Posts tagged teaching
Teaching Themes
Jan 15th
As I have mentioned previously I have been working on the curriculum I will be teaching to the kids on the program. It has been really challenging to sit down and work through all the topics that need to be covered and how to cover them in an engaging way. What is interesting is that as I did this I lost sight of what I was originally thinking would be a good option and after numerous attempts at writing down how it is going to work I have come full circle back to my original thinking. Slightly frustrating given the amount of time I put into this, but at least now I have explored other options and found them wanting.
All I have as a reference point is how I learnt so I am drawing a lot from that. When I started programing it was purely out of necessity. I needed to build an e-commerce website for a venture I was planning. Turned out that I wasn’t equipped to get the idea off the ground. Through that process though I learnt a heck of a lot, and it was what really got me started in my programming career. What I was building was going to enable me to revolutionise the way goods were sold on-line and make me a lot of money and that gave me a real sense of purpose.
So getting back to how I am going to teach. After the sandbox (which has also seen some exciting developments) kids will go into this teaching phase. At the start we will talk about a project that they may want to do. Something interesting and relevant to them. Social networks are hot topics these days so maybe something along those lines – if the kids are really creative maybe we will even get a new concept out of them! In the first session we will work through some of these ideas and turn what they want to build into a series of stories that, well, tell the story of how it will work. Subsequent sessions will work through the process of how to build it. At each step a new concept will be introduced that they must grasp. These are some of the fundamental elements of programming and understanding these concepts will, I believe, set them up to be able to take on almost any programming task they will encounter in a normal business environment.
Curriculum Theory
Jan 8th
I have been working on writing a curriculum for the sand box and teaching programs I plan on running. As I have never written a curriculum before I have been on a steep learning curve! I have been reading ‘Curriculum theory and practice’, and have found it really useful. The author presents four options as to what it a curriculum could be and leaves it somewhat up to the reader to decide the most appropriate meaning.
From reading this I find that I most identify with the ideas of curriculum put forward by Lawrence Stenhouse:
‘A curriculum is an attempt to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal in such a form that it is open to critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation into practice’ – Lawrence Stenhouse (1975)
One of the key ideas that Stenhouse puts forth is that individuals are not merely present in the process but that they should have a voice in the way that the process is implemented. This is important because the process is only a guide that is being worked out. It will not necessarily be perfect or the right thing for all the participants, therefore they must be able to provide feedback on how things are run so as to provide them with the most value – after all they are the reason for even having the curriculum in the first place!
Classic methods of teaching often fail people because they do not work well with the way that they learn. I know this because the way I was taught had little alignment with the way that I learn, I therefore had little desire to apply myself and subsequently dropped out. I was lucky that my desire to succeed and accomplish things drove me to learn skills on my own time and in my own way. I am hoping that my experience with this, and the understanding of how I learn, will enable me to effectively pass that knowledge onto others. My goal is that they will catch a passion for learning that inspires them to pursue knowledge their own way, on their own terms.
Which brings me back to the last part of the quote from Stenhouse:
‘... and capable of effective translation into practice’.
This is the key – translating the theory into practice. I have a lot of work to do to figure out how to do this and it is what I will be working through over the next few years.
Part of the plan
Dec 20th
I have spent some time making up plans for this business I want to start. Here is the run down.
Get a bunch of kids who have no bearing in life and have had trouble with school. Spend a couple of hrs a day with them, teaching them the basics of software development. I am preparing some short modules that I hope will be fun and they can take and use to get started with the learning process. I call this ‘the sandbox’. It is a time to play around, dabble with some technology and with a bit of luck, and encouragement, catch a bit of the passion that comes with it.
I think the sandbox time will last a few weeks. The people who have got some motivation and are interested will be welcomed back to continue learning with a more in-depth teaching class, but again just a couple of hrs a day. This will consist of more advanced concepts along with exercises to complete and material that encourages them to look for their own answers and develop their own solutions to problems
At the moment I am working on a curriculium for how this will work. The more advanced part of it I think I know what I am doing – that sounds wrong I know. But getting people interested, passionate and wanting to learn? I am not sure how exactly to go about that! But it should be fun to give it a go 
