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Comment by ironchef | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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