Sheena
Sheena O’Connell has been programming since her early teens, and has worked on a wide array of projects and products, from embedded code and driver development for custom hardware, to microservice architecture, data pipelining and web development. She has taken active part in all phases of software development, from ideation to production; championed agile and devops practices and led dev teams to success.
Sheena has dedicated the last 5 years to tech-education and has given hundreds of people a start in coding and tech through her non-profit work, either through direct guidance, or through training trainers and education system design. She is passionate about codifying good teaching and learning practices in order to better support the world’s tech educators.
Session
Teaching people to code is...tricky.
Software development and teaching are two distinct skill sets, yet people with technical skills are often put into a position where they are meant to teach others, this might be through workplace mentorship, community involvement, or through being hired to teach (for example, in a bootcamp). They are often expected to succeed with very little or no teacher training at all. A lot of common practice is very ineffective.
Many think that when it comes to teaching, you either have it or you don't. I'm happy to inform you that those people are mistaken.
Teaching and learning is something that has been well studied. There are techniques, patterns, and anti-patterns. There are skills that can be learned and practiced.
I've been working in alternative education for a number of years, and the people who graduate from the courses I've put together tend to do really well for themselves.
In this talk, I'd like to share a few of the things I've learned over the years. We'll cover studies, mindsets, mechanisms, patterns, and anti-patterns. The Python community is full of people with teacher's hearts. My goal is to amplify their efforts.