Teaching Tech Together Book Summary
How can you teach programming?
One nice thing about the book is that you can read it online for free: Teaching Tech Together by Greg Wilson.
I like how the book tries to show all the methods it teaches you in practice. You are reading about the importance of learner personas or learning goals, and you can see them in the book. It is a living example of how to do things. Exercises help solidify knowledge and avoid misconceptions—then there are many of them after every chapter.
The book has taught me why good workshops/lessons in my past were so good and how I can create them myself.
In no particular order:
- Create learning goals.
- Create student personas.
- Use Live Coding.
- Embrace errors as opportunities to teach debugging.
- If possible, try to draw a diagram to explain things visually.
- Ask people to explain the code or trace its execution.
- Use Authentic Tasks - exercises you would be doing in real life.
- Identify students' misconceptions and clear them out as part of teaching.
- Ask people for predictions of what this code is going to do.
- Set up a document with shared notes (if students are comfortable with it)
- Cough drops - when speaking a lot.
If you want to learn more, I recommend The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans.
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