Teach Like You Don't Know | Hacker News Reader

Teach Like You Don't Know

desmondrawls.com

37 pointsdizzydezzy6 comments

I think there's a lot more to pedagogy than you're delving into here. It sounds to me like your teachers in question are largely lecturing with a bit of question. There's all kinds of other things such as "differentiated learning" (how do you teach a visual learner vs a kinesthetic learner), "inquiry-based learning", etc.

I think the larger issue is that many of those who teach programming (specifically) have not had any formal training in teaching.

I thought differentiated learning was starting to go out of style in pedagogy. The last I heard is that all (self-identified) types actually learn all three ways roughly the same speed, but that combining the three methods (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) was the key.

(Source: my Teaching English as a Foreign Language class a year and a half ago.)

That said, I'd agree with you that learning a bit about pedagogy is important. I'd argue that learning to program combines elements of natural language learning (grammar, syntax, vocabulary) and mathematics.

Natural language learning has plenty of resources on how we learn -- there's an entire field on second language acquisition theory. Perhaps it's time to start leveraging this foundation.

I think the different sensory methods are somewhat waning these days, but the instruct / assess parts (in combination with something like Bloom's taxonomy) i think are used in combination with many other tools / methods these days.

In short, I don't think anybody is going 100% differentiated. I think it's just another tool in the tool box.

Additionally, there is the concept of Andragogy[0] which deals with how to teach adults (or more generally, self-directed learning as compared to 'taught' learning). Which could apply more to the audience who are taking a bootcamp or accelerated course.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andragogy

> "Not even good teachers, however, can see the plausible misinterpretations before they happen."

Sure, they can. In my mind that's close to the definition of an expert teacher - experience and knowledge of misinterpretations is a necessary part of effective teaching.

This doesn't mean it's a good idea to directly bring up the misinterpretations before they happen - it's educationally more important to focus on the correct interpretation (in such a way that misinterpretations are avoided as much as possible).

(By the way, all misinterpretations are plausible - otherwise the student wouldn't be considering it)

The thing is that people have different ways of learning, some are good with reading and understanding, others need hands-on and others like to hear it. The bad part is that our education system is currently tailored to an specific type of learner. Reminds me of the quote “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So if you want to be a good teacher you have to understand that students are different, have different learning mechanism, different motivations and a preference over a certain type of thinking.

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