the things that maintainers have discussed in the past and put aside to reduce the barrier 
for new instructors, specially during instructor training. Given that we have more instructors now, 
the unhappiness of them might develop to some burnout. We want to avoid burn out and the Executive 
Council should talk with the new Executive Director to allocate staff time to work along side with the 
community to reduce the work involved when preparing for one workshop.

The Program Committee of the Executive Council has asked that this issue be addressed in the maintainer-RFC repo.

[annajiat]

Instead of waiting for PR, should we fork the lesson and then teach from the updated fork?

Then send the PR after teaching the workshop as by then most of the rough edges would have been smoothened out.

[emcaulay]

This complaint seems fair, and I think we could develop some better tagging / triaging of PRs and issues for lessons.

Maybe even an annual audit of lessons and listing out any areas that are outdated / need prompt attention. Like in July say? A month that is not worldwide national holidays and not that month of August that Europeans vacation!

However, I also think it's important to advance a community approach in the Carpentries: we are in this together and we are developing the lessons and the teaching at the same time. Maintainers are providing a volunteer service that is in the support of workshops and the Carpentries mission, but they are not paid employees at the urgent command to support all instructors. Being a Carpentries Instructor might include some tolerance for "work in progress," and if it's too frustrating, then maybe it's just not the right fit for the moment.

I think @lexnederbragt has a good suggestion about moving toward "releases" for stable lessons.

In general, I'm advocating for more responsiveness and more understanding.

*signed, your newest maintainer