Summary of Experience/Resource
In this post, I reflect on the timeline activity from workshop 1 – as a class we organised different events and policies in teaching onto a timeline. I was impressed by how the activity covered a breadth of topics, giving enough information to follow up on useful ideas on teaching and to also understand where their context in the history of teaching. Applied to my teaching, the context is the “Global Perspectives on Computer Science” module where students reflect on a range of guest lecture talks (which takes up lecture time) whilst meeting the learning objective to: “Evaluate the efficacy of historical, current and future international computing trends considering inequalities and diverse, complex practices, concepts and theories.”
Reflection on its Relevance and Application to Context
Before class, I gathered a range of different technologies from the 1920s to the modern day. I created sheets of paper with the name of the technology, and a space for the date, a quick description, and for people to consider the ethical aspects of the technology. Students first picked a technology. They then did research independently, before coming together around one large table to assemble them into larger bits of paper. The result was placed at the back of the classroom as a permanent fixture.
Next Steps
An effective aspect of the task was students conducting their own research. This led to moments where students would share interesting findings with the rest of the class: these moments of learning and sharing were impactful and resonated with students and the rest of the class. To me this was similar to when they understand threshold concepts (Boustedt et al., 2007). Going forward, I want more opportunities for students to research information without my input. This active approach I felt led to more students leaving with a solid understanding of an idea they discovered: adding a post-lecture assessment of whether these aspects were indeed understood would help to validate this.
Bringing students together to share after independent work was also effective and reminded me of the think-pair-share technique (Kaddoura, 2013). This gave a good balance for students who enjoy quiet activities and those who enjoy energetic activities, differentiating the experience cf. case study 1. Going forward, I want to make sure that these opportunities for different levels of pace in the class are offered for each person’s different learning styles.
The one central table where the class gathered to create the timeline also gave a better balance to the discussion than other methods I’ve tried such as using Miro. Learning from this, I want to ensure that I take advantage of these group layouts e.g. perhaps using one-table layouts again or goldfish bowl techniques (link).
I also had great feedback from colleagues on the task. For example, praising giving small boxes for students to add information: sufficient scaffolding for their research cf. Zone of Proximal Development (Basawapatna et al., 2013). The task also left a permanent object in the classroom to discuss with others, prompting reflection. The goals of the task also sufficiently captured the breadth of computer science required for the learning objective. As students refer to the timeline over the next few weeks and incorporate it into their assessment, I look forward to seeing if they synthesise the range of ideas gathered from each other’s independent research together.
References
Basawapatna, A.R. et al. (2013) ‘The zones of proximal flow: guiding students through a space of computational thinking skills and challenges’, in Proceedings of the Ninth Annual International ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (ICER ’13), pp. 67–74. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/2493394.2493404.
Boustedt, J. et al. (2007) ‘Threshold concepts in computer science: do they exist and are they useful?’, in Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (SIGCSE ’07), pp. 504–508. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/1227310.1227482.
Kaddoura, M. (2013) ‘Think pair share: A teaching learning strategy to enhance students’ critical thinking.’, Educational research quarterly, 36(4), pp. 3–24.