Lesson Plan 2

What students had as an assignment: Assignment 1

[10 mins] Part 1: Discussion of Bain (Ch1, Ch4 and Epilogue)

  • CH1: How does Bain define the best? What examples does he bring of best teachers?
  • CH1: How would you define the best? What would be a teacher that was the best and why in your memory and that was the worst and why?
  • CH4: What do the best teachers expect of their students? How do they behave towards their students?
    • We also want worst teacher stories! Can you share?
  • E: What does Bain say about fixed intelligence vs growth mindset
  • What did you find interesting or helpful to you and your teaching from this reading?
    • What did you find not helpful and why

[30 mins] Part 2: Students Share Their HW Bullet Points

  • What are some styles of teaching you have seen and experienced in the past?
  • What kind of teacher do you want to be? What will that look like?
  • What questions would you need to ask and answer to know if your teaching is working?

[20 mins] Part 3: Bain vs HLW and Research vs. Practice

  • What is Bain’s approach to research/the scientific method?
    • What do you see positive in this approach? What about negative?
  • What is the HWL approach?
  • How do they compare and contrast against each other? [Highlight research vs Practice]
  • Fran tldr: A lot of their methodology is based on cherry picking faculty & students, not rigorous methods (i.e., tagging data or interviewing, “informal” interviews), no rigorous standard or definition for what “counted” towards their assessment

[15 mins] Part 4: Discussion of CH1 HWL: Prior Knowledge

  • What is learning? What are the 7 principles of learning
  • What did you find helpful or interesting that you may apply to your teaching?
  • CH1:
    • Why is prior knowledge important?
    • Example from the book or your experience on how it can help or hinder learning
      • Highlight inappropriate (analogy: boxes for vars, = in programming, folder structure), insufficient and incorrect prior knowledge
    • What strategies did you find helpful? What research was impressive here?
      • Note p29 on student self-assessment!

[15 mins] BREAK

[20 mins ] Part 5: Discussion of Designing a Course

  • Build together a list of things that are important. Give students a Google doc link or do on whiteboard.
  • Before starting the course:
    • Info gathering
    • Fitting into school curriculum
  • During the course:
    • LO (MH some of your LO)
    • Assess
    • Instruction
    • Alignment
    • Revise, cut, determine essential and optional
  • Schedule
    • Logical arrangement
    • Schedule/workload
    • Materials + Alignment
  • Syllabus & Course Policies (Fran and MH can share some examples here)
    • ….

[10 mins + 50 mins] Part 6: Students Find 3 Syllabi & Discussion

Activity: Build a Syllabus for intro CS/Data Structures topic.

  • Collect syllabus for classes offered at other institutions
  • Decide what information to include in syllabus
  • Use template for syllabus from CMU: https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/designteach/syllabus/index.html
  • Discuss the syllabi, pros cons, discuss guidelines for designing syllabi (i.e. CMU’s or Eberly’s)
  • Build syllabus for intro/DS course