Summary
As a tech lead or senior developer, you’re expected to mentor and train more junior teammembers - coaching is already part of your job. In this masterclass with Emily Bache, you’ll learn skills and concrete activities you can use to bring on others and build up your team. You don’t need to be a full-time technical coach to make a difference in your organisation. This course will help you to get started with learning hours and ensemble working. These are not vacuous “icebreaker”-style fun and games, the focus is on real hard technical skills, especially around TDD, refactoring, handling legacy code and better OO design. Real technical coaching is about leading team activities that strengthen your collaboration and ability to discuss code and make better design decisions.
For who?
This session is designed for team leads and senior developers who take an active part in developing software, who also have an interest in mentoring and coaching the people around them. No previous experience of coaching is needed, but if you are already a technical coach you should find plenty of new ideas and inspiration in this training.
Learning Objectives
After the training, participants should be able to:
- Lead a short ‘learning hour’ training / team building session
- Adapt materials and activities for the needs of participants
- Understand the purpose and benefits of technical coaching more widely
Agenda
- Technical coaching, what it is and how you could benefit from it without going full-time
- How to lead “learning hour” training / team building sessions
- Creating a safe, engaging coding environment with your team
- More engaging and useful sessions with Training from the Back of the Room
- Using learning goals to make training more relevant
- Adapting materials and activities for the needs of your team
- Facilitation skills for interactive learning activities
Much of the time will be spent in hands-on exercises. You will come away with the knowledge and materials you need to get started with coaching activities with your team.
Requirements
Please bring your laptop. We will be using Miro. There is not much actual coding in this workshop so it's suitable for people using all kinds of programming languages.
What participants say about this workshop
"A very good presentation about learning hours and coaching the right way to make learning fun. The principle of learning hour is really great and I will use it within my team and during coaching sessions. I also appreciate the Samman community around it, it is a group of professionals interested in doing their job well and better. 10/10!"
- Arnaud, developer, coach, and trainer at Arolla - 2025
"This workshop has inspired me to implement learning hours and elevate the quality of my own training sessions."
- Workshop Participant - 2025