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Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

cacm.acm.org

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Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#21

Post by pjc50 »

redis_mlc wrote: post #6
wagslane wrote: post #3

This is particularly interesting to me as I've been building a CS education platform this year ( https://qvault.io ). My favorite bit was right at the end: > In computer science, we often have a model of teaching that is heavily focused on content matter knowledge—if you know your CS, you'll likely be a good teacher. But all our evidence about quality teaching says that that's wrong. There's a lot of knowledge involv…

Working in IT but having a commercial pilot license, it's bizarre how continuing education in IT is non-existent, yet mandatory in the aviation world - and IT people don't even know it. To teach in aviation in the US, you need a Chief Flight Instructor (CFI) rating, where you demonstrate to an examiner how to teach the various maneuvers. IT could learn a lot from regulated industries like aviation. https://en.wikiped…

Education in IT is so continuous that people don't recognize that it's happening. Every use of google counts.

You can either have a dynamic field or a mandatory curriculum. Once the curriculum is fixed, the field advances at the speed changes can be pushed into the curriculum, which is at best annually.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#22

Post by yellow_lead »

yarky wrote: post #11
leed25d wrote: post #9

When I was in college --names are elided to protect the guilty-- the school of education was a hot mess. There was a verbal meme around the campus that went something like this: those who can do those who cannot do teach those who cannot teach teach teachers.

I thought this was true until I learnt bjarne did some teaching.

My brother had him at A&M. Heard he was great.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#23

Post by tester34 »

klodolph wrote: post #10
redis_mlc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in IT but having a commercial pilot license, it's bizarre how continuing education in IT is non-existent, yet mandatory in the aviation world - and IT people don't even know it. To teach in aviation in the US, you need a Chief Flight Instructor (CFI) rating, where you demonstrate to an examiner how to teach the various maneuvers. IT could learn a lot from regulated industries like aviation. https://en.wikiped…

Anyone working in IT who doesn't continue to learn will likely be out of a job soon enough, but it's much less likely that anyone would be injured as a result.

Maybe not "IT" because IT includes printer toner replacing and stuff

but software engineers? definitely.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#25

Post by TuringTest »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #8
redis_mlc wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in IT but having a commercial pilot license, it's bizarre how continuing education in IT is non-existent, yet mandatory in the aviation world - and IT people don't even know it. To teach in aviation in the US, you need a Chief Flight Instructor (CFI) rating, where you demonstrate to an examiner how to teach the various maneuvers. IT could learn a lot from regulated industries like aviation. https://en.wikiped…

The analogy doesn’t really stack up, flying a plane is nothing like designing software or even managing software systems. Imagine if aviation had a few million kinds of planes to worry about where pilots were expected to modify their planes in flight, in might begin to resemble IT.

That's the reason why CS degrees teach core principles, not a collection of every possible platform and technology.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#26

Post by comprev »

leed25d wrote: post #9

When I was in college --names are elided to protect the guilty-- the school of education was a hot mess. There was a verbal meme around the campus that went something like this: those who can do those who cannot do teach those who cannot teach teach teachers.

Some years ago in the UK when teachers were leaving the profession in droves (stress, paperwork, and result of little actual teaching hours), one of the newspapers (The Guardian, I think) had a front page headline:

"Those who can, leave"

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#27

Post by nicoburns »

leed25d wrote: post #9

When I was in college --names are elided to protect the guilty-- the school of education was a hot mess. There was a verbal meme around the campus that went something like this: those who can do those who cannot do teach those who cannot teach teach teachers.

In my experience, those who teach teachers have been uniformly excellent, impressive people (teaching is hard!). Those who teach are quite varied depending on whether they actually wanted to teach or are just doing it as a fallback.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#28

Post by ntoll »

leed25d wrote: post #9

When I was in college --names are elided to protect the guilty-- the school of education was a hot mess. There was a verbal meme around the campus that went something like this: those who can do those who cannot do teach those who cannot teach teach teachers.

The ultimate source of this is Aristotle... the original is (from memory), something like this:

  Those who can, do; those who understand, teach.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#29

Post by the-smug-one »

Teaching the course content through lectures is overrated, in my opinion. I rarely went to lectures, but the ones I did go to I was there not because I felt a need to learn the course material but because I could in some way engage with the lecturer. One lecturer would talk about how things looked in "real papers", and how new algorithms would get published even though they lacked certain key invariants, and how stupid that was. Another one revealed key insights about the material which he had gained himself. This kind of knowledge exchange is far more important than the course material. You've got the chance to hear what and how some really smart people think about difficult subjects, that's amazing!

Learning is easy, you just sit down and you engage with the material in earnest. Whether that's course material or research papers doesn't matter too much. Figuring out other people's perspective without them explicitly telling you is way more difficult.

Re: Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better

#30

Post by klodolph »

tester34 wrote: post #23
klodolph wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone working in IT who doesn't continue to learn will likely be out of a job soon enough, but it's much less likely that anyone would be injured as a result.

Maybe not "IT" because IT includes printer toner replacing and stuff but software engineers? definitely.

"Definitely" what?

The parent comment called it IT, so I called it IT, but if use the more specific term "software engineer" I'm still going to say that most software engineering projects aren't likely to injure people when they fail.

Software engineering just doesn't seem to fall in the category of jobs where you'd want to mandate ongoing training... jobs like pilots or psychologists.

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