A lot of people have been pointing me to this article on using blogs in writing classes instead of term papers. For an extensive answer, see my dissertation from 2007. Just sayin’. But yeah, communication forms change. That doesn’t mean we do away with argument and evidence and critical thinking. I mean, we used to give speeches (without teleprompters) all the time. We spoke poems. Now we have radio, tv, print articles, books, web sites, youtube, all kinds of ways of conveying an argument. We should teach all those.
Jackie and I have been having a bit of back and forth via our blogs and Twitter about keeping up with our resolutions. She writes:
Newsflash: resolutions also often involve stopping doing things that are easy, and replacing with things that are hard.
Yep, yep, yep. Decluttering has been hard but I’ve managed to keep it up so far. The 15-minute limit helps. And I have missed a couple of days–yesterday, for one–but I’ve just kept it up, imagining the end goal of a house filled with less stuff that I don’t like or don’t need and more stuff that I enjoy and use. The thought of one day walking into my house and having it feel peaceful rather than crowded is keeping me going.
But walking . . . not so much. One, it’s cold, and two, well, I don’t know what two is. I just don’t want to do it. Exercise is hard for me. I can find forty million reasons I don’t like it and only one reason I do. The one reason is that I know I’d look and feel better if I did it. But unlike the thought of a clean house, that’s not enough to motivate me. With the house, I feel somewhat sure that I will achieve that goal, if not completely, at least enough to feel like I accomplished something. With my body, I just don’t trust that adding a small bit of exercise is going to help. And did I mention I find it hard?
This whole idea got me to thinking about my students, specifically my middle school students. Some of them give up when things get hard. When it takes effort for them to wrap their head around something, they will often give up. I wrote a little about this before. Honestly, I know how they feel. I mean, there are things I can’t motivate myself to do. And I’ve been frustrated by many things in the past. As an adult, when I’m learning new things, I know that perseverance usually pays off eventually. But even as an adult, I know that it’s more fun to watch tv than walk, even if it’s only for a little while.
So I’m struggling to figure out ways to motivate my students. Maybe a time-limit thing. Maybe saying, “Okay, working on the robotic arm is hard, but work on it for x minutes and then take a break.” I don’t know. All I know is that some students just can’t find the fire in their bellies to forge ahead and I’m not entirely sure how to ignite it. If I figure it out, maybe it will help me as well.
A discussion arose on an email list about teaching/using Google docs vs. Microsoft Word. That discussion actually made it to Google+. A teacher posted reasons why he teaches Google docs, the most important of which is about teaching concepts because applications change. The conversation on Google+ is interesting and one I participate in at nearly every parent night. The key point that comes up is that Office is used in the “business world” and won’t kids who use Google docs be at a disadvantage. I’m in a slightly different situation in that all of our students are going to college. I hardly think a lack of hard experience or a specific course in Word or the Office suite is going to keep them from a good job. And using Word is not rocket science. And, I always talk about and point out how similar docs is to Word.
Ten years ago, Google docs did not exist. My students won’t be going on the job market for about ten years. Who knows what will be around, what even Word will look like. When I learned these things, you had to actually type in tags/codes to format documents. Things have changed a lot, and I’ve adapted quite well, thank you. So I teach kids to adapt. I don’t focus on specifics of where functions are. I encourage them to find it. And I teach HTML and CSS and talk about how word processing used to be like that. And now, of course, you can make a web site (like this one) without even knowing those codes. I still think it’s important to understand that there is code underneath all these programs, and that’s what I really try to emphasize in my classes, not how to italicize.
I’ve shifted my curriculum away from applications and toward Computer Science concepts as much as possible. While there may be a group of students who would benefit from putting “proficient at Microsoft Word” on their resume, I’m guessing that “proficient at HTML/CSS” with an actual web site to show for it is going to put them a little more ahead.
I’m participating in a P2PU course that examines teaching programming to “free-range” students vs. teaching programming in more formal settings. I’ve long been fascinated by teaching methods, and, of course, focused on teaching in my dissertation. But back in those days, technology and programming were in support of another subject rather than a subject unto themselves. However, some of the same methods apply across subjects. We were asked to read a post by Greg Wilson that reflects on the use (or not) of research-based methods within an informal online context. The source of the research-based methods is an IES report that gives the following recommendations:
- Space learning over time. Arrange to review key elements of course content after a delay of several weeks to several months after initial presentation. (moderate)
- Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises.Have students alternate between reading already worked solutions and trying to solve problems on their own. (moderate)
- Combine graphics with verbal descriptions. Combine graphical presentations (e.g., graphs, figures) that illustrate key processes and procedures with verbal descriptions. (moderate)
- Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts. Connect and integrate abstract representations of a concept with concrete representations of the same concept. (moderate)
- Use quizzing to promote learning.
- Use pre-questions to introduce a new topic. (minimal)
- Use quizzes to re-expose students to key content (strong)
- Help students allocate study time efficiently.
- Teach students how to use delayed judgments of learning to identify content that needs further study. (minimal)
- Use tests and quizzes to identify content that needs to be learned (minimal)
- Ask deep explanatory questions. Use instructional prompts that encourage students to pose and answer “deep-level” questions on course material. These questions enable students to respond with explanations and supports deep understanding of taught material. (strong)
Greg finds that meeting these recommendations within the online context is fairly difficult, given that there’s no clear way to assess student knowledge. Others, in comments, and elsewhere on the web, have suggested that tools exist to provide some of that capability, but whether that would work with “free-range” students is unknown. When learning is voluntary, how to you coerce students into doing things that you know would help them learn but which might turn them off? No idea.
So here’s my assessment of my own teaching and a little about my own learning, which I’ve done on my own for years.
1. Spread learning out over time. I try to do this in my classes. We basically are covering 3-4 main concepts, which were introduced within the first few weeks. I keep returning to things I said 6 weeks ago, trying to remind students of the basics. I could certainly do more assessments that aren’t the actual writing of programs. As it is, they will be assessed on the midterm and though they’ve been using these concepts in their programs, it’s a different thing to have to define them or otherwise discuss them. So, I think I do this informally, but perhaps students could benefit from a more formalized way of doing this.
Online/free-range students could easily be required to return to older material. I’ve never experienced this myself, though I’ve done it myself, redoing exercises and “relearning” concepts that I’ve already “learned”. It helps to re-do these things.
2. Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises. I probably don’t do this enough. There are examples in our book and we go over them and/or work through them together. I also code up my own examples and show them in class. I definitely think I need to do more with this as I think students would get a better sense of how to break down a problem. At the very least, I think we should go through early worked examples more slowly. I see some potential for students to present to the class, going through an example for the class. This could be done in class or online via a blog or class forum. I might try that.
As a student myself, I know I skim these too quickly and then when I’m trying to do similar problems, I don’t remember anything about how the problem was done.
3. Combine graphics with verbal descriptions. Mostly, I put a program up on the projector and then I talk students through it, so I guess I’m doing something okay. Other than programs, though, I don’t use many other graphics. I guess I could use flow charts or something.
I’ve never gotten verbal descriptions as a student myself. I’ve either learned from books or online and none of the online courses I’ve taken in programming have ever had lectures or audio. It’s all been reading about concepts, looking at sample programs, and then writing them yourself.
4. Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts. Usually, we define a concept abstractly and then apply it. According to the research, students learning in this way should be able to apply the concept in different contexts. I’m not seeing that happen consistently. So perhaps I need to think about different ways to present concepts. Some CS Unplugged materials might help concretize some of what we’re doing. Perhaps the issue is that we’re too abstract. Definitely something to think about.
5. Use quizzing to promote learning. As I said above, I use no quizzes. I think it would be worthwhile to incorporate more. We do reading for the class, and I think quizzing at that point would be good as well as quizzing later to reinforce concepts would also be good.
6. Help students allocate study time efficiently. I’ve done this a little. When I return projects, I go over the concepts that people struggled with, in the hopes that students will go back over those concepts.
7. Ask deep explanatory questions. Coming from a humanities background, I think I do pretty well on this one. In class, I often ask students to explain what they’re doing and/or I ask them how they might solve something. For example, we were talking about how the cute little keepon robot works, and I got them thinking about how the very simple things they were doing right now could be expanded in that application. It was an aha moment for them.
Greg suggests the possibility of crowdsourcing/peer assessment. I’ve seen that work in my classes. And I’ve contributed to that in an online context. I think it’s about creating an environment where that’s encouraged. In formal settings, you can require it. Informally, I think it takes a moderator/teacher to model a peer-learning environment.
In general, keeping the research in mind as you plan and teach a course is probably a good idea, but I’m not sure I could incorporate all of these into my course. And I’m curious about how to meet these recommendations in project-based learning, which is my primary way of teaching.
Chuck Tryon is revamping his Technology in the Language Arts course and I left a long comment on his blog about what we do. Here’s a slightly more organized and extended version of that:
- Google Apps for Education: we have this installed and teachers have taken advantage of it in many ways
- Google Docs: Teachers have used this for collaborative projects as well as suggested it for an easy way to go from school to home. There’s no emailing a paper, saving it to a flash drive, and ultimately having it get lost. Teachers have also used the presentation tool, and, to a lesser extent, the spreadsheets, though I have students use them to create surveys.
- Sites: I teach students to make a website using Google sites in 6th grade. This year, the 8th grade social studies classes created online newspapers for states just after the Revolution.
- Blogger: I have one teacher using this and another considering it. An art history teacher is posting images and having students comment on it, discussing the art work’s attributes.
- Groups: This is being used by clubs and classes as a way to get out documents and announcements.
- Video/YouTube: always popular, and a few teachers use it to post student work
- Video: speaking of video, we use it a lot. Using Flip video cameras, students create videos about literature and/or history as well as personal topics. Often they incorporate photos. We have access to both Windows Movie maker and iMovie. Students often use what they have access to at home, though our biggest issue is going back and forth between home and school to work on these projects.
- Animation: related to video, we’ve used GoAnimate and DoInk for animation. GoAnimate is better for people-based animations while DoInk is better for animating things like physics or biology, perhaps even math. You can draw whatever you want in DoInk while GoAnimate provides characters.
- Presentations: I mentioned Google’s presentation tool, which is really an online version of PowerPoint, which many students still use. But we use Prezi an awful lot. Students like it a lot more and teachers use it to teach structure–of poems and stories, but also of student work–which can be illustrated better via Prezi. A story is not always linear like PowerPoint.
- Audio: I teach podcasts in 7th grade and a colleague of mine runs an after-school program that uses podcasts. Audio in the form of narration often gets incorporated into video projects and/or presentations.
- Other tools. I teach Scratch and it’s been used a couple of times in other classes, and I have a teacher who’s doing a project in a couple of weeks that has students create an animation using Scratch followed by an interactive quiz. We also have teachers considering things like Twitter (having a historical figure “tweet” the events of his/her life). Teachers also use print-based things like newsletters and brochures created with Publisher or comic strips for languages. And we’re exploring the use of iPads and other mobile devices, including cell phones. Things are always changing and we’re always trying to find ways to essentially teach both a concept within a discipline and the use of technology.
Today, as I was moving around the room during robotics club, checking in with each team, I had a moment where I realized I really liked what was happening. I still have reservations about robotics as a pathway to Computer Science, but there is so much the kids have gotten out of this. They no longer call screws and nuts “thingys”. They’re screws and nuts–and the tools to work with them are 3/64 or 5/32 allen wrenches not “thing-a-ma-bobs”. Lefty-loosy, righty tighty is no longer needed. We talk about L-pieces and C-channels. They sound like they know what they’re doing. Each team member (mostly) has a job to do and does it. They’re working together fairly well. They’re getting a lot out of this.
And just before that, I had a study hall where students chatted with me about their experience visiting upper school classes that day and how they’re looking forward to upper school. Two girls were chatting with each other about books and one said to the other, “I didn’t know you talked so much. I’ve never really heard you talk.” I smiled to myself, because I knew she talked and I knew she was interesting to talk to, and I was happy to see her classmates recognizing that.
And in homeroom, we talked about upper school, the upcoming holidays and speeches that they’re preparing. I really enjoyed hanging out with them.
And that’s what makes the long hours worth it. Because you hope you’re making a difference in these young people’s lives. And really, they’re making a difference in yours.
After my classes today, I started thinking about this issue, of how to encourage students to not just do the bare minimum, but to go beyond that and to do their very best on any given task. In theory, grades should do that, I guess, but I don’t think it always does, and in classes like my middle school ones, where I have a set of minimum standards, most kids get A’s pretty easily.
An example. My 6th graders are using Google Sites to create web sites. Over the last few weeks, we’ve gathered some of the artifacts, written paragraphs, even conducted surveys for graphs to include. We are now in the process of putting it all together into a cohesive web site. We have just a couple of class periods left, but it’s actually a fair amount of time. I had a couple of students say, halfway through today’s class, “I’m done.” Yes, they have most of the elements I asked for, but they only just have them. Meanwhile other students are exploring gadgets, and including multiple pages, and finding links and are clearly going to work up until the very last second. This isn’t the only class where this kind of thing happens. I’m trying to figure out how I can get the “early finishers” to appreciate that putting more effort into something and working during the alloted time (instead of playing a game) is a good idea.
I think this is related somewhat to something Mark Guzdial pointed out in his blog today about teaching students “grit.” He was referring to a NY Times article that explores the character traits of students who are successful. It turns out that it’s not the straight A students, always, who succeed:
the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence
For some reason, I think that the students in my classes who push themselves, and who explore areas beyond what I’ve explained are the ones who fall into this category. There’s something about their willingness to take risks, to mess up, and to learn from that in order to get their best work done. I don’t think all of my “early finishers” are necessarily lazy. They simply do what they’re told and no more. I’m pretty sure I remember doing that myself sometimes.
What I’m talking about is not the high-pressure, jump through all the hoops kind of process that many students participate in, but a kind of pride in their work, whether it gets an A or not. Because there are no grades in life, and I want my students (and my own kids, of course) to focus on doing their best not on some arbitrary grade.
I knew that Computer Science and logic were closely tied together, but I’ve been surprised by how difficult that logical thinking comes to my students. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have to say my writing background is perfectly suited to CS. Writing = Logical Thinking. When I started doing some programming several years ago, I struggled mostly with syntax, but once I switched to a language with a more logical syntax, a lot of the thought process of programming came naturally.
My students, though, are struggling a bit, at times. We’re working right now on just using functions, loops, variables and some simple calculations. We start using some boolean logic next class period. It takes them quite a bit just to wrap their heads around calling functions and using variables (instead of putting in actual numbers). Calling a function within a function totally blows their minds. I think the issue is a difference between concrete and abstract thinking (as well as logic). So, for example, they’ve been writing programs one line at a time in a “do this”, “do this”, and then “do this.” kind of fashion and not thinking, okay, I’m doing this 3 times, maybe I should use a loop. Or I’m having to calculate this by hand every time, why don’t I write a function I can reuse over and over again.
My plan for next class period is to take their existing programs and rewrite them to both take advantage of abstraction and to include some boolean logic. I’m just going to keep repeating and going over these things until it sinks in.
For Halloween, I wrote a little program to do this:
Not the most exciting thing, but all done with (gasp) math and programming.
One of the most fascinating things about running this robotics club is watching kids figure out how to work together. The mantra about 21st century learning is that cooperation and collaboration are at the top of the list, because things like cloud computing make it possible to do across time and space. But working together is a really hard, especially for girls who are smart and used to achieving individually. I’ve watched kids bickering, individuals doing all the work, individuals complaining that “no one is helping”, people wandering off from the group, and people getting frustrated. It’s all part of the process. I spend more time talking to kids about how to work together than I do talking to them about how to build a robot.
Some of them literally don’t know how to work as a team. I find this interesting, though not unexpected. They’re young; they’re not asked to do this very often. And they don’t actually see the end goal very clearly because they’ve never done this before. They’re all trying. So although I hear complaints and see bickering, those are their ways of trying, so I talk to them about better ways to communicate, how to delegate. I’ve seen kids make great strides. Students who were bickering a couple of weeks ago now delegate work to the rest of the team. And I find it kind of fun to try to come up with ways to help them work together.
I can’t emphasize enough how important I feel this skill is. In the “real world,” we all have to work with people we don’t like or don’t agree with. If we just worked with people we liked, we’d never accomplish anything. Am I perfect in this regard? No. But I work really hard at it, because I think it’s important in order to achieve things within an organization, even as an individual. Very little that I’ve done has been accomplished without some kind of help, directly or indirectly. I hope to teach my students this as well. We’re all in this together. Working together is how we are going to solve the problems we face.
- You’re never fully prepared sometimes. I spent the summer developing my course. And yet, the other day, after going over my plan, tweaking a few things, and adding others, I still didn’t feel prepared enough, and I still feel like, afterwards, the lesson could use some work.
- Once a week is not enough for my middle school technology classes.
- Prep and grading sometimes fall to the bottom of the priority list when you have other things to do. And I really hate that.
- I feel way more comfortable in the classroom than I did last year, especially when it comes to classroom management.
- I sat down at lunch today and said, “I love this place.” And I meant it. My colleagues are awesome.
- I’m running in-service day this Friday. It’s been a real pleasure organizing. People have stepped forward and really helped me out. And really, it’s run by the rest of the faculty who are leading workshops for the day.
- On the home front, I’m a little obsessed with Geeky Boy’s impending (in two years) entrance to college. He seems not just ambivalent, but downright uninterested. Sigh.
- I’ve signed up for an online CS course that covers some of the advanced stuff I haven’t really gotten into much. I’m looking forward to it, and I’m looking forward to taking some more CS-related courses in areas that I might teach–iOS programming, for example. Always something new in my field.
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