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Coach and organiser guidance for students who come for tech support #24

Open brunogirin opened 4 years ago

brunogirin commented 4 years ago

We've had some instances where students appear to want tech support rather than coaching and both coaches and organisers need guidance on how to deal with that situation.

What do I mean by tech support vs coaching?

The codebar website says:

Our goal is to enable underrepresented people to learn programming in a safe and collaborative environment and expand their career opportunities.

So we expect each workshop session to be about learning how to program using a particular tool or technique, even is there is no tangible outcome at the end of the session.

We've occasionally had students who expected to achieve a particular technical aim during the session rather than learn how to achieve it themselves. When an experienced coach is in charge, they can try to steer the conversation to give the student the capacity to fix the problem themselves.

Some examples out of recent workshops:

Additional feedback from the Slack channel (#coaches):

Is there an official Codebar page/doc detailing what the type of thing coaches are and aren't expected to help with? Would be useful to reference for guidance as a coach, and to be able to point to if a student has something "inappropriate", e,g,:

  • If they've brought a take-home test/project (I currently take the stance that they can get help with general concepts and small nudges in the right direction but nothing more)
  • If they seem to be working on a project that's a business idea, and are focusing on building it but not actually "learning how to code" (I have no idea what the official stance is on this)

I've been pointed to the https://codebar.io/effective-teacher-guide but feel that resource is more about "how to coach well (assuming the student has an appropriate project)"

Coach guidance

Coaches need guidance on two fronts:

Identifying the problem is somewhat tricky as there are a lot of grey areas. For example, having a student with a personal project is not a problem, especially if it helps them focus on what they want to learn. The key seems to work out what the intent of the student is: do they want to learn programming or get code that works even if they don't understand it?

Once identified, how to deal with it can be quite tricky as you need to ensure the student understands this is not what coaching is about. Some of our more experienced coaches have managed to deal with this by steering the conversation to the underlying technologies and making them understand how it worked. What coaches would need is:

Finally coaches should probably advise the organisers when this happens.

Organiser guidance

Organisers need guidance on two fronts:

Website updates

Once we agree on the guidance, we should probably update the web site to clarify this both in the student and coach guides.

KimberleyCook commented 4 years ago

This is a great topic to discuss

VirtualDOMinic commented 4 years ago

This is quite a wordy response from me, and I'm not sure exactly how useful it is, but hopefully it'll at least lead to more discussion on this issue :)

Thanks to Burhan for posting a link to this in the Slack! The quote in @brunogirin's post is from a post I made in the Coaches Slack channel a few weeks back. I posted it after two Codebars in a row where I ended up with a student (a different one each time) who didn't seem to want to learn to code, but had questions/tasks relating to features they wanted to add to an app (a business idea with a massive scope) they were working on.

Slightly whiny rant (feel free to skip it!)

In both cases, the students were very friendly and polite, but I got the impression that they'd been getting coaches/others to build everything for them bit-by-bit while still not really trying to learn anything. It's hard to give someone guidance on a feature they're trying to build when they don't understand the majority of "their" codebase, or to answer their technical questions when they have practically no fundamental knowledge (e.g. working with mongoDB when they don't know what an object is) and don't seem to want to learn the fundamentals. Again, the students were nice, but - as a coach hoping to help URMs in tech to learn to code - I found both experiences pretty frustrating as I didn't feel my time had been put to good use, and I'm sure there were people on the waitlist who would've loved to get help learning how to code.

Thoughts on the questions

It'd definitely be great to have official guidance on how to handle these situations, as I don't want to directly make a student feel called out, especially if I accidentally misrepresent Codebar's stance in the process.

At what point can they say "this is not what I'm here for" to a student?

I think it could be hard to have a general-purpose guide for this. Perhaps a short, polite reminder at the start of each meetup and/or a very clear message in the workshop attendance flow along the lines of "The purpose of these workshops is for students to get help with X, Y, Z. It's not appropriate to ask for direct help with business ideas, client work or tests that are part of an interview process." This way, a coach may at least feel a lot more confident saying "I'm sorry, but I'm only here to help with learning to code, not building a business idea" to a student.

How to receive feedback from coaches

It could be nice to have a link to a simple Google form (see example fields below) where people can give feedback without feeling like they're "making a big deal" out of it (compared to approaching an organiser or sending an email). This could be great for coaches to give feedback about students in a non-confrontational way, and for students to be more comfortable giving feedback about coaches being inappropriate, etc. I'm sure there'd also be plenty of really positive feedback, too 🎉.

Example fields: name (optional), contact (optional), coach or student (checkbox), workshop (date/location), feedback (text box).

How to address the problem with students?

I'd hope that making Codebar's purpose extra clear to both students and coaches at (or in the signup flow for) each workshop, coupled with encouraging coaches to give feedback, could be effective enough.

Other thoughts

The issue with grey areas outlined by @brunogirin is definitely a challenge, as I can see how my suggestions above could lead some people to believe that they can't bring along a personal project to learn with. I guess we could explicitly say that personal projects are encouraged, as long as the student is using the project as something to learn from.

Website updates: I've referred to this above, but - to confirm - I definitely agree that it would be useful to have the website (ideally included in the workshop signup flow, with an "I have understood this" checkbox) updated with these more explicit guidelines

KimberleyCook commented 4 years ago

@VirtualDOMinic Thank you so much for your input on this topic. I'm also really sorry this happened to you at 2 codebar workshops.

We'll discuss this and put something in place to try and stop in happening.

Thank you once again, and apologies.

biggianteye commented 4 years ago

A relevant fragment from the "Our values" section of the manual:

codebar aims to help people learn from scratch. We want our students to understand why and how things work. We want to teach them the basics and encourage them to practise a language before jumping into frameworks. We are not here to configure a blog or a server, nor to support a project. We want to help students learn how to do this on their own.

The last two sentences seem particularly relevant.

KimberleyCook commented 4 years ago

ACTION

brunogirin commented 4 years ago

As discussed, will add link to Google doc with suggestions and will also include suggestions for #15

brunogirin commented 4 years ago

Here are drafts of different documents:

oliviameng commented 4 years ago

Issue: student behaviors We have a student who has been to our workshop a few times. I noticed some of her behaviors only last night, which is concerning. She got very frustrated and upsetting through her learning process, hitting the keyboards and complain to the coach about how little progress she's made through the night. I took only 1 minute and checked on her during the break. She gave me an eye roll(said i am distracting her and the interaction was passive-aggressive...) Then her coach spoke with me afterward, he was struggling during the coaching session with her. Another coach joined and said he had a difficult session with her last time.

matyikriszta commented 4 years ago

Here are drafts of different documents:

* [Student guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I7Vnbu8dlLvM802_-jaLH-t-Pv1YKsxpqRtFfMoiNW8/edit?usp=sharing): small change to clarify the attendance policy

* [Coach guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R-DQUHes-BH789KLJHuJZCoUsca7OwRyy3fC-buHEi0/edit?usp=sharing): rough draft, tries to put the idea in words but needs improvement

* [Organiser guide](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zppD5BG_CYIqWipf9ZqyG3xhNrIaTAdqVipd7dkUX6Q/edit?usp=sharing): very rough draft, mostly an outline, copies of some stuff mentioned on Slack and notes to myself

Add a note about photography to the guides.

brunogirin commented 4 years ago

We actually have an organiser guide here: http://manual.codebar.io/organiser-guide.html

So it would be a case of updating this guide accordingly.