Greg Wilson on training with video

Greg Wilson uses video recording for feedback of his trainees. But, interestingly, not just for themselves to review.

Greg Wilson’s The Third Bit: Just Keep Swimming (Dec 2015)

When I do in-person instructor training for Software Carpentry, I have trainees film each other teaching short lessons. The main goal isn’t to give people feedback on their presentation skills: they could get that without being recorded. The real aim is to teach them how to scale their evaluations of themselves. Almost without exception, people will give themselves an F when others would give them a B; knowing that, they can adjust their self-assessment to be more accurate. And knowing that, they can start to improve.

Activity idea: prediction

From EDEC-625 notebook, Fall 2015, 19 Oct 2015.

Setting up a prediction activity. This is a classic technique for Science classes, where labs and experimentation are part of the process. But it should work really well for Math and CS too, where the algorithm/formula/steps are complex enough that students have to do some mental gymnastics to go from seeing them on paper to knowing what they will do.

What to do:

  1. Activate the students’ prior knowledge, as needed.
  2. Show the setup of something new. Don’t execute it yet.
  3. Ask for predictions. Probe for understanding of the details of the setup and the underlying concepts at play. Discuss in small groups and/or large group, and record the students’ ideas visually as per usual technique.
  4. Execute the program/problem/algorithm, and confirm the results.
  5. Was the outcome understood? Which theory “won”?

Go through this cycle with a well-chosen case, and then do it again with new inputs–maybe once or twice more with inputs that you choose for specific reasons (they generate good illustrations, highlight edge cases or unintuitive results, etc.). Then repeat a few times with the students suggesting the inputs. Repeat until everyone is able to predict together how it will behave.

Allow students to give you crazy inputs. Don’t think too hard about what the result will be, and (unless it’s too crazy) don’t say “no” to a student’s suggestion. The idea is to (a) let go of the usual tight curricular control that we usually exercise, and (b) to help the students poke and prod the concepts you are illustrating.

The overall cycle is: Input > Predict > Execute > Discuss

Key objectives:

  • The teacher holds back his/her own knowledge of the outcome.
  • Teacher draws thinking out of the students, builds ideas before executing, gets them to reflect and understand after the execution.
  • Teacher embraces unknown, novel, or surprising results.
  • Teacher relinquishes control over inputs and problem design.

Activity idea: peer challenge

From notebook EDEC-625 Fall 2015, 19 Oct 2015.

Have students in groups. Each group creates a programming challenge for the next group to solve. They have to come up with something that’s within the class’s ability, using the blocks and techniques they’ve all learned up to that point. Ex:

  • Make the sprite draw _______.
  • Make the sprite do _______.
  • Animate a conversation about ____ with appropriate costumes.

Each group formulates a challenge and passes it to the group to their right. They receive a challenge coming from their left, and they have to carry it out.

The idea:

It’s great to solve a challenge… but it’s an even richer task to think up a challenge. You have to see through it, understand how a person might go about it, understand where the pitfalls are (or maybe intentionally place some). That’s good meta-cognition.

Kate and Kids Code Jeunesse on MAtv

Yesterday our Kids Code Jeunesse founder and chief badass Kate Arthur chatted on Montreal local tv with Richard Dagenais. Great interview — I think Kate did a good job positioning code as a common everyday medium that anyone can (and ought to) get a taste of and put to use, even without becoming a programmer.  And maybe some folks in the audience will come away a little less intimidated by learning to code. 🙂8b8db55d7dcb2cb6_150_montreal

Episode: MONTREAL BILLBOARD October 13, 2015 (Kate starts at ~8:30.)

Cited in the interview: our partner codecademy, who has a great lineup of well-documented, self-paced lessons in a variety of coding platforms. (Seriously, check out their HTML + CSS sequence. It’s not perfect, but they align well with my axioms of programming instruction. It’s a very good entryway for kids and newcomer adults.)

Learning styles: movement becomes parody

I overheard a passing comment in class this week about learning styles, and it was a record needle scratch moment for me.

Learning styles are a hot topic in the education world–they’re the notion that a person may have a specific mode (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic, says one model) through which they like to learn or are best at learning. In class we were talking about orchestrating classroom discussions, and most of the conversation was about how to encourage participation and keep students talking.

One classmate of mine added that when she leads a discussion she likes to keep in mind her students’ individual learning styles, and she structures so that she can reach each student effectively. Something along these lines: Sally is an auditory learner, so ask her to speak up; James is a kinesthetic learner, so throw in a physical activity; etc.

This was validated with a round of sage nods and enthusastic comments by the teacher and several other classmates–they all seemed to think this was smart, just good teaching. But something about her comment rubbed me the wrong way. It felt like I had read somewhere that learning styles were pop psychology, not borne out by research. But I didn’t push back. I waited til I was home and could look it up. And yup, researchers are now saying that learning styles (as people usually think of them) are bogus.

But unfortunately, the publishing industry piled in some time ago, and isn’t likely to be dissuaded from pushing learning styles as a way to differentiate their products. If you’re a parent, there are a dozen different ways to teach your baby—or kindergartner, or middle schooler, or college-bound teenager—that thing you want them to learn right now, each one perfectly tuned to their ideal learning style.

WIRED posted a super clear debunking and distillation: All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes.

The short version: people often express a favorite mode of learning or activity, but (so far, let’s say) the evidence has simply not borne out that there is any actual personal effect between mode and learning. In other words, setting aside what feels good according to personal preference, individual people doesn’t seem to actually learn more when they learn something in their favorite mode than in other modes.

If I’m grasping it correctly, the idea is that the personal sensation of the activity we’re doing while we’re learning feels to us like it’s directly coupled with the learning itself. Research has so far not established an effect between the two. We need to de-couple them in our personal model of learning, and in our model of teaching.

What have been found, though, are effects between the mode of learning, on the one hand, and the material being learned and the stage of learning on the other.

… although each of us is unique, usually the most effective way for us to learn is based not on our individual preferences but on the nature of the material we’re being taught

Beginners in a given domain may learn best one way (say, through looking at completed sample problems), and experts another way (say, through solving new problems themselves). That picture may look different in another domain. There also seems to be an overall positive effect when learning through mixed modes, and this may in fact apply to every learner, in every domain.

Here’s another good article, this one citing more academic research: The Myth of Learning Styles. The author makes an interesting observation about why the myth is so attractive and persistent: we’re just not very good at assessing what’s happening in our own thinking.

… a growing body of psychological research on metacognition demonstrates that our beliefs about how we process information and how we learn can actually be quite wrong,

Coming back to my seminar mate, the teacher: it may be that a certain lesson she teaches will be better absorbed through motion, or through visual diagrams, or some other mode. But it will be because the content of the lesson is well matched to the affordances of the mode she chooses, not because of any individuals’ learning styles. And she should be encouraged that hitting on a productive teaching mode will help all of her students learn the material, not just the students who think they like the mode she chooses.

So, tonight’s seminar is done and I can’t get back that opportunity to debunk the theory among my classmates. But now I’m armed with research the next time it comes up. Hopefully this will happen less in the future — at least among educators I meet.

So meta

The Education seminar I’m enrolled in right now is a lot of fun, but is occasionally mind-bendingly self-referential.

It’s easy enough at the surface level: we (a mix of MA and PhD students) are learning what makes teachers effective. The trick is that we’re working on this practice NOT in order to teach K-12 students, but in order to teach teachers.

self reflection photo
Photo by arripay

We’re training to be teacher-educators, in other words. In business terms I’m in a three-month long Train-the-Trainer course—which, given my corporate business simulation and teacher-education roots feels like home—but where the ultimate end topics are K-12 math, science,  and humanities. Continue reading So meta