Ground the teaching of style and code clarity through the experience of reading unfamiliar code to provide meaningful motivation for students.
Teach students that if they need to explain their code for someone else to understand it, they should think about how to change the code to make it readable.
Set expectations during workshops for a focused classroom by redirecting off-task behavior and showing students how to take their work to the next level.
Remind students that each problem relies on a specific set of knowledge; not understanding a particular problem doesn't mean they’re stupid, it’s an opportunity to work hard and learn more.
Get students' thinking aligned with the Ruby on Rails community values by introducing them to community resources like Github, forums, and screencasts, for example http://railscasts.com/.
Highlight the basic syntax and semantics of Ruby on Rails without referencing complex external concepts like closures and blocks to enhance beginning students learning to code them quickly.
Illustrate the steps a user-action travels through in the Ruby on Rails framework, from making a request at the browser to returning a response, to help students learn create a meaningful mental model.