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title: SE10x Instructor's Guide

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# SE10x Instructor's Guide

### Prepping for your session
1. Do a few practice problems on the topic of the week
    - Each week usually has a topic (binary trees, graphs, ... ). It's a good idea to start getting in the mind set for that week by doing a few practice problems on that problem
        - The best place for practice problems is in the [course portal](https://courses.codepath.com/) on the `Sessions` tab. This will give you a good idea of what students will be working on during the sessions. 
2. Look through all the material that's in the course portal for the week
    - This includes:
        - The overview page, including the Goals for the week
        - The sessions pages, which includes practice problems that students will be working on during the sessions in the week
        - The assignment page, which includes extra practice problems for studnets and topic guides
        - The resources page, which includes previously recorded lectures
3. If available, watch the recorded session of from a previous year's run for the week. This will give you a good idea of how the instructor ran the sessions in past iterations
4. Most weeks have slide decks already created by previous instructors, but it can still be a good idea to create your own slide deck for the session. This can include:
    - The general topic overview you want to go over for the week
        - For example: What are Linked Lists? Why are they useful? In what situations is this data structure better than other data structures? What are real world examples of this in use?
    - Picking out a practice problem that you want to walk through with the students
        - This can include either working through specific parts of UMPIRE for the problem, or working through the whole problem itself.
    - Additional topics you may want to spend 5-10 minutes taking about (building effective resumes, interview tips and tricks, etc)
5. As you're creating your slide deck, it's a good idea to map out how long you plan on spending for each section. An example plan might look something like:
    - 5 minutes: Intro to linked lists
    - 5 minutes: Top 3 patterns for linked list questions and how to recognize them
    - 20 minutes: Linked list problem walkthrough: Removing duplicate nodes
    - 80 minutes: Breakout rooms 
    - 10 minutes: final wrap up

### During the Session
The session will typically start with you giving your lecture and then sending students into breakout rooms. Once students are in breakout rooms and settled (it usually takes students a few minutes to go into their breakout rooms and get situated), it's a good idea to start popping into random breakout rooms. This will give you a sense of how the students are working through the problems, the painpoints they're facing, and how the format of the breakout room is working.

### After the Session
Each week we send out a weekly recap email. As the lead instructor for the week, you are responsible for preparing this recap email. Guide for drafting recap emails: https://courses.codepath.com/courses/intermediate_software_eng/pages/sending_weekly_emails_to_students

If you observed anything interesting or something that can be improved, it's useful to note it down and share with the instructors team so we can help improve the course for the next run.

### Throughout the week
It's a good idea to check Slack periodically throughout the week to help answer any questions students may have. Students may have questions around:
- How to understand a specific practice problem
- Where to find certain resources