Checkout Instructions
Last updated on 2025-10-14 | Edit this page
Overview
After attending Collaborative Lesson Development Training, there are two steps to complete before qualifying as a Certified Carpentries Lesson Developer. Briefly, the two steps are:
- Teach one or more episodes of your lesson to a real audience. We refer to this as a lesson pilot.
- Participate in a Pilot Workshop Debrief session, reporting on your experience teaching your new lesson and your plans for the next iteration of the content and design.
These checkout steps must be completed in the order listed above.
How will the Checkout steps be tracked?
Trainees must send notes from their lesson pilot to curriculum@carpentries.org so that their progress can be tracked by the Curriculum Team. Participation in Pilot Workshop Debrief sessions will be tracked automatically based on data shared by session hosts. You can track your progress through the checkout process in AMY.
Checkout Deadline
All trainees have 4 months (120 days) from the end date of their training to complete checkout. If you need more time, 4-month extensions may be requested by emailing curriculum@carpentries.org. Extensions may be granted for any reason up to 1 year from your training date.
Help! I have a Question about Checkout!
If you have a question, you can email us at curriculum@carpentries.org
or visit the #checkout-support Slack channel.
Piloting Lesson Content
Teaching a lesson for the first time is an important intermediate step in the lesson development process. To complete the first checkout step, trainees should teach part of the lesson they have been designing to a real audience. (Or all of it if you have time to prepare the whole lesson!) The purpose of this task is to gather feedback at an early stage of the development process, and to reflect on how well the tested lesson content meets the objectives that we defined for it.
Guidance on what feedback/information to collect while testing out the lesson content is provided below.
What should I teach?
During the first stages of the training, you will have completed the early stages of design and development of a episode of your new lesson. After completing the exercises in the training sessions, you should have identified a target audience for the lesson, defined objectives for the lesson and for a particular episode within it, designed exercises to assess learner progress towards the episode objectives, and outlined a narrative to lead learners through that episode. The lesson pilot is an opportunity to teach this episode of your lesson to a real audience.
Note that it will probably be helpful to spend some time writing some
of the supporting information for your lesson before your pilot. For
example, if you did not have time to finish writing the setup
instructions for your lesson in the learners/setup.md file,
you should try to complete these and share them with your learners
before the event.
For groups of collaborators
During the training, you should have been working on consecutive episodes in your lesson. Ideally, schedule a single pilot event that will provide an opportunity for you to test all of your lesson content together. You may find it easiest for each trainee to teach the episode they have been working on during the training. This will also give you an opportunity to observe each other teaching, to help each other gather feedback and information to help improve the lesson (see below), and to identify any gaps or overlaps that become apparent when moving from one episode to the next.
If you cannot all teach an episode, make sure that every collaborator can take an active role in your lesson pilot, for example by assigning responsibility for notes on timings, questions asked by learners, technical difficulties, etc to those who will not teach.
For Lesson Developers working alone
We ask you to collect a lot of information during the lesson pilot (see below), and it will be difficult to do this while also devoting yourself to delivering the lesson. For that reason, we recommend that you try to find someone who can attend your pilot as an observer, to take notes and give you feedback from their perspective. Ideally, this would be someone who you work with and who is already familiar with the topic that will be taught in your lesson episode. That will make it easier for them to provide their own insights, and to properly capture details in the notes they take. If you are unable to recruit a colleague or peer to do this for you, please discuss it with your trainers and/or send an email to curriculum@carpentries.org to request support.
What information should be collected from the lesson pilot?
During the pilot, it will be helpful to take notes to answer the following questions:
- How long did it take to teach the episode?
- How long did learners need to complete each exercise?
- What questions did learners have?
- What technical difficulties were encountered?
- What parts of the lesson appeared to be confusing for learners?
At the end of the pilot, make sure to capture some feedback from the learners. You can use the methods described in Preparing to teach to gather feedback, e.g.
- Minute cards
- One up, one down
- Ask learners about the exercises in your episode
As soon as possible after the pilot has finished – ideally immediately afterwards – take some time to reflect on the following questions, based on the feedback collected and from your own perspective as the instructor and author of the lesson content. Make some notes on your answers to these questions. You will need to return to these notes when you join the Pilot Workshop Debrief session (see below).
- What worked well both in terms of content and delivery?
- What did not work as well?
- How close were your time estimates to the actual time needed to teach the material and finish exercises?
- How did the audience perceive the difficulty level of the material?
- What will you do differently next time?
- What will you change in the material you taught?
- What will you change in the way you collect feedback in future pilots?
When you have completed the lesson pilots and made these notes, send them to curriculum@carpentries.org.
Who should the learners be for a pilot?
You can choose the format and audience for your lesson pilot. It could:
- take place online or in-person.
- be a private session attended by invitation only, or open to external participants.
- be delivered to members of your own network, community, or institution.
- be advertised on The Carpentries channels and delivered to members of the wider community.
Feedback and experience collected from testing lesson material like this will be most useful if the audience taught closely matches the intended audience for the lesson itself. However this is often not easy, especially if the event will be short or your episode(s) does not appear early in the lesson (as audience members will not have benefited from learning the previous episodes first). In this case, try to ensure that members of the audience are briefed on what kind of feedback to give, e.g. by providing context about what would have been covered in the earlier sections of a full workshop teaching the whole lesson. If you are teaching to people who are already familiar with the lesson topic, i.e. who are not representative of the actual target audience for your lesson, encourage them to focus their feedback on points that would be most important to someone who is learning the skills and concepts in the lesson for the first time.
Where can I go for help?
The Carpentries Curriculum Team can provide support for lesson pilots. For example, by providing access to an account with a paid Zoom license for an online pilot, by helping advertise the session to The Carpentries (sub)communities, by listing sessions on The Carpentries Community Calendar, etc. Contact the team on curriculum@carpentries.org if you would like to request assistance like this.
Pilot Workshop Debrief
After you have completed your lesson pilot, participate in one of the regularly scheduled Pilot Workshop Debrief community sessions hosted by The Carpentries. The purpose of these events is to give members of The Carpentries lesson development community an opportunity to report on their experiences teaching lessons under development, to share their perspectives, and to exchange knowledge and advice.
Sign up on the Community Sessions Etherpad. Take care to double check the time zone, and mark your calendar after signing up! At the time of the event, the Zoom link can be found at the top of the Etherpad.
Carpentries Tools: Etherpads
The Etherpad is a collaborative note-taking tool that is widely used in Carpentries workshops and many other activities in the community. We also use Etherpads for sign-ups and notes on recurring events, like community events and teaching demonstrations. Although we have used CodiMD for notetaking during Collaborative Lesson Development Training, Etherpad is used for community sessions including Pilot Workshop Debriefs.
GitHub Skill-ups
Although not a required part of Lesson Developer checkout, we recommend that you also register to participate in a GitHub Skill-up session. You do not need to wait until you have completed a pilot of your new lesson to benefit from this skill-up.
Note: some content on this page has been reused and adapted from the equivalent page in the Instructor Training curriculum.