Teaching CS50 Practice with Pedagogy

Key Takeaways

and hello everybody Welcome to teaching cs50 practice with pedagogy I'm guy white one of the longtime teaching fellows here at cs50 and I'm so excited to be joining all of you from around the world here for this educator Workshop in 2024 so to begin our time together today I know that so many of us are here and so many of us are here live here on the camera some of you of course are listening more passively today if you take a moment go ahead and let's head to the chat box together and I'd like you just to take a moment if you would type in the country from which you're joining us today as a quick warmup as we say hello to one another today thank you so much I see lots of people from the USA Brazil Iran the UK Egypt Uganda South Africa lvia Bangladesh Singapore India Canada Thailand and on Turkey my goodness and so many others I'm so happy to be joining all of you from here in from beautiful Portland Oregon here in the United States and we're all here in service of many things today like first of all we're here in service of you we're here in service of helping you either adopt or adapt cs50 curriculum technology and pedagogy into your own classroom but really we're here because we're here on behalf of our students I want you to think about all those those people that you're serving daily in your job as an educator many of you have there are many of you that have even joined today that have the aspiration of becoming a teacher in computer science I want you to picture the students that you are working with or the students that you will be working with in your classes uh there's a few of you that we've been talking in the chat box that have just been told the Summer's just ended or summer just started in terms of uh your your teaching year and you're off and you've just been told a couple of you that you're going to be teaching computer science for the first time starting in the fall when you return to school and so many of you are here because you want to serve your students but there's many of you also that are here because you're feeling like you're feeling lost you're feeling like you want to understand how you can best teach computer science to your students and how to make the best of the situation that you're in with the curriculum the techn that you have at hand and so to begin this rather than hearing more about your teaching context because we've heard so much already uh from you and your survey response I'd like to take a moment and I'd like you to think about who is the best teacher that you've ever had I'd like you to think about some teacher in your life that has had a major impact upon you one of my teaching values is that no one gets anywhere without a teacher every human on the planet has had the advantage of a teacher at some point in their life I'd like you just in in in service to you but but my goodness just to honor the legacy of that teacher take a moment and go to that chat box and I want you to type in the last name or the first name potentially of that teacher that has had such a profound impact upon you name that teacher there in that chat box as you're doing that I want you to think about that teacher I want you to think about what made every other teacher not reached to the level of this one teacher you have in mind there was something special about that educator perhaps it was the way that they engaged with you one on-one perhaps it was the way that they taught perhaps it was the way that they were in the room and very present with their students it's possible that your teacher helped you overcome adversity in your life and dare I say much much of what that teacher did that made a difference for you did not cost thousands tens of thousands millions of dollars instead it was something that they were able to give from them themselves free of charge in some way they didn't have the best equipment the best laptops the best internet connection potentially but they had something within them and that today that something within you is what we're going to be focusing on because go figure what helps in your teaching is great curriculum and great technology but in fact it's the great pedagogy the working with students that really makes the difference and I just want to say as I I could not read all these names out here out loud but I just want to say as I'm seeing this I want I'm just so honored to be sitting amongst these names that are sitting here in this chat box because what a beautiful thing to conjure as we enter this time together to talk about pedagogi so I want to welcome all of you I'm so excited to be here with you today so let's begin by talking about pedagogy itself what is pedagogy basically the question is what is teaching take a moment go to the chat box again type out your definition what is pedagogy what is teaching in your mind think about it there are teachers that they go and they present there are some teachers that go and they facilitate there are some teachers that work in the classroom and they serve and looking at this many of you talk about the method of teaching the science of effective teaching the behavior according to a student's situation how to create a learned situation sharing a set of skills sharing what we know I got a long a long response from one of you that I can't read but basically what I see there is giving the right steps at the right time and and the key to New World of having uh students that we've never seen before these are all things that are pedagogy for the sake of our time here today we're just going to say that pedagogy has something to do with facilitating fun engaging students in some way and then providing them content and having them come back with content we'll get back to the definition of pedagogy a little bit later but generally pedagogy is what we teach how we teach in a certain way you know you imagine there are times in your life where content has been available to you in many different forms about the same subject I mean right behind me here right past my duck I have a bunch of computer science books and those computer science books before I came to cs50 I had little programming knowledge but I had loads of books back there about how to program and I thought oh my gosh if I just read this book and Implement what's in this book everything will be right everything will be okay and then I I'm sitting there with the book and for me as a learner I'm reading and this just doesn't it doesn't work I went on to a couple you I went on to YouTube and I found a couple lessons and I went to a couple competing websites and things like this to discover what would work for me and it just wasn't working but then I found a teacher and I found a a curriculum a pedagogy and a technology that we working together in a way that allowed it to click for me really for the first time and many of you who've been exposed to the cs50 curriculum have had that experience for you as well in the end though pedagogy is an interesting thing you know in cs50 in the introductory weeks we talk about the we talk about the idea of an algorithm and we discussed the algorithm is this idea of a black box a black box where we provide an algorithm something and then what spits out is something else you know you can imagine for example that we we hand perhaps uh a certain word to an algorithm that checks for the spelling and it might output true or false is it's spelled correctly and in the end pedagogy is a lot like that pedagogy is we have a certain set of tools and we have a certain set of skills and we have our curriculum that we have and we're somehow interacting with our students and we're doing something special there in that black box and then the out the outcome hopefully is that the students are doing well and they actually learn the material in some fashion and I like what Abel says in the chat box the idea of delivering learning experiences is going to be particularly important today so in our presentation today we're going to be really hitting three things three presentations all inone first we're going to be talking about pedagogy specifically what is it how to implement it we're going to be talking about instructional strategies which is the actual doing of pedagogy and then we're going to be talking about your teaching values and how you can leverage your teaching values to be really the best teacher you can possibly be so if you would in that chat box as I'm queuing up this next slide I want you to tell me how many years you've been a teacher in computer science go ahead and type out a number between one and Infinity how long have you been a computer science teacher and lots of You by looks of things have been a computer science teacher for less than five years but I do want to say that we have many seasoned people that are here as well and you know the interesting thing is and what I love about teachers regardless of how many years of experience you have the reality is that you can accumulate and collect new strategies as you see other teachers teach and frankly uh enthusiasm and seeing how other people go about their work is really powerful because teachers I wish I could grab right across the room here I have a tool boox I wish I put it over here because teachers are a lot like people that have toolboxes you know you can assemble you have your set of tools that goes in that toolbox but over time you accumulate more and more tools and one tool that we will be using today is what we call the kwl chart so the kwl chart is if you imagine if we were in a physical room what we might do is we might take a piece of paper like this and we might fold it into three columns and indeed when I'm working with students on ground and perhaps we we're not we don't have access to laptops and other forms of technology maybe we're using paper alone we would fold them into three columns like this and at the top of those columns we would talk about we would put the column name of no and what do we know about this topic already and then we might have something called want to know what are the things we want to know and then at the end of the kwl chart we might have what we call learn what we what we did learn as a result of our time together today and so what we're actually going to do is we are going to take on the spirit of this kwl chart and this the spirit of this kwl chart uh by downloading this file and I'm going to put the link there in the chat box for everyone as well and and using this link you'll download your own copy you can go and it'll take you to a Google doc of course and there what you can do is you can go up to file and make a copy file make a copy and you'll have your own copy of your kwl chart and what I'd like you to do is under that no column go to that no column there and I'd like you to write down just a couple words what are some things in teaching you know that works really well right what's right there in the chat box you can find that link what are some things that you know really well about teaching that you know that works in teaching and through our time together today and perhaps even right now I'd like you to go to that want to know section and I'd like you please to go ahead and write down some questions perhaps that you have about our time together today and most definitely for those of you asking about sharing access uh to for the link I provided a few times there uh do know that you can go to file and make a copy and you'll get your own copy there in your respective Google drive or you can download a copy if you wish under the file menu as well and so this is a reflective tool and it's one of the teaching strategies that we're going to be using today is by writing down what you know and what you want to know you're actually taking part in your own learning in a way right you're guiding your own learning because because this is an interactive session we have an opportunity to take your questions live so we'll be looking for your questions there in the chat box as we go forward today so this is the use of the kwl chart thank you so much so let's jump into pedagogy together our first presentation of three big things today so pedagogy generally generally is the process of facilitating learning or facilitating the process of learning I should say and if you think of learning as a process it's it's really much easier to see what your students need at any given moment because uh you know many of you who are teachers you've had a student come to you from a previous year or a previous teacher and you've noticed that there's gaps in that student's learning there are some deficiencies of what you might expect that they might have coming in and so you might even say that student didn't learn X right whatever that X is in some way and so you might say uh the student didn't learn what they needed to in the previous class and so therefore when they come to my class ah they're not going to do very well perhaps because they didn't know what they they didn't bring into the class what they should have known now you know what the hard part is though is that that when you're a teacher and you have a student that comes to you that doesn't have the previous knowledge that's necessary to take on this lesson or this class that you're teaching you have a choice you can leave that student completely on their own and really decide I I can't help them in some way or you could take it on yourself as a teacher to say it's on me to help this student get from point A where they are now to where I would like them to go as a learner if you imagine every student that walks into your classroom they are all coming in with different levels of previous learning different PRI all different prior knowledge how is it that you want to work with those students do you want to be the type of teacher that says when the student walks in ah you don't know what you you you don't know what you should know I don't know if I can help you or do you want to be the type of teacher that says welcome I'm so happy that you're here oh I see what you know from before and I'm going to help you and get you into this new thing and so my of course my imagination is if you're sitting here today you are one of those second types of teachers that want to bring their students from where they are today to something new and indeed there are different levels of learning because not every student comes in to your classroom with the same level of knowledge but even if they all did we still have to know that learning progresses in a certain way so if you imagine you're teaching a very fundamental concept like a concept like I I don't know a variables inside computer science inside programming you can imagine where you'd have to start at a very low level you couldn't just say okay here's how we program variables you'd have to first Define what a variable is is because without a definition we couldn't do anything right we we wouldn't know what this thing is we know we know that it seems important because the teacher's talking about it but how do we use it so we have to start at the definition level we have to tell students what the a variable is in this case the second level of learning is describing and so we teach our students by taking that definition and adding on some words some some padding some understanding to that definition such they understand why perhaps a variable or whatever the term is that we're teaching is important to them and then from that because we now have a definition and now because we know what it's generally used for and why it's important we then can explain and we can explain by providing examples in some way and examples would be by showing in this case for variables would be showing actual variables themselves above explain is the idea of comparing and contrasting showing the similarities and the differences perhaps between this concept that we're learning and other Concepts we've have learned in the past we're taking this idea of a very a very basic idea up to a higher level by allowing students to compare and contrast those two things whatever those things are you know an example might be just a moment ago I was talking about pedagogy I defined pedagogy I allowed you an opportunity to describe in your own words what pedagogy was I talked through some examples of what pedagogy could look like in the classroom and many of you provided examples there in the chat box and even just a moment ago I compared and contrasted certain ways of being and certain ways of heart around pedagogy between being the teacher that that doesn't really care what their students know before versus the teacher that cares a lot right by comparing and contrasting two ways of thinking around this and so the next level is the synthesis level of learning and the synthesis level goes beyond just comparing and contrasting but says I can use this New Concept with other Concepts that I've learned and I can use them together to do something new and in fact that leads us to the highest level of learning that we're going to learn here at least in our time together today which is creating I'm going to go and I'm going to create something for those of you that have gone through the cs50 curriculum you can see how we've actually gone through these different steps of learning together like in the cs50 curriculum in the in your first time being exposed perhaps in week one of cs50x you're being exposed to C for the first time you might have have ever encountered C or or syntax within C at all but through the opening we Define what C is what the fundamentals of c are in terms of syntax how to do something like printing hello world we describe the process of printing hello world we show examples of how to print how to print hello world and later on for example in week six of cs50x when you get in when we get into python We compare and contrast the ways of using C to print hello world versus python printing hello world and then what do we do with that well we go and we create and we we work and we do problem sets around those different ideas so you can imagine then if we're working through algorithms so this is the interactive portion of our time together so if you go to the chat box so if you can imagine we have the idea of algorithms compare and we have the definition of algorithms would be first right so what is an algorithm and then we would describe the difference the what are different algorithms perhaps moving up our levels of learning to explain we might explain each step of the algorithm in the compare and contrast stage we might ask well how do two algorithms differ here's algorithm a and here's algorithm B and what are the differences between these too and then we could say here is how industry is using each of these algorithms perhaps and then what we could do is we could create your own algorithm so notice that this is like the taxonomy of learning taking someone from the ground not knowing anything all the way up and so let's have you try this so in the chat box what I'd like you do is let's go to the let's let's talk about loops for a second uh for those of you that are uninitiated a loop is just some is just something that repeats and a loop is uh used in programming to do a repeating action in some way and so what I'd like you to do is for Define let's see could you go there and go to the definition or go to the chat box I should say and and write down a question that you might ask students about loops that gets to the definition of Loops what's a question you might ask a student to see what they know about loops from the ground up at that definition level and for those of you asking absolutely you can get access to this presentation we're going to be sending out a link to the presentation and so on uh afterwards definitely okay perfect yeah absolutely so a question questions that are really great at the definitional level what do you know about loops already um or what is a loop right or uh what is a loop what does a loop do right this is really good these are great opening questions that you might ask now the describe level is quite similar right is you might ask your students right what what one of you might ask uh what's what does a loop do uh if we if we show it like this that yeah that's right so like we have a Ser a piece of code that looks like this what does this Loop do that's the description level then what we could do at the explain level you might imagine so you could ask them to show examples right so yes exactly you could have them actually iterate over a piece of code themselves by having them physically maybe with their pencil or their pen this is a great suggestion in the chat box by going down and actually having them walk through the loop move my move my pen one two three boxes and then go back to the beginning one two three boxes very good and they have to compare and contrast level with loops what you could do is you could have them say look at Loop a and look at Loop B and what's the difference between these loops and what's the same between these Loops uh an activity we do in my sections uh for for python in loops and python is we look at a we look at a for loop as it's implemented in C and then we look at a at a for loop as it's implemented in Python and we look back and forth between what are the differences that you see here and there are some absolute similarities but there are surely some differences at the synthesis level you might actually have them show how these algorithms these Loops I should say are used in different programs that perhaps we've already been exposed to in the class or we could show them group blocks of code from from other assignments or blocks of code that we've pre-prepared and have them look at the loops that are present there and then finally we might have them create their own Loop most definitely well stated there in the chat box thank you and so what I'd like you to do now is I'd like you to go to that want to know column of your kwl chart and indeed if you don't if you didn't download it earlier perhaps you just write down something you know on your computer there or on your phone or on a piece of paper nearby what you learned in this short section that we just did of about the levels of learning so looking here again in at the pyramid at the taxonomy think about how you approach your students when they walk into your room do you expect them to already be at a higher level in that taxonomy or do you teach in such a way that it provides everyone in the room access where every single student can walk in and get in on that definition level I don't know about you but I've sometimes registered for the wrong class I've been placed in the wrong class before and so I've walked into a classroom that is like a third year highlevel class on a certain topic and I'm lost the first moment the professor opens their mouth I'm like is this the right class for me and so we want to provide the opportunity for every student to walk in and so think about that and yes indeed they are absolutely to the comment in the chat box they they are absolutely steps that you walk students through all lessons should walk students from this definition level all the way up to that create level very well done team thank you so where then does the content that we're going to be using our pedagogical skills to teach where does that content come from well the content can come from many places and this really depends on your locality throughout the world there are places throughout the world and there I suppose there settings throughout the world where the teacher can just invent what's going to be taught in the classroom however many of you are working in places where there are standards to which that your teaching has to hit in some way that is there are certain topics that you must cover in your content through your teaching that are that are mandated by law or by policy and standards are the ways by which we usually do that for example the computer science Teachers Association the csta they have a series of standards and the series of Standards through csta are a list of computer science skills that students should learn and in fact how teachers perhaps should interact with students in teaching those computer science skills so it actually tells us what teachers should be teaching and what students should be learning through their work in computer science curriculum uh the College Board of course I'd be remiss not to mention the College Board uh the AP Computer Science standards the framework is also another set of standards that we often uh appeal to and especially within cs50 we are very sensitive to this because we many students throughout the United States and abroad use AP Computer Science standards as the as the way by which they can go and they can take a test to get college credit for their high school work in computer science and then lastly there's IST there's the international Society for technology and education and they've taken a bit of a different approach rather than talking about individually what specific computer science skills down to the algorithms the the loops all those types of things they've taken the approach of looking overall what type of learner they want the students to be and there's standards for that as well now you can get so an example like what does a standard even look like so now that you know what a standard is uh a standard might look something like this and this is given to us a courtesy of the College Board in the AP Computer Science curriculum this is a standard about algorithms and programming and so literally the the standard almost like a law or a policy has an actual number 3A ap13 and and this specific one it says it's to create prototypes that use algorithms to solve computational problems by leveraging prior student knowledge and personal interests now as a teacher that's really useful to me because if I was just and many of you by the way like I mentioned have just been told that you're going to be teaching a computer science class for the first time and you were like what am I going to teach what am I going to do and it's standards and lists of Standards like this that are really great to leverage because it tells you exactly what you need to be teaching in your classroom many of you are season teachers that been really just working in the classroom and creating whatever you can because no one's told you specifically what you should be teaching in this computer science class and indeed standards like these can be a really great way of understanding what specifically should I be teaching in each of my classes now unless your your school your school district your locality mandates that you use these of course you're not required to but they are exceedingly useful and notice that the standard at least in the AP computer science curriculum provides some interesting annotation for that so what I'd like to do is I'd like to provide you access to those standards here and there's the QR codes but in the chat box as well I put all the links there for you so that way you can access them if you'd like to do it via click instead and of course at the end of our time together uh today and tomorrow we're going to be providing you access to the slides of these presentations so that way you can get access to all of these of course these are so useful for me as a teacher now as a teaching fellow in cs50 these computer science standards aren't binding to me necessarily it's not like there's a a law or a policy that I have to use them but I tell you when I'm when I'm working and I'm teaching students about loops when I'm teaching students about algorithms the C the csta standards and the College Board standards and the IST standards are ones that I go to for inspiration of what are some good uses of our time and when we're inside of our classes together for those of you that are mandated to adopt a standard in some way your your lesson plans can can use each of these standards as a guide now I'd like you to think about that for a second let's say that you have some standards that you can leverage that you can look and you can say Okay I want to teach this topic from this list of Standards what do you do from then well what you have to do is you have to lesson plan right so let's do some lesson planning together today so what I'd like us to do and uh is let's let's go to the chat box and let's choose a computer science topic together go ahead and type in any computer science topic that you love to teach that's my only requirement what computer science do you love yeah and I see traversing that's actually one of my favorite things to teach I see data structures arrays that's like my number one favorite thing to teach is arrays and then we have we have sorting we have we have packet switching that's not my a expertise we have machine learning we have sorting we have loops we have accessing the Dom we have ux and UI design we have math for Cs and just notice that's amazing how all of you just have your thing that is really important to you uh makes me teary and excited in a way because you know all of you I mean I'm so blessed that all of you have these different expertises and these different cares because you know your students are going to be exposed to different teachers over time and isn't nice that all of our teachers have different things that they care about because your students going to pick up on that care they're going to see that you care and because of that they're going to want to work more they're going to want to learn more because they see that you care so what we're going to do is we're just going to pick one of these and I I'm I'm not going to pick something that's my favorite necessarily but let's talk about the idea of yeah let's go with algorithms since that's one that so many of you said here today so let's go ahead and what I can do now is I can bring up and let's do this is let's so let's look at a lesson plan with one another today so what we have is we have a lesson plan template that I prepared in advance and of course I'll be giving you a link to this in just a few moments and so if we talk about like the level of education so let's start with the level of Education of our students so what level of let's go ahead and go to the chat box what level would you like to do would you like to do uh High School primary school undergraduate to it yep and and sure enough the vast majority of you are saying high school so let's let's do that let's say high school is the primary level of education and then let's talk about the topic well the topic we're going to be teaching today is algorithms and what I can do then is I can choose one of these standards so let's go ahead and and let's go there together and let's look for some standards about algorithms for high school and so if I go here to the handy dandy chart I can look at the framework of the AP Computer Science curriculum and I can see that we have these big Concepts I'm just going to roll through and I'm going to go all the way down to where we get to algorithms and so I love how it provides all these different strategies so what we're going to do is all right so for example I have this idea that one of the objectives is that we have algorithms are precise sequences of instructions for processes that can be executed by a computer and are implemented using computer programming languages so that's one of the things that I want to make sure I'm covering in our time together the specific learning objective is to develop an algorithm for implementation so I'm going to take that and I'm actually going to drop that here here in my standard so this is the main aim of my time together with my students and did I do that correctly no I did not is it going to let me copy that's an interesting question well I'm just going to type it out develop an algorithm for implementation so let's do that so develop an algorithm for implementation okay now we don't know exactly what we're going to implement but we can do that shortly so that's our first step our first step is determine what are we teaching with our students and what level are we teaching and what standard are we going to be using or leveraging in our time together so now that we have that in place now that we know the topic and we know the standard that we're going to be using let's talk about the process of actually lesson planning and how then to go about a lesson the first piece of any lesson and you saw it here today you saw it with David at the beginning and you saw it with me and you're surely going to see it with others is the into portion of lesson the beginning of a lesson really introduces the lesson to the student and it asks them questions to tap their prior knowledge to get them thinking about the topic preparing the students to learn and to generate excitement around that topic and I hope that you've really been seeing me model these four things as we got into our time together today and so what I can do then is inside of our lesson plan we can go to our n section and I could just make some notes I can ask myself first of all what do students know prior to this this lesson well I could say they know nothing right I could say they have no prior knowledge likely now if I was teaching later in the year what it what might happen is I might indeed have a situation where they have much prior knowledge about algorithms leading to this and then into so again I'm going to describe one or more activities that I can use to tap students's prior knowledge to prepare them to learn so what I might do is I might do an opening question I might ask them uh who has heard of the word algorithm before and then what I might do is I might do a a pair share right where students speak to one another about the topic right about that question or about the about the answer to that question and then what I could do is I could ask students whole class I could ask students to share algorithms that they already know exist in the world in some way uh we we have we have a algorithm here in my house called make a grilled cheese sandwich my children will say Daddy I'm hungry and I will go and I'll go cook the uh dad's grilled cheese sandwich which which has three different types of cheese the next piece of our lesson is the through part of our lesson it's the main component of our lesson the through component of our lesson the purpose of that the through component is to get students to actually get in the material it's where we actually teach the content it's where we actually model the content of the students and what we're doing is we're giving the students the opportunity to exercise more and more independence with this topic that we're teaching so you can imagine how in a class where I'm teaching about or a lesson where I'm teaching about algorithms how we can begin by what I could do is I could Define algorithms right I could Define the algorithm I could I could show examples right I could code my own algorithm and then and that's all by me presenting to them in some way what I could then do is I could I could do a group activity in some way I could do a group activity where uh students work together to match specific algorithms to their names so perhaps I have uh some pieces of paper that are cut out or some pieces of code that I give to them and I say what algorithm is this what's the algorithm doing let's name each of the algorithms right and then what I might do is I might do another group activity that we might call more of a group investigation where a group activity is more people collaborating and talking about a topic a group investigation might be actually them going and doing some creation of creating something together and they might create your own algorithm together right and so they by doing that they're becoming more and more independent at the beginning I'm teaching them through direct instruction or I'm showing a presentation but then through group they're working together on a topic and they're learning more and then on their own that is with the group they're creating their own algorithm and then finally individually what I might do is on your own right I might have them take a test or a quiz or what I could have them do is I could have them create a short presentation about what you know about algorithms so each student then on their own has that that own that their own independence to go and talk about now specifically for them what do they know about algorithms so that's the meat of the lesson I suppose and then we get to the final piece of our lesson and the final piece is the Beyond section and so in the Beyond section we summarize what was learned we provide students with the opportunity to reflect and we create anticipation for future lessons in some way we almost want a preview and tease and if you listen to David's lectures usually right there at the end David will provide a bit of a one sentence or two teaser about what's coming next and how we're going to apply the work that we did today and then go figure at the beginning of David's next lecture he has students recall prior knowledge and then talk about the topic that is at hand today so the Beyond portion of this lesson might be uh something like we could we could summarize we could do some direct instruction where we do a summary of what was learned for the day we ask students to reflect right we have them go to perhaps their kwl chart like so many of you have they're open on your systems today and you could ask them them the students here the question what did you learn about algorithms today and then lastly what I could have them do is I could have them hypothesize right what do you think will come next in our learning together so now that they have learned about algorithms what might we do with that when they come back to school tomorrow or next week right it allows students to get that reflective thinking already happening about the connections between what they're learning now and future lessons as well so notice what we were able to do here team we're able to take a standard and we're able to take a topic and build out a lesson based upon that standard based upon that topic now I'd be remiss to say that throughout our lesson planning and throughout our time in working with students we have to provide many levels of support to our student throughout there's many ways to provide what we call scaffolding and Scaffolding basically is providing supports like if you imagine uh the side of a building there are many Cathedrals through the world many buildings throughout the world uh many uh many buildings that you've probably seen on the news as of late that might have scaffolds on the side to hold up the building as they're building and they're making a project uh they're finishing a project and so that's supporting the building until it's strong enough to support itself and Scaffolding and learning is a lot like that scaffolding could be in the form of sensory scaffolding for example you and I are talking here today I'm purposely varying my voice volume I'm varying my tonality I'm actually using slides and I'm not just using one slide I'm switching back and forth between multiple windows I'm drawing you over to the chat box uh and things like this and in just a few moments here we're going to be going to some group breakout sessions where you're going to be doing some lesson planning together and so I'm providing sensory opportunities for you to be involved that otherwise may have allowed your learning to be less so if I just was audible I mean imagine if there was no video at all it's just the my voice booming over your speaker right now there's graphic scaffolding as well right there's pictures that I'm using there's context clues it is no mistake that I have the duck back here it's a it's a way of making your brain light up and it become more alive there's ducks throughout this presentation there's been a few hidden Ducks if you've not seen them already and the graphic presentation of the actual presentation itself is one and later on when you have access to the slides that's going to be a way for you to recall your learning and to learn even more deeply and of course this is a very interactive session most definitely right and so this interactive session is one where it's not just simply you sitting and you going into a coma as you're you're downloading whatever I'm saying instead hopefully you're interacting and engaging as time goes on these are all ways to to scaffold and support your learners I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention assessment too which could be a whole different topic you know assessment is usually thought of is how do I test my students to make sure they learned something and yeah that is one form of assessment but as Educators there's really three main moments that we perform assessments whether we're conscious of it or not as a teacher indeed there's formative assessment formative assessment is just is looking at what do the students know as they're coming into a lesson or as they're beginning a lesson and by me getting feedback from you in the chat box I got a sense really quickly of who was in the room where in the world were you that gave me an idea about what sort of challenges you might be facing in your classrooms by looking at the the level of teaching that we might do today whether it was high school or undergraduate level I learned that so many of you are from the undergraduate level but I learned that even more of you perhaps are from the high school level or at least there's more of you being vocal in the chat box that are from the high school level today and by you by doing that I was able to discover my about what you're what you are doing and not only that but by providing you the kwl chart I was able to learn a little bit about what you know about learning and pedagogy already there's process learning which is by checking in with the student that's another form of assessment where during the assess during the lesson you can actually check in with the students to see how they're doing sometimes if you're in the physical classroom or if you're in an online uh environment that could be stepping into a group or stepping into a breakout session to monitor the interactions as it's happening uh you can also have students perhaps answer some questions you might ask them directly some questions to see how they're learning as well and then finally the summative assessment which is what we all think about when we think about testing and assessment is at the end of the lesson what did the students learn indeed what did they learn and so that way you can determine is my next lesson going to be the next piece of material I was planning on doing or is my next lesson simply going to be a repeat of or a a bettered version of what I just did because it's possible that students might not learn what an algorithm is on the first go around I hope they will but maybe they won't and so am I G to leave them behind if they didn't learn it or am I G to go back and am I gonna allow them to have the opportunity for me to teach a little bit more deeply the purpose of summi of assessment you know it's interesting uh we're teachers and we have classes and we have grades we that is we provide a grade or an outcome for the class did you pass or your fail or did you get a letter grade a BC or D and so on that's one form of uh of of assessment but also there's knowing where how did our students perform such that I as a teacher can look at myself and say what do I need to make better for me how do I need to teach better for my students see the summi of assessment is not the penalty we give students for their their performance or the award we give for their performance Summit of assessment is best when it's a hint about what you need to do as an educator to help your students more in the future there are many different instructional strategies that you can use out there uh and we're going to be talking about many of them uh you know generally instructional strategies are the methods by which you facilitate learning and we've been talking a lot about those today there's direct instruction direct instructions where you're talking to your students and you're delivering the content much like I'm doing right now right and this image is really appropriate for direct instruction because you're you're basically being seen as the authority you're the sage on the stage that is given that is the authority and the leader on this on this topic and is giving uh giving the material out but it's very low interaction typically you might ask students questions but generally speaking direct instruction is you talking to them right and so on and I'm seeing some playful comments in the chat box about the rubber ducks I think peir share is where you might say to a partner uh or you might talk to a partner and talk about a certain idea like I If you are in the room today physically if you were in the room with me I would say turn to a partner and talk about what you know about algorithms and I might give you 30 or 60 seconds and then what I might do is have you both share out or one of you share out what the group discussed flipped classroom is probably one of my most favorite things that we can do is uh and because and I would say that uh dare I say that cs-50 follows a flipped classroom model is that many students do not tune in live here at Harvard College or at Harvard Extension School live for lectures uh many of you who have been exposed to cs50x curriculum or any of the other cs50 classes did not necessarily watch the lecture live when it was live presented but instead you watched it separately you watched a recording of it and so what a flip classroom is is where rather than going to a classroom where the where the teacher sort of talks at you for for 90 minutes or more the flip classroom is where you watch the lecture before going to the class and indeed in cs50 we've implemented uh sections uh here at Harvard college and also at Harvard Extension school where people that come to section rather than it being another lecture instead it's an interactive session where we're talking through topics and we're working through group activities to help the students learn more uh and the flip model is really exciting because uh you don't have to give the same lecture every year uh you could absolutely just simply provide a video to your students have them go home and watch the video such that when they come to class they're more prepared to interact there's competition is another great uh instructional strategy that you can use it's surely one of my favorites uh competition with play I should say I don't like competition where it's an ugly competition I like a playful competition where teams of people are working together towards an aim and there's a playfulness that's involved um and indeed at the beginning of our time together today for those of you that were here we did the pixel art together and it's a playful it's not necessarily competition where someone wins but it's a playful way of showing different outcomes for different groups and it it sort of fits with that spirit in a way of playing together maybe competing together if you're trying to make a better drawing than the other groups that my favorite strategy in the whole wide world is what's called a gallery walk a gallery walk is you take a room I want you to imagine a room a physical room uh this could be absolutely done uh in breakout sessions as well and in a controlled environment where you know how many people are going to be in the breakout rooms and you know that everyone's going to participate a gallery walk is an excellent way facilitated even an online uh instructional uh moment for your students so imagine a room and what you do is you create stations or even breakout rooms throughout the room so you might have four stations throughout the room what you could do is you could you could group students together you could say okay at each station there's a different question I want you to imagine that physically on the walls of your classroom there were four stations and on each station there was a question that students can answer and you could ask them questions about how could they create an algorithm that does this task maybe at station one and at station two here's another task that I'd like an algorithm to do and what the students might do together is they go to the stations together as a team and they work together to answer the question that's at that station and indeed if you're physically doing it in the room you could actually write on a poster perhaps on the wall a piece of paper on the wall your answer to that question and what you would do then is rotate the groups between each of those stations in a breakout room setting you can absolutely do this where you can rotate people between different questions or deliver questions to your breakout room so they can answer them right there in one breakout room a another strategy is a group investigation and a group investigation is uh where specifically the aim is for you to have the group create something new together but what you do with that is rather than keeping the group all together at once so you have each group work together but then the Twist on this is that you number off the group and you have one member from each group go to another group and teach the other group about what your group learned so what you could do then is you could provide five different concepts to five different groups and then what you could do is you could move one group member for each group into the another grou