Oh dear. This is exactly the WRONG conclusion to reach. It’s the conclusion that “highly selective” colleges use, and it’s perfectly, exactly, precisely beside the point of good education. The incoming and outgoing gatekeepers are NOT the locus of preparation. The teaching is.
In closing the discussion, Walsh had one big recommendation: Make schools with teacher-prep programs harder to get into, and to graduate from, to see a big impact.
Great exercise: “My favorite no.” – have students submit answers on index cards. Walk through an incorrect one on the board (anonymously). Everyone gains insight from the misconceptions and mistakes.
Despite skepticism from some parts of the mathematics field, new strategies are emerging for teachers to help students develop positive learning attitudes toward math.
Here’s a fascinating take on the STEM imbalance from University Affairs: the major dynamic may not be sexism or any other institutional intent, but the accumulation of simple economic choices at the individual level. And the solution may be more background than foreground. Intriguing, no? Continue reading Male-female imbalance in STEM comes down to economics?
Magdalene Lampert’s one-problem lesson model is not just great because it focuses on one problem instead of many. Its real innovation is in how it flips the orientation from “answer-getting” to “sense-making.”
Here Lance Bledsoe highlights the difference. It directly relates to Mike’s Axiom: Stamp out contrived problems.
The conversations I tend to be involved in about underrepresentation in the technology world are about the gender divide. At Kids Code Jeunesse we’re very conscientious about designing our activities and honing our pitch so we include girls. And in my own reading and thinking (probably colored by who my 2 oldest kids are) I pay particular attention to the ways we can make technology and “computational thinking” accessible to girls.
There’s lots of interesting stuff to think about there: which applications of tech are likely to appeal to girls (and yeah, they are different than for boys); how to teach in a way that resonates with the expressive side of a kid, rather than the purely rational side; and more.
Other divides
But of course there are other divides too, and here’s a great story out of Baltimore about a year-round code camp directly targeted at minority boys: the Minority Male Makers Program(via npr.org). It’s being rolled out at a handful of Historically Black Colleges in the American south that have engineering schools: Morgan State U., North Carolina A&T State U., Jackson State U. and Kentucky State U. as of summer 2015. Guided by undergrad students at those schools, these kids get to design, engineer, 3-d print, and code their own ideas and products.
They’re reaching kids at middle school age. They rightly point out that this is their last shot at reaching kids before their path toward adulthood (and higher education and professional life–if any) starts to solidify and accelerate. Influence them here, show them it’s possible to be creative and use their brains for good, hard things, and you stand a good chance of influencing their choices in next few years. And then they’ll be on a good, productive path.
They’re letting the kids make real things starting right now. With programming, modelling software, and 3d printers in the classroom, this is tinkering with real stuff. Look at the press release and see that these kids are walking out of the classroom with the objects they’ve made. There is no 4-year lecture-driven book learning period, no extended apprenticeship standing between their adolescent selves and being real-world-productive.
Graduates of the Minority Male Makers program (morgan.edu)
They’re looking specifically for kids who show signs of being disengaged and bored in class. They know that disengagement isn’t a sign of being stupid; it’s a sign of needing a more active, hands-on learning method than the school is set up to deliver.
And the NPR article suggests that, rather than opening it up for open registration, they are asking school principals and counselors to bring them students. This is a great way to (1) encourage administrators who are engaged with their students and know them well, and (2) sidestep the self-selection that attracts self-motivated geeky boys to code camps. We have plenty of those already. 🙂
Bootstrapping the talent pool
I love seeing programs like this, and the overall philosophy is what attracted me to the Kids Code Jeunesse team. All programs of this kind are trying to bootstrap the tech talent pool in a very conscious way. Malcolm Gladwell might say these are ways to solve our talent selection problem, our “quarterback problem.”
If we want to change the complexion of the tech industry and what it produces, it will have to be through initiatives like this: initiatives that intentionally reach everyone, or that intentionally reach underrepresented groups.
If we can keep those going, the tech industry will not only look different in its makeup and its atmosphere; it will start producing output that’s better and that speaks to a wider range of people.
There’s more to it than just “knowing the tricks of the trade.”
Formulated by Lee Shulman:
PCK is (1) knowing how to organize and present the curriculum for students, (2) being aware of misconceptions, prior knowledge, and particular problems students may have when learning new subject matter, and (3) having specific methods or strategies for the classroom situation or environment.
This is what i want to establish & advance: PCK in K-12 Computing education.
Have you ever noticed it’s better to use a visual representation for introductions and conclusions when teaching 5-paragraph essays, but it’s better to use an audio file to introduce rhyme and meter in your poetry unit? Or, have you seen better test scores when you teach electricity before fluid mechanics in Physics? Or, the circulatory […]Source: Pedagogical Content Knowledge – Learning Bird
Introducing…. Mike’s Axioms for Computing Instruction.
As I do more and more teaching and lesson writing, I’ve started collecting the gemmiest of my design principles.
Little by little I’ll record them here in the blog with some examples and the reasoning behind them, and hopefully they’ll be a useful reference for me and others. As I deepen my formal knowledge and gain more hours of practical experience, I’ll come back and elaborate or revisit.
The last decade of traditional business intelligence / data warehousing best-practice infrastructures is rapidly becoming obsolete, as new technologies come together to provide a once-in-a-decade tipping point.
The week of May 17-24, 2015, students from across the US are invited to play a (everyone outside the US too, but they’re not eligible for prizes). Challenges include cryptography, reverse-engineering, and reconnaissance. Continue reading CS Capture the Flag 2015
At one of our recent Kids Code Jeunesse meetings, my friend, high school programming teacher Stuart Spence (see his site and his YouTube channel) was telling us about what his students are into.
One of the things they get most excited about–especially, he says, the girls–is cryptography. They think it’s really cool that they can use their just-beginning programming skills to reverse-engineer passwords and crack codes and stuff like that. Continue reading Crypto for high schoolers
In closing the discussion, Walsh had one big recommendation: Make schools with teacher-prep programs harder to get into, and to graduate from, to see a big impact.
