I was asked to share some of the pedagogical innovations from two books I recommended once during a talk: Pedagogical Patterns and Training from the Back of the Room. In this post I will focus on Pedagogical Patterns, and leave Training from the Back of the Room for my next post. I will provide an overview of the book and share the insights that I have put in practice. I hope you will be tempted to read them and apply some of these ideas.
Pedagogical Patterns, Advice for Educators, is a collection edited by Joe Bergin with the help of a board of editors, including Jutta Eckstein and Helen Sharp, and the result of the collaborative work of many authors. The book is applicable beyond software engineering, but most of the examples deal with computer software issues. One of the things that resonated with me the most while reading this book is the loving warmth that the writer/teacher’s voice conveys for the work of teaching, love of both students and the experience of teaching itself.
The book is organised as a pattern catalog, following the Alexandrian format, and also grouped according to their main theme (active learning, feedback, experiential learning, different perspectives). Here are some of the patterns that have impacted me the most:
* Abstraction Gravity — Fron High to Low: Introduce concepts that require understanding on two levels of abstraction at the higher level of abstraction and then at the lower level. We apply this pattern in several forms in our first programming course at UNTREF. First, we apply it in the context of Meyer’s Inverted Curriculum, so that we focus first on understanding and using objects, and then we move on to implementing them. Also, we go from a very abstract use of Java objects using a dynamic interpreter to a more static compiled environment as the course progresses. Some of the issues in this approach are making sure that the link between the two abstraction levels is clear, and that more than one example is described.
* Active Student: Keep students active and engaged in and outside the classroom to make it more likely that they will learn. This means shifting some activities from listening and reading to speaking, writing, solving problems and interacting. The Different Approaches related pattern promotes organising activities with varied focus among different sensory modalities: visual, auditory and kinesthesia, that cater to different types of people. We find that active students are more likely to participate during the course, and that is why we make sure that during the first and second classes students are actively engaged physically and mentally (we go out of the classroom, separate in “tribes” throughout the classroom, and solve minor puzzles).
* Early Warning: Provide early feedback on students falling behind or not having a clear understanding of issues that might impact them when future activities need to build on previous knowledge. After the first few weeks of our programming course, we start working on exercises. We apply this pattern by explicitly marking the expected rhythm of progress on the exercises by publicly stating which exercise workbook corresponds to that week. For this to actually have impact, we make visible how many students have solved a given amount of exercises on the current workbook. In order to do this. we ask students to raise their hand when we say out loud the number of exercises from the current workbook they have solved up to that point. We count hands for 0, 1, 2, etc. up to the number of exercises in that workbook. This not only marks which one is the current workbook that they should be working on, but provides gentle peer pressure on students when they see each other’s progress. We have measured noticeable improvement in the amount of exercises performed on the current guide as the course progresses.
The core tenets I see behind these patterns are a caring look on students and an effort to keep then connected to the learning experience. These are only a few examples of the patterns you will find in the book and how you can apply them.
I would love to hear your comments on your own experiences and how these ideas resonate with you.
