Round 10: Introductions and Concept Maps

Jun 13, 2014 • Greg Wilson

Group 10 had its inaugural online meeting this week — almost 40 people joined us to take a look at what we’ll be covering in the next 12-14 weeks. As a rough outline, we will be covering:

  • Introductions: novice vs. competent practitioner vs. expert
  • Concept maps as a design and communication tool
  • Formative vs. summative assessment and reverse instructional design
  • Five minutes of fame
  • Motivation and demotivation
  • Collaborative lesson development
  • Showtime

For Our Next Meeting (Wednesday, June 25)

  1. Pick a topic that you think you could teach novices in 5-10 minutes.
    • Related to computing, but doesn’t have to be programming: how to test a GUI or how to sort values in Excel would be fine.
  2. Draw a concept map for that topic.
    • Bubbles for ideas, labelled links to show how those ideas are connected.
    • Hand-drawn/low-fidelity so that you can iterate faster, and so that feedback will be more honest.
    • Here are some slides by James Neill, and some examples from previous trainees.
    • Post a picture of your concept map to the blog by Wednesday, June 18.
    • Then comment on at least half a dozen other people’s concept maps before Wednesday, June 25.
    • Because one of the goals of the exercise is to get comfortable giving and receiving feedback on teaching and teaching materials.
  3. Please also read the first two chapters of How Learning Works.

Notes

  • Educational psych — how brains learn
    • Doesn’t limit teaching methods, many teaching options.
    • individual-based educational psychology (will be our focus)
  • Instructional design — effectiveness of teaching techniques
    • Example: whole language vs phonics (top down vs. bottom up)
      • (phonics has the advantage of giving rewards along the way)
      • Statistically neither is better. The most important factor was teacher enthusiasm
    • which one is better? depends on the enthusiasm of the teacher
  • 3 “stages of knowledge”:
    • novice:they don’t know what they don’t know, they try to fit partial knowledge into different (existing), wrong “boxes” (incorrect mental model), end up having misconceptions —> more information, greater confusion
    • Important to teach a correct mental model
    • Need to build a concept structure to hold new knowledge
      • asking questions based on preexisting mental categories; the question itself doesn’t really make sense
      • example teach only 15 commands in the first class (in 3 hours)
    • authentic task
      • bait and switch ( training on topics that are relevant) e.g. loading a dataset and finding an error in an actual typical dataset
    • Key approach: minimize knowledge presented
    • most important thing with teaching a novice is giving them the appropriate working structural/mental model
    • teach key concepts, then fill in details
      • Problem: people only interested in achieving ‘concrete task’
    • competent practitioner
      • hours logged not = to expert
      • connections among facts distinguish them from experts, not knowledge
    • expert
      • density of connectionsbetween facts they know
      • do and ponder
      • is most probably a bad teacher
      • Experts can shift between different paradigms easily
        • Reflective practice (cycle of “do” and “ponder”):Can critique own work (feedback loop)
          • stage 1: get feedback
          • stage 2: give feedback
          • stage 3: give yourself feedback
          • ‘bootstrapping’ that leads to expertise
            • e.g. code review; peer ‘mentoring’
  • Concept map (appendix a or b in text) — which ideas are related to which other ideas?
    • vs. notes — don’t pre-commit to specific ordering, connects ideas
    • A good teacher will explicitly connect new concepts to existing concepts / skills
    • More connected facts — more likely they will be remembered
    • Not just useful in lesson prep — can also be helpful to write it up on the whiteboard in a lesson to reinforce what you’re describing
    • points notes implicitly impose an order
  • Homework: 5-10 min presentation about technical task (more info in a blog post)
    • hand draw a concept map and post to blog by Wednesday next week (June 18), then comment on at least half a dozen others
    • read two first chapters of “How learning works” before next meeting
    • Advantages of drawing a ‘rough’ prototype: More likely to get honest feedback (if polished, harder to critique)
  • Advantages of reflective practice:
    • Bootstrap expertise
    • Build community
  • Working memory — fast but limited
    • ~7 ideas can be held at the same time (e.g. phone number length)
    • Teaching (novices) broken into 5-10 minute blocks with few ideas that are then reinforced.

10:00 Eastern

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