On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 4:43 PM, Bill Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
MCQ? One thing I know I need to work on more in my own workshops is judging where everyone is at regularly in the lecture. "Who learned something new?" etc. > 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 >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> >> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org > > > -- > Bill Mills > Community Manager, Mozilla Science Lab > @billdoesphysics > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
