Recommendations for those who want to organise a coordinated, synchronous effort to create/improve their lesson materials.
The recommendations are relevant to a lesson sprint consisting of a single session or in multiple sessions with breaks between, whether on one day or multiple consecutive days. We have tried to note where a particular recommendation is only relevant or particularly relevant to a sprint being run across multiple days/sessions. These recommendations were written with a particular focus on sprints taking place virtually, i.e. with participants meeting by video conference, but many of the recommendations (especially those in the Before and After sections) are also relevant to in-person events.
- Planning your lesson - these are steps to follow to make your lesson ready for a sprint. If you have not yet completed these steps for your lesson, you may not get the most out of organising and running a sprint on it.
- Recommendations for what to do before a lesson sprint
- Recommendations for what to do during a lesson sprint
- Recommendations for what to do after a lesson sprint
- Recommended tools that may help you when planning and running a lesson sprint
Recommendations specific to sprints taking place [online] and [in-person] are marked accordingly.
The target reader is one of the lead developers/maintainers of a lesson under development. They should already have a clear idea of the target audience and main learning objectives for their lesson, even if they haven't started writing the actual material yet - see the Planning your lesson section for more details of the steps we recommend you take with your lesson before it is time for a sprint. They may be planning to teach the lesson for the first time, or have recently taught it for the first time, and now want to improve the lesson material based on feedback collected when teaching.
If you in the stage where you are not yet clear on the target audience or the overall learning objectives for your lesson, we suggest you take a look at The Carpentries Curriculum Development Handbook first before returning to this guide.
Provide practical tips and more theoretical guidance about how to:
- organise an inclusive and accessible sprint
- make the most of a dedicated lesson sprint
- create coherent lesson material from individual contributions made during the sprint
- engage contributors before, during, and after the lesson sprint
- The Guide for Collaboration section of The Turing Way has many more recommendations and guides to help your team collaborate effectively. Many other sections of the book are also relevant.
- The Turing Way's process for organising and running a Book Dash has many similarities to the recommendations made here for lesson sprints. We recommend that you explore this resource, which also includes checklist and schedule templates that could fit a lesson sprint with some minor adjustments.
- In addition to The Carpentries Curriculum Development Handbook already mentioned above, Greg Wilson's Teaching Tech Together provides a more in-depth overview of the reverse design approach to lesson development as well as many useful pointers for teaching and collaborating.
- The Carpentries Instructor Training curriculum is another valuable source of advice for writing and teaching lessons.
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
 Toby Hodges 💻 |
 Aleksandra Nenadic 💻 |
 Zhian N. Kamvar 💻 |
 Sarah Stevens 💻 👀 |
 Steve Crouch 💻 |
 SarahAlidoost 👀 |
 Chris Erdmann 👀 |
 Malvika Sharan 👀 💻 |
 Emmy Tsang 👀 💻 |
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