A better way to teach technical skills to a group

Interesting. I've had exactly the reactions she talks of, and have tried all the previous methods she mentions to get students to ask questions, and nothing has worked well. I will be trying this next term, hopefully it will do the trick, as there is always someone who refuses to ask questions, but will ask a neighbour instead.

I teach data journalism to a class of ~20 students with no teaching assistants and it sounds like my curriculum has some overlap with the author's. I spend the first few classes focused on spreadsheets -- including formulas and pivot tables.

After that, I go full on into SQL. This was initially motivated by the fact that SQL is a pretty important skill, and it is one of the most succinct ways to describe the concept of computationally joining two datasets to find interesting insights...which is basically the core of journalism (e.g. a list of names of business owners and a list of names of political campaign contributors)...but I've found it's a great way to teach computing in general. For most of these students who have never programmed, SQL is the first time that they've had to tell a computer exactly what they want. For example, I used to think it was a pain to have to specify every column you want to see with a `SELECT` statement...but this is in perfect contrast with how Excel works. The latter by default shows everything, and this has implications with not just computer performance and dataset size limitations, but in data filtering...that is, you're forced to see all the data columns at once, even if it's far too much to consume. With SQL, it's about knowing exactly what you want to see and telling the computer to do it exactly the way you want.

On the teaching side, this makes things far easier for me. I no longer have to teach a GUI, which is a long series of me saying "Click here...unless you're on PC/on version 2011X/have a window size less than 1024px wide" and writing tedious guides of screenshots. With SQL, I just write SQL. And the exercises can be stated in plain English.

For the exams, I basically made them write out a bunch of queries on real-world datasets which I described in plain English...I gave them the expected results, and so they had to write the queries that got the answers. Very easy to grade and very easy to give them help on (they were take home exams):

Baby name data: http://2015.padjo.org/assignments/midterm-babysteps-sql/

Medicare data: http://2015.padjo.org/assignments/midterm-wsj-medicare-walkt...

And to comment on the author's experience with the "stereotype threat", in which students of traditionally minority groups hesitate to speak up because they feel they are being judged by that group, e.g. xkcd #385 http://xkcd.com/385/...this is definitely a phenomenon. Last year I had a nearly all female class and they had no problems at all speaking up/out at me. In elective programming classes with more males, they generally were more reserved.

At work there's often new tools and processes being built and used and I've been noticing that many of my co-workers struggle to figure out the new stuff. Its frustrating to have them go back to old ways when we're in a time crunch too, since it means that new tool isn't taking shape. I've long abandoned the "brown-bag meeting" as a way to share with my peers, because it never seems to work. What's been much more effective has been one-on-one time with others, when I can carve it out.

Obviously this isn't very scalable to a larger group though. I'm depending on the grassroots effect to take hold at some point and for others to spread that knowledge. Its effective, but not as quickly as I'd like. I may have to try some sort of workshop style like this in the future to get us to the point faster.

Those baby name questions are pretty neat! Thanks for sharing this.