When I'm not creating programming courses for Khan Academy, you can often find me teaching workshops for GDI SF, a non-profit that offers low-cost web dev workshops to women.
When I first started teaching for GDI, I ran workshops the traditional way - with live lectures and breaks for exercises. However, especially with the longer workshops and more complex topics, I found that students would be unhappy because some would find it moved too fast and some would find it moved too slow.
Now that we have more courses on KA, I now have the students work on the KA content at their own pace, and I've become more of a learning facilitator than a teacher. I make sure to mix in a lot of social components - networking, demos, pair programming - so that students feel like they're a community and can learn from each other. The students are much happier with the format, so I'm hoping to move all of our long workshops over to the self-paced format.
To make it easier for other GDI chapters and clubs to implement, I've put together a lesson plan, which you can grab from our new lesson plans list in our teaching guide. I'll be adding the JS 101 and JS 200 lesson plans there over the next month, as I'll be teaching those workshops next.
Let us know if you have any lesson plans to share!
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