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‘...By this point, I have realized that there are two kinds of teachers. Some focus on transmitting their skills. They seem to be saying to the student: “this i

‘...By this point, I have realized that there are two kinds of teachers. Some focus on transmitting their skills. They seem to be saying to the student: “this is how to do what I do.” Others offer themselves as models to be imitated: “this is how I became who I am.”‘ This part struck me. For topics like computer science (or any science) we need more of the former, for anything related to the subjective experiences of creativity or even life, we need more of the latter. Even then, “this is how I became who I am,” can only get you so far, because you need to learn to become who you are and not someone else.

josephg 6y ago
I spent a couple years as a programming teacher, and really struggled to find the right balance there. As an example, about 9 months in I had a student ask how they should approach a problem. I'd say "What are all the ways you can think of to do it?" and together we'd brainstorm a few viable approaches. "So which one should I do?". What do I say to that? Do I tell them which approach I think is best? I was originally self taught, and I got good in part thanks to those moments. When you pick something yourself but you aren't sure if its the right choice, .. well, thats when learning happens. Next time you choose differently and over years explore the space. But at the same time, getting advice can really help a novice improve. Despite being pushed I didn't answer the student about which approach I recommended, and I still wonder if it was the right choice. I'd like to think that my teaching approach resulted in my students spending more time gazing into the belly of the beast. But maybe I just didn't give them much as much instruction as they needed. I can't tell.
- heymijo 6y ago
  From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching: On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here. You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help. You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------ Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss? If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it. This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners. If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn. In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with. Next up is feedback... Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong? If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter? These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle. 1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum. Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.
  - philoclea 6y ago
    Love this breakdown. And to josephg's post: When I was picking a dissertation topic I'd suggest things to my advisor and she'd say brightly, "Why don't you go do some research on that, come back in two weeks and tell me what you found?" I'd go off to the library for a couple of weeks, do the reading, come back and say, "You know I think X is a terrible topic, the scholarship on it all seems to drag." "Oh yes," she'd say, with a look that said this was the worst topic in the world. "So why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?" Then she'd get diplomatic. "You're young, maybe you see something that I don't!" I realised though that it wasn't just that. Had she told me my idea about topic X was a loser, I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity. I really had to figure out on my own how much the topic sucked. It had to come from my own discovery, not from her authority. Anyway, I do this now and it drives my students nuts, because they want me to hand them a paper topic, ideally tell them what books to read, and send them off so they can execute the steps. Meanwhile, I want them to spend time in the messy, difficult process of working things out. I think my process probably results in more failure (at least as far as the grades are concerned), but the good work is so much better.
    - heymijo 6y ago
      I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity Thanks for sharing this story. I think a lot of about potential impacts like this on students/learners. My goals when teaching are to nurture agency, autonomy, and a positive disposition towards what is being learned in addition to a student learning the content or practices/skills. People often misconstrue this as wanting to make learning "fun" for students. For me it begins with inversion, look at how to crush a student's spirit, agency, and disposition towards a topic. Don't do that. Then find ways to put them in situations where they can struggle productively, be creative, show ingenuity, and see the fruits of doing so. Sometimes students aren't aware of their own ingenuity, creativity, or their own productive struggle so that gives me an opportunity to go meta with them and help them see it.
      - philoclea 6y ago
        Yes, I love this! I try to convince my students to work on something they find interesting, even to take risks in doing so. My experience is that they tend to do better work when the topic reflects their own curiosity, obsessions. Unfortunately the educational system I work in prioritizes conformity. I don't blame them for having a hard time taking a risk.
- greggman3 6y ago
  According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say "figure it out on your own". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say "if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own". You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.
  - philoclea 6y ago
    This is a useful point. The beginning learner needs more straightforward instruction -- just knowledge transfer -- whereas the learner with a basis of knowledge can spend more time exploring, making mistakes. The issue comes in when a student is so accustomed to being fed information that they bristle at being asked to think. This point also suggests a flaw in the online MasterClass format. In a traditional music master class, someone who is already very very good at singing or playing an instrument comes out, performs a song, and then is corrected by the "master." Then they do it again, etc. An online "masterclass" is in fact a lecture-style course, which is really better suited to beginners.
powersnail 6y ago
I don’t really see Master Class being a thing for computer science. To be honest, I don’t see it being a thing for most engineering subjects. The knowledge here is mostly objective and non-personal. The best classes are not necessarily those carried out by “masters”, but by really good educators. Sometimes the two aspects overlap (e.g. Feynman), but most of the time they don’t. And what’s more, it is actually okay to learn engineering with a teacher who is dry, accurate, but not necessarily the top engineer of the field. For art and music, on the other hand, the deeper you learn, the more personal it gets. So, the subjective experience of a master is of great value. That’s where the this kind of class really shines.
- smabie 6y ago
  I've been lucky (not really, keep reading) enough to take a few classes with professors who are probably the best in the world at what they do and found them really awful. You could tell they didn't want to be there and didn't really give a shit about anyone learning anything. Moreover, I think being really good at something makes it harder to teach, not easier. TAs are usually much better teachers. After all, they can still remember what it was like to not understand the material. Some of the best teachers I've had were at a community college, actually. I ended up taking community college classes for a couple years instead of going to high school and had a much better experience than at the "real" college I attended when I was older. That could have been a function of age though (by the time I went to a real college I was much more interested in girls and partying than learning anything).

josephg 6y ago

I spent a couple years as a programming teacher, and really struggled to find the right balance there. As an example, about 9 months in I had a student ask how they should approach a problem. I'd say "What are all the ways you can think of to do it?" and together we'd brainstorm a few viable approaches. "So which one should I do?". What do I say to that? Do I tell them which approach I think is best? I was originally self taught, and I got good in part thanks to those moments. When you pick something yourself but you aren't sure if its the right choice, .. well, thats when learning happens. Next time you choose differently and over years explore the space. But at the same time, getting advice can really help a novice improve. Despite being pushed I didn't answer the student about which approach I recommended, and I still wonder if it was the right choice. I'd like to think that my teaching approach resulted in my students spending more time gazing into the belly of the beast. But maybe I just didn't give them much as much instruction as they needed. I can't tell.

heymijo 6y ago
From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching: On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here. You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help. You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------ Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss? If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it. This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners. If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn. In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with. Next up is feedback... Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong? If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter? These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle. 1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum. Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.
- philoclea 6y ago
  Love this breakdown. And to josephg's post: When I was picking a dissertation topic I'd suggest things to my advisor and she'd say brightly, "Why don't you go do some research on that, come back in two weeks and tell me what you found?" I'd go off to the library for a couple of weeks, do the reading, come back and say, "You know I think X is a terrible topic, the scholarship on it all seems to drag." "Oh yes," she'd say, with a look that said this was the worst topic in the world. "So why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?" Then she'd get diplomatic. "You're young, maybe you see something that I don't!" I realised though that it wasn't just that. Had she told me my idea about topic X was a loser, I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity. I really had to figure out on my own how much the topic sucked. It had to come from my own discovery, not from her authority. Anyway, I do this now and it drives my students nuts, because they want me to hand them a paper topic, ideally tell them what books to read, and send them off so they can execute the steps. Meanwhile, I want them to spend time in the messy, difficult process of working things out. I think my process probably results in more failure (at least as far as the grades are concerned), but the good work is so much better.
  - heymijo 6y ago
    I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity Thanks for sharing this story. I think a lot of about potential impacts like this on students/learners. My goals when teaching are to nurture agency, autonomy, and a positive disposition towards what is being learned in addition to a student learning the content or practices/skills. People often misconstrue this as wanting to make learning "fun" for students. For me it begins with inversion, look at how to crush a student's spirit, agency, and disposition towards a topic. Don't do that. Then find ways to put them in situations where they can struggle productively, be creative, show ingenuity, and see the fruits of doing so. Sometimes students aren't aware of their own ingenuity, creativity, or their own productive struggle so that gives me an opportunity to go meta with them and help them see it.
    - philoclea 6y ago
      Yes, I love this! I try to convince my students to work on something they find interesting, even to take risks in doing so. My experience is that they tend to do better work when the topic reflects their own curiosity, obsessions. Unfortunately the educational system I work in prioritizes conformity. I don't blame them for having a hard time taking a risk.
greggman3 6y ago
According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say "figure it out on your own". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say "if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own". You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.
- philoclea 6y ago
  This is a useful point. The beginning learner needs more straightforward instruction -- just knowledge transfer -- whereas the learner with a basis of knowledge can spend more time exploring, making mistakes. The issue comes in when a student is so accustomed to being fed information that they bristle at being asked to think. This point also suggests a flaw in the online MasterClass format. In a traditional music master class, someone who is already very very good at singing or playing an instrument comes out, performs a song, and then is corrected by the "master." Then they do it again, etc. An online "masterclass" is in fact a lecture-style course, which is really better suited to beginners.

powersnail 6y ago

I don’t really see Master Class being a thing for computer science. To be honest, I don’t see it being a thing for most engineering subjects. The knowledge here is mostly objective and non-personal. The best classes are not necessarily those carried out by “masters”, but by really good educators. Sometimes the two aspects overlap (e.g. Feynman), but most of the time they don’t. And what’s more, it is actually okay to learn engineering with a teacher who is dry, accurate, but not necessarily the top engineer of the field. For art and music, on the other hand, the deeper you learn, the more personal it gets. So, the subjective experience of a master is of great value. That’s where the this kind of class really shines.

smabie 6y ago
I've been lucky (not really, keep reading) enough to take a few classes with professors who are probably the best in the world at what they do and found them really awful. You could tell they didn't want to be there and didn't really give a shit about anyone learning anything. Moreover, I think being really good at something makes it harder to teach, not easier. TAs are usually much better teachers. After all, they can still remember what it was like to not understand the material. Some of the best teachers I've had were at a community college, actually. I ended up taking community college classes for a couple years instead of going to high school and had a much better experience than at the "real" college I attended when I was older. That could have been a function of age though (by the time I went to a real college I was much more interested in girls and partying than learning anything).