(2018-11-06) Chin Teaching Tech Together

Cedric Chin review Teaching Tech Together. This is a summary of a 🌳 tree book on teaching computer programming to beginners. This summary of Greg Wilson’s Teaching Tech Together is going to be a little different from the other book summaries I’ve done on Commonplace.

I’m going to focus solely on the section of the book that covers how humans learn, how knowledge is acquired, and what self-learners (auto-didacts) can do to learn better. This makes up chapters two to five of the book.

To say this book is a tour de force is an understatement

How do Humans Learn?

Teaching Tech Together contains an extremely concise, practical overview of the cognitive psychology and learning science literature

It begins with a summary of the differences between novices, competent practitioners and experts

Experts have mental models that include all the complexities and special cases that competent practitioners aren’t able to handle.

Wilson asserts that the way you teach novices is to help them construct the right mental models, so they have somewhere to put your facts.

why construct? Why not absorb, or learn?

Wilson uses the word ‘construct’ because he is most influenced by Seymour Papert’s work on knowledge acquisition. Papert’s claim is that humans learn by ‘construction’. (constructionism)

It helps explain why you can’t simply explain your intuition and hope that students understand you; it explains why you must generate lots of examples and explanations until it clicks

what is a mental model? Wilson defines a mental model as: … a simplified representation of the most important parts of some problem domain that is good enough to enable problem solving.

One important nuance of teaching is that it’s necessary to clear away broken mental models that are formed during the process of knowledge construction

one important way they do this is to use formative assessments (formative here means ‘to form’, or ‘to shape’ the learning) to diagnose mistaken mental models

Papert suggests that all of learning should be like this: that the education (schooling) system should be reformed to encourage facilitation, not recitation.

What are the difference between the mental models of novices, competent practitioners and experts?

Novice start out with no facts or wrong facts, and no relationships (or mistaken relationships) between facts.

When Wilson says the job of teaching is to provide a mental model to slot facts in, he means that you should aim to provide a basic skeleton of linkages.

Experts — like competent practitioners, have a mental model and know how to organise new facts as they experience them; the primary difference is the density of relationships in their mental models of the domain.

They can jump from a problem to solution without considering intermediate steps, because there is a direct link in their mind

Experts are better at diagnosis than competent practitioners. More linkages means that experts find it easier to reason backwards from symptoms to causes

expertise comes from how densely these facts are interconnected. And that interconnectedness comes from reflection and practice.

Concept Maps: This notion of ‘mental models as graphs’ aren’t just nice illustrations used to explain mental models. Wilson shows us that they’re also useful as teaching tools.

research done at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition that illustrates that any subset of knowledge may be turned into something called a concept map.

Concept maps are a form of externalised cognition — a thinking tool that makes thought processes and mental models visible so they can be compared, contrasted, and combined.

Teachers can draw concept maps on a white board during teaching to make the connections and linkages explicit.

Students can draw concept maps for teachers to check (as formative assessment).

note that concept maps are not mind maps

Working memory and 7±2

During learning, a student cannot load new items directly into long-term memory. Instead, all learners load new information into their short-term memory. This new information is then transferred to long-term memory later, when it has been rehearsed and has sat in short-term memory for a long enough time.

This also means that a single teaching session should hold only 7 ± 2 total concepts. Wilson notes that he draws a concept map for each lesson he’s about to teach; if he finds that the number of concepts in his map exceeds this number, he splits the lesson into multiple parts

How to become an expert

So what’s the upshot of all of this learning science? The short answer is: do deliberate practice.

to be effective, deliberate practice requires a clear performance goal and immediate, informative feedback.

Individual Learning Strategies

Wilson points us helpfully to The Learning Scientists, who have collected six of those strategies and summarised them in a set of downloadable posters.

1. Spaced Practice

Wilson suggests that individual learners make notes about things you’ve forgotten: that is, make a flash card for each fact that you couldn’t remember, or remembered incorrectly. Spaced repitition

2. Retrieval Practice

our brains fill up with junk, but nothing is ever truly forgotten; instead, we become unable to retrieve certain things

The classic approach to retrieval practice is, of course, flash cards

3. Interleaving — interleave study of different topics.

switching up the order makes studying more effective

because interleaving creates more links between different topics, which in turn increases retention and recall.

4. Elaboration

Explaining things to yourself as you go through them helps you understand and remember them. Wilson means this literally: really do go talk to yourself! (rubber-ducking)

Talking to yourself may seem like an odd way to study, but explicitly trained people in self-explanation, and yes, they outperformed those who hadn’t been trained.

5. Concrete Examples

A special type of elaboration is so effective that it warrants its own section: generating concrete examples.

Whenever you see an abstract statement or a general principle, try to provide one or more examples of its use

Wilson points us to the ADEPT method, which is a structured way of generating concrete examples: give an Analogy, draw a Diagram, present an Example, describe the idea in Plain language, and then give the Technical details.

6. Dual Coding

it helps to combine words and images when you are studying

The book is freely available online at this site, and you may download the ebooks for free at unglue.it. I highly recommend it.