Pedagogy Recommendations🔗

1 Key Advice🔗

I think the single most thing important I can say is this: Every time you are inclined to use the word “teach”, replace it with “learn”. That is, instead of saying, “I teach”, say “They learn”. It’s very easy to determine what you teach; you can just fill slides with text and claim to have taught. Shift your focus to determining how you know whether they learned what you claim to have taught (or indeed anything at all!). That is much harder, but that is also the real objective of any educator.

2 Readings🔗

3 Neuromyths🔗

Education is replete with “neuromyths”. One of the most pervasive is that of “learning styles” (when I said “visuals” above, did you think, “Aha, that should appeal to visual learners!”?). Just type “learning styles debunked” into your favorite search engine and you’ll find dozens of articles saying so, yet the idea refuses to go away. For a very sober, cautious summary of the (lack of) research evidence for this idea, see this excellent review paper.

4 Classroom Tips🔗

Over the years I’ve adopted several classroom techniques that appear to have been useful to my students. In what follows I will refer to the educator as “you”, on the assumption you’re reading this in the hope of getting new ideas. Anyone is welcome to read this, but the person with the power to make a change is you!

To start out, I’ll make a provocative statement. Most educators think a great idea is to ask a question and get an answer or two, and when asked to teach “actively”, this is what they do. I claim this is a terrible idea. Read on to understand why and what you can do about it.

Problem: Coming to class and just staring at you without any idea how to answer your questions is a discouraging experience. Also, it creates a power dynamic of you always being in charge.

Solution: Remove the isolation factor. Also, reduce the amount of time you’re in charge.

Approach: This is a variation of think-pair-share [REF]. Ask a question, and give them time to talk it over. This has several unexpected benefits:

- Whether or not you (can) walk around the room, you get some sense of what students are saying. This will help you realize if they have some misconceptions, but even more importantly, it will help you realize if you didn’t make the question clear enough! If a lot of them are talking about the “wrong thing”…it’s probably not them, and you should bring the class back together to clarify.

- Just by listening to the conversation, you can tell when they’ve had enough time. Once they’re done (enough), the conversation will often drift off-topic. Of course, you don’t have (and can’t afford) to let every conversation get to completion. Again, keep listening for the temperature of the room.

Detail: To make the social aspect work, start every class by asking students to introduce themselves to their neighbor. Do this at the start of every class for a while until the class settles into a pattern. (Why do it even if they’re sitting by the same person as yesterday? Because it’s embarrassing to admit that you’ve forgotten the other person’s name. Being told to introduce yourself again absolves the other person of that tension at the very outset.)}

Problem: That one student who dominates q&a. Note that just getting the room as a whole to discuss is already an improvement, because everyone has had a chance to participate. But there is also a bit of tension in a classroom when you ask a question: who’s going to relieve the class of the pressure? If there’s a “safe hand” at the front, then other students no longer feel the need to participate, and indeed, over time, don’t.

Solution: Limit the number of times a student can answer a question on a given day.

Approach: I got this idea from [REF]. My rule is that when you raise your hand to answer a question, you have to raise as many fingers as the number of questions you have already answered that class.You can ask as many questions as you want, though! Therefore, the first time a student raises their hand on a given day, it looks like a fist.

My rule is that I prioritize the lower number of fingers. It’s really that simple. But I also say that raising one finger is fine, but raising two is really pushing it: it means you want to give an answer for the third time that class. In that case, I say, I really will be judging you; you better have something really interesting to say. (But that’s also why you can: maybe you do have something really interesting to say, and we’d all benefit from hearing it! It doesn’t even have to be right; an interesting wrong response is also very educational for everyone.)

This also creates some vocabulary for the class. “Can I see more fists?”, “Hmm, I see too many ones.”, etc. all become natural things to say and are automatically understood. But it also forces the power to be spread across more students. That small group of students can no longer hog the class.

Problem:

Class becomes a game of “Guess what I’m thinking of”; guess correctly and you get rewarded, guess incorrectly and you openly get told that. That sounds horrifying, right? But you probably do that without realizing it.

See, this is the difficulty with asking a question and taking answers until you get the right one. Very quickly, students figure out the game. This then has two adverse consequences: students who aren’t confident will never speak up, and those who know the answer (or think they do) will jump to tell you, and the whole classroom atmosphere goes south.

Solution:

Don’t take just one answer; take all the answers. Take answers until you’ve gone on too long or the hands have stopped being raised.

Try to stay as unreactive as possible when you get an answer. Treat them as interesting, not as correct or wrong. The moment you start passing judgment, you’ve reverted to the game. (The two exceptions I make are: (a) if the answer is completely off, I might nudge the class back on track; (b) if the answer is especially interesting, like something I have rarely heard someone point out, only then will I give the student a bit of a pat on the back.)

Instead, take all the answers and “summarize” them back to the class. Usually, I find that I got a bunch of partially correct answers, some totally correct ones, and some wrong ones. But by putting them all into the cement mixer of my summary, they lose their individual nature. Each student can decide for themselves how correct they were, and the class still gets the right answer in my words, which have probably been thought through more carefully than most student answers.

An added advantage to this mechanism is that the rest of the class won’t know the right answer until the end. Therefore, they need to stay engaged and reflect on every answer as it comes in, because I’m not doing it for them. This may also inspire new answers! That’s the best case, because it suggests students are actively formulating and testing hypotheses and understanding.

Problem:

It’s useful to get the temperature of the room periodically. It also healthy to force them to commit to an answer, even if it’s the wrong answer: I learned this from Mark Guzdial, who was channeling [CITE].

However, the usual raising-hands voting has two problems. First, everyone can see all the people around and in front of them, and will know if they voted incorrectly. That will heighten any self-consciousness or lack of belonging that students feel. So you want them to be able to vote without revealing too much.

Easy! Use a clicker or some other electronic device. These days there are clicker apps that run on your phone or laptop, even!

Reader, you have so lost the plot here. Electronic devices are pits of distraction. You want to do everything you can in class to keep your students from returning to them. The dumbest thing you can do is to have them open their devices on your order.

And here’s the second problem with either raise-hands or electronic voting: it isn’t social, it isn’t fun.

Solution:

I got this idea from Biella Coleman, who pointed out that this is how the IETF works. You vote by humming.

This essentially addresses the above issues:

- No electronics involved.

- You can vote fairly confidentially.

- It’s fun! People want to make noise! It keeps them awake, and it makes them feel alive.

- Very subtly: The volume of a hum is a continuous variable. If a student feels particularly strongly about something, they can hum loudly. It’ll happen, and when it does, if you treat it in good humor (as you should), everyone will get a good laugh out of it, and it’ll encourage a certain kind of great lawlessness.

- See, the discrete counts never really mattered that much (unless you were doing a concept inventory [CITE], but that’s a different proposition). Don’t fall for the trap of false precision. It doesn’t matter whether the vote was 32 for and 31 against or vice versa. Humming keeps the internet going, because the people who invented it had some deep intuitions about humans and decision-making. Take advantage of their intuitions.

Problem:

You want to know whether people understand a thing. you ask “does everyone understand?” Nobody says no, but it’s not clear everyone does.

The difficulty here is that you’ve become like a security alert. You’re asking a useless, almost impossible, question. It may cover your ass, but it doesn’t produce useful, actionable information.

Start by asking the negative question: people are more likely to express non-understanding than understanding. Also, don’t frame it as a binary: ask what specific thing they don’t understand. But actually, don’t do any of this! You know what all the pieces are; they don’t. So break it down into specific things you are hoping they know. And just ask concrete questions about the specific pieces. Their responses will not only give you the same information, it will also help you understand what specifically they haven’t understood.

The key is to do this as you go along. Think of student understanding as a potential random walk. However, your class plan isn’t that at all: you have a very specific place you’re trying to get to and a small set of routes you think is the best way to get there. Therefore, at every point you want to try to consolidate the walk by curbing the randomness. Asking intermediate questions and getting feedback helps you correct confusions before they compound. And then you never need to ask the big, global question.

* How much time does all this take?