From Observer to Catalyst: How Faculty Learned to Teach with AI in Four Sessions
In this blog
Most professional development for educators follows a familiar pattern: an expert presents, teachers take notes, and everyone goes home hoping some of it sticks. The AI-Assisted Teaching with GitHub workshop series was built to break that pattern entirely.
Over four sessions in March 2026, WWT partnered with GitHub to bring a cohort of faculty through something different — a hands-on, progressive workshop series that didn't just introduce AI tools, but gave educators the time, the space, and the structure to actually build with them. By the final session, participants weren't just using GitHub. They were distributing assignments to students, collecting submissions automatically, and setting up systems that grade themselves.
No prior technical background required. Just a willingness to try.
The Framework: Observer, Activator, Catalyst
Every session opened with the same framework — a three-level model that gave faculty a clear picture of where they were starting and where the series was designed to take them.
LEVEL 1 Observer In a learning mindset. Consuming information, watching demos — but not yet taking action. | LEVEL 2 Activator Moving from understanding to doing. Applying concepts, experimenting with tools, building hands-on. | LEVEL 3 Catalyst Driving momentum beyond themselves. Teaching, advocating, accelerating adoption across their institution. |
The goal wasn't to move every participant from Observer to Catalyst in a single afternoon. It was to give each educator enough hands-on experience that they could see the next step clearly — and feel confident enough to take it.
Four Sessions. One Complete Toolkit.
The series was designed as a deliberate progression. Each session built directly on the one before it, so faculty who attended all four left with a complete, usable toolkit — not a collection of disconnected demos.
Session 1 GitHub Fundamentals: The Platform and Its AI-Ready Teaching Tools No technical background required. Faculty learned the GitHub ecosystem from the ground up — repositories, the Educator Toolbox, and how the platform maps to real classroom workflows. | Session 2 Getting Started with GitHub Copilot and Spark Beginner-friendly AI-assisted creation. Faculty built their first Copilot-powered curriculum hub and used GitHub Spark to turn plain language descriptions into working web applications — live, in session. |
Session 3 Copilot and Spark in Education: Use Cases Across Disciplines Practical applications across subject areas. Faculty outside of computer science — in nursing, business, and the humanities — explored how AI-assisted tools apply to their specific courses and students. | Session 4 Beyond the Basics: GitHub Classroom Workflows The full assignment lifecycle. Faculty created a GitHub Classroom from scratch, built a student roster, distributed a live assignment using Copilot Adventures as starter code, and set up automatic grading. |
The Tools at the Center
Three GitHub tools anchored the entire series, each addressing a different part of the teaching and learning experience.
GitHub Copilot AI pair programmer for writing, understanding, and improving code | GitHub Spark Build and deploy full-stack apps using natural language — no prior coding required | GitHub Classroom Course and assignment management using real-world developer workflows |
What made the combination powerful wasn't any single tool — it was the way they connected. Copilot helped faculty and students write code without starting from a blank page. Spark let educators build interactive curriculum tools without writing a line of HTML. And GitHub Classroom turned the entire experience into a managed, gradeable course that runs on the same infrastructure professional developers use every day.
What Faculty Built
By Session 4, the workshop had moved well past slides and demos. Faculty were building. Working from a forked version of Microsoft's open-source Copilot Adventures repository — a collection of story-driven coding challenges designed to be completed with AI assistance — participants walked through every stage of a real assignment lifecycle.
They created a classroom organization, uploaded a student roster, configured a private assignment with starter code, and set up an autograding test that would score each student's submission the moment it was pushed to GitHub. The Magical Forest of Algora challenge — where students simulate a dance between two mystical creatures and display the resulting state of an enchanted forest — became the live test case for the entire workflow.
For faculty who have spent years managing submissions through email attachments and LMS dropboxes, watching this happen live was a turning point. The question stopped being 'can I use this?' and started being 'why didn't I have this sooner?
A Curriculum Hub Built to Last
One of the most durable outcomes of the series wasn't a skill or a certificate — it was a living resource. Every session fed into a growing curriculum hub, a GitHub Pages site built by the instructor and refined across all four workshops, that gave participants a single place to return to long after the sessions ended.
The hub included interactive carousel slides, a student-facing guide for completing the Magical Forest of Algora assignment independently, step-by-step instructions for setting up GitHub Classroom from scratch, a sample student roster CSV, and direct links to free educator licenses for every tool covered in the series.
The intent was the same as the series itself: not a one-time event, but a launchpad. Something faculty could hand to a colleague, share with a student, or return to when they were ready to go deeper.
The Portfolio Argument
The demand for continuation was immediate and specific. Before the final session had ended, participants were already asking about what Level 3 looks like in a classroom context — assignments that connect to external APIs, agents that give students personalized feedback, workflows that adapt to how a student is performing in real time.
The series also surfaced a larger opportunity. Faculty across disciplines — not just computer science — showed up ready to engage. A nursing instructor exploring how Copilot could help students document clinical reasoning. A business professor thinking through how Spark could help students prototype the products they were pitching. A humanities faculty member asking how GitHub could become the portfolio platform for writing and research, not just code.
The tools are language-agnostic. The workflows are discipline-agnostic. The only thing that changes from classroom to classroom is the assignment — and GitHub Classroom is built to handle all of them.
Four sessions. One cohort of educators. A complete, working toolkit they built themselves — and a curriculum hub they can share with the colleagues who ask what they've been up to.
That's what it looks like when professional development is designed to activate, not just inform. And for the faculty who showed up across four Thursdays in March, the question has already shifted from what is this? to what do I build next?