Really big skill spreads are tough to handle - my thinking these days is
to go hard down the peer instruction route; give lots of challenge
problems frequently, pace the lecture strongly based on people's
responses to MCQ, and give the strong students the challenge of
explaining their knowledge to the beginners.
One thing seems clear: no matter what single fixed lesson anyone comes
up with, it's going to hit only one part of the skills distribution;
capturing both tails of that wide bell curve requires something more
adaptive like peer instruction or project work. I'm eagerly looking for
more ideas on this topic!
On 2014-10-17 1:33 PM, Ivan Gonzalez wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've taught two workshops recently where we run into the same issue with the
shell lesson and I would like to know your thoughts about it. The shell lesson
is different from the other ones in the sense that you find a very broad
spectrum of student skills: a big portion of the class knows at least a handful
of commands, compared to say VC, where people either know the 10-ish basic
commands to work with a repo, or know nothing at all. (I'm talking all the time
of novice level.)
Both workshops had low attendance (~20), in one case because it was closed, in
the other we don't know yet why. With low attendance, it's easy to run in a
situation where half of the class is very bored during the first three or four
chapters of the shell lesson (I found that loops wake up most people again.)
This puts the whole group in the wrong mood, which sometimes is hard to recover
from. Pre-assesment surveys are not very helpful here, because you can't split
such small groups.
Do you have any ideas on how to fix this? I like the shell lesson and it had
worked well for all-novices groups, but I wonder if someone tried to adapt to
the situation described above by shortening the lesson up or maybe making a
more-than-novice-but-less-than-intermediate hybrid.
Best,
Ivan
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Bill Mills
Community Manager, Mozilla Science Lab
@billdoesphysics
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