Hey Erik,
Sorry - MCQ == Multiple Choice Question, for doing exactly what you
suggest re: judging where everyone is at in the lecture. I need to work
on that too! Which is sort of the point of my other thread today; what
are the barriers there, what do we need to do to make those techniques
actually happen more in practice?
Anyway, to stay on Ivan's question: a big +1 to Erik's suggestion,
regularly measuring where students are at is really key. This can also
support a strategy of having your helpers 'bring up the rear', by
letting them quickly see who needs a bit more attention; perhaps leaning
more heavily on helpers can be another strategy for dealing with a
really wide class spread. Along that theme, another thing to try (pure
idea spitball here, haven't done this myself) would be to take the one
or two MOST bored looking students and see if they can be deputy helpers
for the rest of the class.
On 2014-10-17 3:11 PM, Erik Bray wrote:
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
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Community Manager, Mozilla Science Lab
@billdoesphysics
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