Reflection Questions (14 September 2021): Why I don’t advise emphasizing open-ended questions, and what I advise instead.
Research Paper Audiences (13 September 2021): To rate a paper, its intended audience must be known.
Capturing the Wild Attention (7 September 2021): Who can capture and hold your attention? Can you domesticate it so that one of the answers is yourself?
Learn and Grow (6 September 2021): Thoughts on two different ways to become “smarter.”
Leading to discover (14 Aug 2017): Striking a per-activity balance between explanation and exploration.
Knowing ≠ Believing (8 Aug 2017): The relative merit of sound results and plausible explanations.
On what do students rely? (31 Jul 2017): Successful students rely fully on their teacher, but also fully on themselves. This applies to students of mortal teachers and of the Master Teacher.
Allocating Help (16 Jan 2017): When demand for TAs exceeds available TAs on staff, who gets help?
Interest vs. Distraction (16 Aug 2016): Does adding bells and whistles to a class improve student learning?
Multiple-choice (24 Oct 2015): How to write better multiple-choice questions.
Cheating Incentives (9 Oct 2015): Graded assignments and secret exams.
Kinds of Cheaters (7 Sep 2015): A list of kinds of cheating that I have caught.
Academic Honesty (1 Sep 2015): Why do students plagiarize and cheat?
Using Assignments (20 Aug 2014): Reflections on assignments as an educational tool.
Scratch work (21 Jul 2014): Three-column scratch work as a tool for thinking about thinking and a genealogical tool.
Understandablity (15 Jul 2014): Cognitive load theory, my first postulate, and education.
Of Books, Teachers, and Inversion (23 Dec 2013): Student comment: “Sometimes I had to read the book to understand the topic.”
Teaching in Church (12 Sep 2013): Tip 3: Loosen the reins. Loosen them much less in a lecture hall.
Teaching in Church (11 Sep 2013): Tip 2: pause to think about what they said. Perhaps more important outside of church.
Teaching in Church (10 Sep 2013): Tip 1: Wait longer. Somewhat useful outside of church too.
Church Lessons (9 Sep 2013): What makes a lesson in church remarkably good?
Building by Proxy (21 Aug 2013): Conflicting goals in selecting material to present in class.
Selecting Assignments (23 May 2013): What makes a good programming assignment?
Grading and XP (22 May 2013): What does a point-based grading scheme suggest about the teacher’s model of learning?
Will MOOCs exacerbate inequality? (21 May 2013): One of my fears about massive open online courses.
Telling and Showing (15 Apr 2013): It is best to both tell the students the rules in play and show them how the rules are used in practice.
Student Vocalization (27 Nov 2012): Reflections on the power of soliloquy and expression in the classroom.
Of Cisterns, Spigots, and Pipes (30 Oct 2012): Thoughts on kinds and scopes of standardization.
Snapshots of the Mind (17 September 2012): Personality, IQ, fatalism, and growth.
Failure of On-Line Learning (13 Aug 2012): Why are so many online courses bad?
What Should Children Learn? (10 Jul 2012): The “Ought” of Education
Closed-loop Education (4 Jun 2012): How many brains are needed to facilitate learning?
Programming Ad Ideas (25 May 2012): Some ideas inspired by Lucy Sanders at NCWIT.
Taxonomy of Thought (17 May 2012): Thinking about the boundaries of a revised Bloom taxonomy.
Different Underneath (3 May 2012): Processes that look the same for different reasons.
(Not) Liking a Subject (25 Apr 2012): Why do students like (or not) particular subjects?
What to Grade? (19 Apr 2012): What would you grade, or on what do you wish to be was graded?
Questions not to answer (18 Apr 2012): When is it better to let the student think it out?
Who gets the ‘A’s? (12 Apr 2012): Are confidence and grades correlated?
SIGCSE 2012 (3 Mar 2012): The 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.
Teaching in Pairs (28 Feb 2012): The power of divided labor.
The Impossible Lesson (21 Feb 2012): Teach them to think.
Multiple choice or short answer? (16 Feb 2012): The intellectual impact of question format.
Teaching Whom? (13 Feb 2012): A collection of small observations about audiences in teaching.
Watching Your Curriculum (7 Feb 2012): Curricula writers ought watch others use their curricula.
A Gulf of Understanding (5 Dec 2011): Educators as proselytizers: converting student’s thought processes.
Students That Drive (29 Nov 2011): An observation about classroom dynamic.
Educators Ought to Listen (17 Nov 2011): A little extension of an earlier post.
Disseminate Information, Organize Knowledge (14 Nov 2011): “Let me organize your thoughts…”
Learning Bipartite Graph (21 Sep 2011): Reflections on instruction and understanding.
K-12 Programming: Counting (23 Aug 2011): Practical programming in kindergarten or first grade.
What Should Teachers Do? (4 Aug 2011): Reflections on information, knowledge, understanding, intelligence, wit, acuity, aptitude, instruction, etc.
Unlocking Programming: What is CS? (1 Aug 2011): A discussion of the terms “computer science”, “computer engineering”, “information technology”, “information systems”, “software engineering”, and “programming”.
Programming Ad Ideas (27 Jul 2011): A reaction to the appalling way educators act like computing isn’t important.
Friday Poem (1 Jul 2011): A sonnet for CS1.
Another CS1 Approach (23 May 2011): Get the students to propose each element before it is taught.
A Different Way to Teach Computing (19 May 2011): How would I teach computer science if I didn’t have any computers?