The opportunity came up for me to teach a workshop on Interactive Teaching in Actuarial Science to university Lecturers in Indonesia through the READI project. (READI stands for Risk management, Economic sustainability, and Actuarial science Development in Indonesia and is a joint venture with the Indonesian and Canadian governments to build needed actuarial expertise and capacity.)

I was extremely excited: here was a chance for me to take all the knowledge I have gained over my teaching career from other fabulous teachers and my own practice, and force-multiply it to improve the education of thousands of students!

It was hard for me to decide how to structure the 2.5-day seminar, but with some help from the READI staff in the Indonesia office who know what the participants wanted to learn more about, I drafted a proposal. On the first day, I plan to talk about levels of learning, motivating students, and interactive in-class techniques (with some time built in to apply them to the courses the participants teach regularly.) On the second day, we’ll discuss handling large classes, assessment design and alignment, inclusive teaching, and how to get feedback. And on the final day, we’ll tie everything together with a talk on getting students to think like Actuaries.

But let’s back up to how this developed and look at some key takeaway lessons.

Months ago, talking informally at a Women in Math event about it, some colleagues suggested that I get to know the backgrounds of the participants to help determine the content. If no one in attendance has even considered teaching and testing at multiple levels or the importance of active learning, it would be a very different workshop than if they were familiar with and regularly used these concepts. So I created an online survey (hard copy too just in case) for them to fill out. I won’t get the results of the survey until the day before the workshop, but it will still allow me to tweak the level of my explanations and shift the amount of time I focus on different topics according to their needs.

Takeaway 1: Get to know your audience and their needs and background first.

When it came time to prepare the materials, which I started doing in Reading Week when I actually had time I could devote to it, that was when I first realized it was 15.5 hours of workshops to prepare over the 10 topics mentioned above. Yikes!

Luckily, I have given lots of talks before on various teaching topics, so I could repurpose a lot of that material. I started by copying the slides from every teaching presentation I had ever given into a single document and organizing them into the 10 categories. (I’ve given over a dozen different talks since 2015, so that was a lot of slides!) I also created a skeleton of a handout for each section for an interactive activity, since I wanted the participants to have space to apply what we did in each workshop to their own courses.

Takeaway 2: Don’t start from scratch; use what you’ve already got.

From there, I was a little bit stuck. I had some ideas but some topics were pretty sparse since I’d never spoken about them myself, just attended talks by others. Some of my skeleton handouts just said “Blah” or “Insert stuff here” and I felt like I didn’t have a coherent message or structure for the content I wanted to deliver. I needed help.

Luckily again, the wonderful Monica Vesely from CTE agreed to meet with me and help me develop my materials. In our first meeting, she suggested some resources to help flesh out the topics I didn’t have much material on, helped me organize the flow of topics better, gave suggestions for the interactive activities when I hadn’t thought of what to do, and added a few more topics and themes to tie everything together better. She was the one who suggested giving the survey ahead of time rather than trying to do it as part of the first session. It was amazing how much better I felt about the workshop after that meeting! I went back and made all the changes, pulling material from the CTE website and other sources, and got it to a place where I was happy with 8/10 of the slides and 6/10 of the handouts.

Takeaway 3: Reach out and ask for help; lots of talented people can support your work and getting an outside perspective can be extremely valuable.

We met one more time, a few days before I left, and once again Monica had some amazing suggestions to touch up the slides and handouts, as well as additional questions to ask the participants in the survey. Another couple of late nights bashing it out, and my materials were ready (no pun intended) to go!

One other idea I had at the last minute which I’m hoping can happen is to video record some or all of the sessions so they can be used again, or for Lecturers in more remote locations who can’t get to a seminar like this. The READI project is really keep on sustainable digital assets that can be used multiple times, and having online resources available will be really neat. They’ll have quite a job editing the 15.5 hours of sessions down into something more manageable, but the READI team has lots of experience with online education so I’m hopeful this can happen.

Takeaway 4: Think about how to extend the impact of your work beyond one workshop.

Meanwhile, there was the matter of the trip itself to plan. I had booked my flights months before, and the READI staff arranged my hotel and transportation from the airport, but it takes a bit more than that. With helpful advice from people who had been to (or lived in) Indonesia before, travel clinics that are open on weekends, government websites, and packing suggestions from friends on Facebook, I managed to get all the details sorted out just in time. I even have a plan (courtesy of my sister Dr. Susie) for not getting too messed up from a 12-hour time difference when I’m only going to be there for 4 days in earnest. TL;DR – melatonin and ZzzQuil.

Takeaway 5: Plan earlier than I did. I was lucky everything worked out so well.

Finally, I couldn’t possibly have thought of doing this without the support of my husband. He put up with my late nights and stress working on this, also gave fantastic suggestions for my slides and handouts, helped me pack and prepare, and is taking on a whole week of solo-parenting our two children so I can do this. I love you honey!

I’m writing this from the airport on my way there, and I’ll post again afterwards with Part 2 on how it went!