Hello everyone! I'm well thank you how are you?
This week I have a new thing to show off and an idea to write about.
Thing: Digital Apprenticeships Listings
There are a lot of apprenticeships in tech! An apprenticeship is a job that comes with training, and they're quite good for breaking into a new field. The compromise is often, but not always, the salary — but on the other hand a bootcamp and a job hunt can be expensive and you don't have those costs with an apprenticeship.
There's a government website that collects them, but it is in my opinion not very well designed for people who actually want to do one.
So I built a little page that lists them and has some basic filtering, subscriptions. Here it is.
And it looks like this! Not beautiful but it’ll do. I really must fix that navbar/header alignment thing at some point it’s really bugging me.
Idea: Teaching Effects
This turned out way more of an incoherent ramble than I hoped so be warned. There’s a nice link at the end of the email if you like golden era Hollywood actors.
I was recently watching some teaching by a tech education provider. I won't name them because I'm about to be a bit unfair, but let's call them Button School. Let me describe it to you as I saw it.
About three hundred people start watching a live stream. There's a chat that goes alongside where all the students can sign in and talk. On the stream there's a man. He introduces the project they're going to make today, a little online game. He's building it in one of those online editors. He shares his screen and just starts building it, talking as he's going. His explanations go along with what he's building — the code is really leading the way, and he's explaining things as he goes. In the chat, people are asking questions of varying degrees of sophistication, there are some jokes, a lot of people are talking about it going too fast for them to keep up and using the 🤯 emoji. There is another man in the chat who answers some of the questions and offers encouragement like "Don't worry if it is too fast for you, you can always look back at the recording!" Occasionally the man on the stream stops and answers some of the questions. Over about two hours, he gets something working but it's maybe 1/3rd of the whole project. A relatively large number of students, maybe 10-20 thank the instructor and admire his skills. Some are still talking about how confused they are.
Now, I'm not an eager novice developer. I'm there to research Button School, whose teaching model I find kind of interesting and I want to learn more about. And my reaction is — what the fuck is going on?? Is anyone learning anything?? Is anyone even enjoying this??
I go to a few of these sessions and they're broadly all the same — all quite messy, very fast live coding with talking along, teaching proficiency varies but it's vaguely similar — and attendance does not meaningfully drop. It's still around ~300, and most people stay for the full session. Many people submit their projects and post them online.
When I'm mentoring a novice educator, I do have my own process, opinions, rules of thumb and mostly I guide people to teach in a way that I believe is effective. But the root of it all, one of the first things I tell any teacher I work with — is that our primary metric is learning. You have to be able to work out what people are learning. Once you can do that, all of my guidance is just advice — you can try something different and as long as you have good reason to believe learning is happening then it doesn't matter what I think. This is how you will become independent of my guidance and ultimately better than me at what you do. It's also in my view what drives great educators (and I sure hope so, because it's really my mentor/rival Sam Morgan's idea).
Now, is anyone at Button School paying serious attention to what is being learned and by whom at these sessions? Honestly, I kind of doubt it. But taken on raw business metrics of engagement — this stuff is working. And I'm not a scrub — if a learning experience is achieving real world objectives, that's plenty enough for me to call it successful, even if you have no idea why it works or even what's going on.
Now me, I'm in the business of making high-impact learning experiences, so I like to know what is going on. I don't have a very precise analysis of what Button School is doing that works, but I have come up with an idea that can act as a tool to aid in that project. That idea is teaching effects.
Most people, educators included, go around thinking that there is 'good teaching' and 'bad teaching'. Successful education is simply a matter of doing as many techniques from 'good teaching' as you can, and as few 'bad teaching' techniques as you can manage. An uncontroversial example — if you are using an unfamiliar word you should explain it. People might disagree whether explaining it before or after you use the word is 'better teaching' or not.
The problem with this intuitive understanding is that Button Schools exist and they do all kinds of 'bad teaching', but they still work. Sometimes they even make 'bad teaching' into 'good teaching' just by showing that it works. Equally, you can take techniques from 'good teaching' and apply them and they don't work at all.
So it feels like there's some system of good teaching that is required. You have to take a compatible set of 'good teaching' techniques, maybe from some kind of discipline or trend like Montessori or whatever, and then if you do them together. Oh and also you sort of have to have the right kind of students, and maybe you need the right kind of teaching personality too, and actually all the other teachers at your institution really ought to be following a compatible set of techniques.
This is better, but it doesn't help us if we want to design anything new, or even analyse anything that exists. This is where teaching effects come in.
Let's look at two stimuli. These teachers are in the process of teaching learners about functions in programming.
Teacher A: "Could you give me your best definition of a function?"
And…
Teacher B: "A function is a reusable chunk of code. Now — repeat that back for me."
My immediate preference is for Teacher A's version, it seems to me like a technique straight out of 'good teaching'. It puts a bit of learning & recall pressure on the student by asking a question, the word "best" modifies the question to imply that it doesn't need to be 'correct' to be a good answer, just the best of what the student currently knows. It provides more information to the teacher which they can then use. It's dialogical. I ask questions like this all the time.
Let's move the focus to its 'effects'. The learner will feel under pressure. They will think about what they know about functions. They may feel fear. They may feel relief if they know the answer. If they know nothing at all, they may feel out of place. They may feel curious to learn more. They will bring to mind ideas about functions that they have. They will put effort into formulating a response in English. If English is not their first language they may have to put in extra effort. If peers are around, they may feel social anxiety.
I could keep going. A rough summary is that the learner is going to have an emotional experience, they're going to call what they know about functions into working memory, and they're going to say something.
These things aren't by themselves good. But I have created a situation I'm familiar with where I can put other techniques to good use. If I'm familiar with this kind of question and its effects then I can be very effective — the equivalent perhaps of bringing a car into your own workshop where you know the equipment well.
Turning our attention to Teacher B's stimuli — I don't have a very good understanding of what that will do. I imagine that learners will recall the definition I gave and say it out loud. They will hear other learners say it out loud too. Some learners might have zoned out and they'll try to 'say it along' somehow as they say it, and maybe feel a bit caught off guard. I don't instinctively like it. What if the learners don't know that terminology? What if it doesn't connect to what they already know? The 'teaching effect' there might be confusion or just a sort of mental blankness, a giving up.
But I do know this technique can be powerful, correctly applied. Once at secondary school someone from the police came in to talk to us about drugs. He said many things, but one thing he really impressed on us was "Heroin is a brown powder". He told us this, got us to repeat it back, then he would periodically say "Heroin is..." and we would have to repeat back "a brown powder!"
I think I'll honestly remember that until I die. It was just an hour of teaching, but then it was so funny to us teenage boys that we would just repeat it to each other whenever drugs came up at school. But you know if I ever come across a drug and it is a brown powder I am going to think "that is heroin" and "don't do loads of this drug and die of an overdose".
(Thinking about it now, that's another teaching effect — chanting something back is a social experience, you all do it together, and so it can get stuck in your head together in the same form, so you can become common knowledge in a group).
All of this only worked alongside that teacher's other traits — they were loud, they pointed, they talked about life and death, they were a bit cringe, sort of dad-like. Each of these had their own effects which then enabled the chanting stimuli to bed itself into our brains and our social context.
So, a teaching effect is a way of talking about the other side of a teaching technique. The teaching technique is the cause, the teaching effect is... the effect. You combine these effects in a coherent way to then produce learning, or behaviour, or whatever result you want.
So with Button School — here's my analysis of the effects of doing fast paced live coding to a large group: learners will believe their teachers are competent and admire them. Learners who are already quite skilled will keep up and build something in the session. Learners who are not skilled will not keep up and feel discouraged. Consequently, more highly skilled learners will apply to join their training programme. This is probably good for Button School, and in a sense if their teaching is like that then it's good for all the learners too. The compromise is that you lose out on a lot of students, but if you manage to get ~300 people turning up and sticking around to admire all this cool coding, then it probably doesn't matter if you lose a large fraction of them as long as you're losing the right fraction. Furthermore, if you attract strong students, it might not matter so much if your teaching isn't driving that much new learning.
So, that's teaching effects. I have the creeping feeling I've just said something extremely 'obvious' (did you know causes have effects??). I think it's more of a perspective shift — away from judging teaching techniques as good or bad in themselves, to analysing their effects, and how we can trigger and combine those 'teaching effects' to achieve what we want.
(All that said, I still suspect Button could do better... but anyway)
Links
You know Katharine Hepburn? I found myself watching one of her very few television interviews. It's worth a watch even if just for a few minutes just to see her presence as she absolutely takes over the room, feet up on the table, sitting on Dick Cavett's chair, etc. As e would say, she's a real pistol!
Hope you're all doing well!
K