Teaching Tech Together How to design and deliver lessons that work and build a teaching community around them. Compiled by Greg Wilson Copyright © 2017–18 ISBN 978-0-9881137-0-1 90000 9 780988 113701 Licensed under the Creative Commons - Attribution license (CC-BY-4.0). See https://github.com/gvwilson/teachtogether.tech for the source, and http://teachtogether.tech/ for the online version. For my mother, Doris Wilson, who taught hundreds of children to read and to believe in themselves. And for my brother Jeff, who did not live to see it finished. “Remember, you still have a lot of good times in front of you.” The Rules 1. Be kind: all else is details. 2. Remember that you are not your learners. 3. that most people would rather fail than change. 4. and that ninety percent of magic consists of knowing one extra thing. 5. Never teach alone. 6. Never hesitate to sacrifice truth for clarity. 7. Make every mistake a lesson. 8. Remember that no lesson survives first contact with learners. 9. that every lesson is too short from the teacher’s point of view and too long from the learner’s. 10. and that nobody will be more excited about the lesson than you are. Contents Contents 7 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Who You Are . 2 1.2 What to Read Instead . 3 1.3 History . 4 1.4 Why Learn to Program? . 5 1.5 Have a Code of Conduct . 5 1.6 Acknowledgments . 6 1.7 Exercises . 6 I Learning 9 2 Building Mental Models 11 2.1 Are People Learning? . 13 2.2 Exercises . 16 3 Expertise and Memory 19 3.1 Concept Maps . 21 3.2 Seven Plus or Minus Two . 24 3.3 Pattern Recognition . 26 3.4 Becoming an Expert . 27 3.5 Exercises . 28 4 Cognitive Load 31 4.1 Split Attention . 35 4.2 Minimal Manuals . 36 4.3 Exercises . 37 5 Individual Learning 41 5.1 Six Strategies . 42 5.2 Time Management . 46 5.3 Peer Assessment . 47 5.4 Exercises . 48 II Lesson Design 53 6 A Lesson Design Process 55 6.1 Learner Personas . 57 6.2 Learning Objectives . 58 6.3 Maintainability . 61 6.4 Exercises . 62 7 Actionable Approximations of the Truth 65 7.1 How Do Novices Program? . 66 7.2 How Do Novices Debug and Test? . 68 7.3 What Misconceptions Do Novices Have? . 70 7.4 What Mistakes Do Novices Make? . 71 7.5 What Are We Teaching Them Now? . 72 7.6 Do Languages Matter? . 74 7.7 Does Better Feedback Help? . 78 7.8 What Else Can We Do to Help? . 79 7.9 Exercises . 81 III Teaching 83 8 Teaching as a Performance Art 85 8.1 Lesson Study . 86 8.2 Giving and Getting Feedback on Teaching . 87 8.3 How to Practice Performance . 90 8.4 Live Coding . 91 8.5 Exercises . 97 9 In the Classroom 99 9.1 Enforce the Code of Conduct . 99 9.2 Peer Instruction . 100 9.3 Teach Together . 101 9.4 Assess Prior Knowledge . 103 9.5 Plan for Mixed Abilities . 103 9.6 Pair Programming . 104 9.7 Take Notes. Together? . 105 9.8 Sticky Notes . 106 9.9 Never a Blank Page . 107 9.10 Setting Up Your Learners . 108 9.11 Other Teaching Practices . 109 9.12 Limit Innovation . 112 9.13 Exercises . 112 10 Motivation and Demotivation 115 10.1 Authentic Tasks . 117 10.2 Demotivation . 118 10.3 Accessibility . 123 10.4 Inclusivity . 125 10.5 Exercises . 128 11 Teaching Online 133 11.1 MOOCs . 134 11.2 Video . 138 11.3 Flipped Classrooms . 141 11.4 Life Online . 142 11.5 Exercises . 145 12 Exercise Types 147 12.1 The Classics . 147 12.2 Tracing . 150 12.3 Diagrams . 152 12.4 Automatic Grading . 154 12.5 Higher-Level Thinking . 156 12.6 Exercises . 157 IV Organizing 161 13 Building Community 163 13.1 Learn, Then Do . 165 13.2 Three Steps . 166 13.3 Retention . 167 13.4 Governance . 170 13.5 Final Thoughts . 171 13.6 Exercises . 171 14 Marketing 177 14.1 What Are You Offering to Whom? . 177 14.2 Branding and Positioning . 179 14.3 The Art of the Cold Call . 181 14.4 A Final Thought . 182 14.5 Exercises . 182 15 Partnerships 185 15.1 Working With Schools . 185 15.2 Working Outside Schools . 188 15.3 Final Thoughts . 189 15.4 Exercises . 190 16 Why I Teach 193 Bibliography 195 V Additional Material 241 A License 243 B Citation 245 C Joining Our Community 247 C.1 Contributor Covenant . 247 C.2 Using This Material . 249 C.3 Contributing and Maintaining . 250 D Code of Conduct 253 E Glossary 255 F Meetings, Meetings, Meetings 263 G A Little Bit of Theory 267 H Lesson Design Template 271 I Checklists for Events 275 J Presentation Rubric 277 K Teamwork Rubric 279 L Pre-Assessment Questionnaire 281 M Design Notes 283 1 Introduction Hundreds of grassroots groups have sprung up around the world to teach programming, web design, robotics, and other skills to free-range learners outside traditional classrooms. These groups exist so that people don’t have to learn these things on their own, but ironically, their founders and instructors are often teaching themselves how to teach. There’s a better way. Just as knowing a few basic facts about germs and nutrition can help you stay healthy, knowing a few things about psychology, instructional design, inclusivity, and community organization can help you be a more effective teacher. This book presents evidence-based practices you can use right now, explains why we believe they are true, and points you at other resources that will help you go further. Its four sections cover: • how people learn; • how to design lessons that work; • how to deliver those lessons; and • how to grow a community of practice around teaching. Throughout, we try to follow our own advice: for example, we start with ideas that are short, engaging, and actionable in order to motivate you to read further (Chapter 10), include lots of exercises that can be used to reinforce learning (Chapter 2), and include the original design for this book in Appendix M so that you can see what a lesson design looks like. This Book Belongs to Everyone This book is a community resource. Parts of it were originally created for the Software Carpentry instructor training programa, which has been run over several hundred times over the past six years, and all of it can be freely distributed and re-used under the Creative Commons - Attribution 4.0 licenseb. Please see http://teachtogether.tech/ to download a digital version or to purchase a printed copy at cost. Contributions of all kinds are welcome, from errata and minor improvements to entirely new sections and chapters. All proposed contributions will be managed in the same way as edits to Wikipedia or 1 patches to open source software, and all contributors will be credited for their work each time a new version is released. Please see Appendix C for details and Section C.1 for our code of conduct. ahttp://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/ bhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 1.1 Who You Are Section 6.1 explains how to figure out who your learners are. The four I had in mind when writing this book are all end-user teachers: teaching isn’t their primary occupation, they have little or no background in pedagogy, and they may work outside institutional classrooms. Emily trained as a librarian, and now works as a web designer and project manager in a small consulting company. In her spare time, she helps run web design classes for women entering tech as a second career. She is now recruiting colleagues to run more classes in her area using the lessons that she has created, and wants to know how to grow a volunteer teaching organization. Moshe is a professional programmer with two teenage children whose school doesn’t offer programming classes. He has volunteered to run a monthly after-school programming club, and while he frequently gives presentations to colleagues, he has no experience designing lessons. He wants to learn how to build effective lessons in collaboration with others, and is interested in turning his lessons into a self-paced online course. Samira is an undergraduate in robotics who is thinking about becoming a full-time teacher after she graduates. She wants to help teach weekend workshops for undergraduate women, but has never taught an entire class before, and feels uncomfortable teaching things that she’s not an expert in. She wants to learn more about education in general in order to decide if it’s for her. Gene is a professor of computer science whose research area is operating systems. They have been teaching undergraduate classes for six years, and increasingly believe that there has to be a better way. The only training available through their university’s teaching and learning center relates to posting assignments and grades in the learning management system, so they want to find out what else they ought to be asking for. These people have a variety of technical backgrounds and some previous teaching experience, but no formal training in teaching, lesson design, or community organization. Most work with free-range learners and are focused on teenagers and adults rather than children; all have limited time and resources. Section C.2 describes different ways people have used this material. (That discussion is delayed to an appendix because it refers to some of the 2 ideas introduced later in this book.) We expect our made-up learners to use this material as follows: Emily will take part in a weekly online reading group with her volunteers.