Let’s talk about what we can do after our course is done. After careful preparation and effective execution, now we’re at the end of the course. In this part, We’ll talk about what we can do to help our students after every lesson or when the course is completed. This will make our students still benefit from our course and experiences, even after their active learning days are over.
This is the last part of series focused on teaching programming. You can read the first part about preparation here and second part about practices during the lessons here.
After Party
This is it, you made it! There were ups and downs, lots of bugs and questions but you managed to overcome them all as a team. Now it’s time make the course as beneficial as possible for your students for the future challenges.
What it takes is what they got
Make sure your students understand that just because the course is over doesn’t mean they should to stop learning or building. Encourage them to use what they’ve learned, do more research and keep learning.
Give them product ideas, this will make it easier for them to start building. It could be a personal website, a simple mobile application, a blog about recycling or landing page of their long planned side hustle. Make them feel confident enough to start coding with what they know, show them what it takes is all they got.
Show them you can do it.(image source)
Retrospective
Do this at the end of every day. Ask them what they liked about the lesson, what they didn’t, if there is anything they wish to change or add. Remember you already created an open environment so they’ll be willing to share their candid thoughts with you. Try to adopt new ideas to your lessons on the go, make everybody benefit from what you teach equally.
Make everything accessible
Probably the first request you’ll receive will be sharing the code you write in the lessons. Make it even better and share everything about the course with them - make everything easily accessible. List the content of the course and what you did right after course. This can be a list of the topics, the exercises you gave during the lesson, homework, your retrospective action items etc. Upload everything to Github (or Gitlab or Bitbucket) and BAM! You just taught them about Git.
This is a celebration
It’s been a rough patch but they did it! Show them their dedication and hard work deserve a celebration. Go out together to have dinner, do a beer night. In Corona times I was only able to prepare a cocktail and make a toast to them, however it was enough to get all of us into celebration mood.
This was the last piece of the entire course. Being approached by some of the students days after our course showed me it was quite rewarding to follow tips above.
What do you think about the tips above? Do you have any different ideas how to make teaching programming better? Let me know in the comments below!
This article is originally posted on my blog.
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