Workshops &
Retrospectives
The Rhetorical Situation for Software Engineers
Workshop Rationale & Description
​It is my deeply-held belief that we should teach software engineers about rhetorical situations in order to help them understand how to effectively communicate in the specific, recurring situations they encounter.
And over the last few years, I've seen how effective this approach can be: I’ve led multiple workshops that first introduce software engineers to the rhetorical situation, and then guide them in how to utilize the framework to construct their communication in terms of interactions between author, audience, purpose, and context. This interactions ultimately determines what shape their communication – whether written or spoken – can take to facilitate successful communication.
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I'm quite proud of this workshop. It is informed by my teaching at Colorado State University between 2012 and 2016, when I taught Academic Writing and College Composition to both native and non-native English speakers.
In the software context, I've gotten the wonderful feedback from participants that it changed the way they think about writing and communicating across genres, including pull request and ticket descriptions, code review comments, technical documentation and product demos, and even stand-up readouts.
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Read in-depth about my approach to teaching communication skills here.
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Ideal Workshop Format
This workshop is best run with groups of 6-10 engineers over the course of four weeks, with a weekly 60-minute synchronous session and weekly "homework" that each participant receives individualized feedback from me on.
That said, this workshop is very adaptable, and we will work together to ensure it meets the needs of your team's particular objectives and context.
Learning-Themed Retrospective
Workshop Rationale & Description
​In order to avoid the accumulation of learning debt that can result from both individually-held beliefs and unhealthy team learning cultures, leaders need to proactively foster a healthy team learning culture.
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There are both significant exigencies and theoretical underpinnings to this argument that you can read about here. But they all build up to a claim that validates running a learning-themed retrospective with your engineering teams: When learning cultures are unhealthy, individuals may pass up on-the-job learning opportunities. And when learning beliefs are falsy, individuals may pass up on-the-job learning opportunities. And when individuals pass up on-the-job learning opportunities repeatedly over time -- and enough learning debt has consequently accumulated for an individual, a team or a company -- we find ourselves in the untenable situation of no longer knowing the things we need to know, or how to do the things we need to know how to do, in order to build what we need to build effectively and efficiently.
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Ideal Workshop Format
This 90-minute retrospective is best run with individual teams, and can be adapted to meet the needs of your team's particular objectives and context.