While it might seem like teaching data science is a new activity, educational professionals have studied teaching techniques for decades. Today’s teaching techniques are based not only on the personal experiences of classroom teachers, but also on neuroscience and cognitive psychology. While we can’t replicate the thoroughness of the National Academies’s How People Learn, we can recommend a couple of starting points for learning how to teach technology:
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Read Teaching Tech Together. Authored by Greg Wilson based on his work for the Carpentries, and this book will help you create and deliver lessons that work for technical and non-technical audiences alike and to build a teaching community around them. Greg also created a free online webinar titled What Every Data Scientist Should Know About Education. This one-hour introduction presents a handful of evidence-based practices you can use right now, explains why we believe they are true, and points you to other resources that will help you go further.
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Get involved in the Carpentries, a volunteer organization that teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide (they’ve even run a workshop in Antarctica). Their lessons on data wrangling, programming, and for librarians are all open access and classroom-tested.
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Become a certified trainer. In 2019, Posit launched an instructor training and certification program that aims to help people apply modern evidence-based teaching practices to teach data science using R and Posit’s products, and to help people who need such training find the trainers they need. While this program is currently inactive, you can meet our Certified Trainers and learn more about this past program.
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Connect with the #rstats education community. The Posit Community is a warm and welcoming online discussion forum to ask (and answer!) any questions about using R. Within the forum, you can find posts tagged as teaching and education, lively discussions between first-time instructors and seasoned educators about topics like how to introduce functions in R, ideas for datasets to use, or how to pronounce an R package name. To meet other R educators in person, we host a yearly
conference (posit::conf)that always features talks about teaching. You can browse past talks from conf on YouTube (examples: 2023, 2024, 2025). If you do attend our conference, keep an eye on Community before you go for announcements about the Birds of a Feather meetup for educators — this is an informal get together of like-minded R educators to talk shop and connect in person while you’re all in the same place at the same time.