Ultimately her teaching experiences have caused her to ask “do the students really have a solid understanding of the mathematics they are using?  And, more importantly, do they understand why they’re using it?”

I think you know where I’m going with this.  Too often in computer science courses (and in fact in other IT courses that are offered in high school and I dare say in post-secondary) are planned so that a certain amount of material is “covered”.  Students get to practice modifying and writing code but often have no clue why they are writing this code.  They get to memorize some syntax but don’t understand what they’re memorizing.  There’s little of no context within which their work in writing code can be placed.  One might call this “context-free content”.  I think the author of the article is saying the same thing, but for mathematics.

Another way to look at this is to relate it to G. Polya’s four-step problem solving approach:

• Understand the problem
• Design a solution
• Solve the problem
• Assess your solution

Too often particularly in my early years of teaching computer science, I would “understand” the problem for them (put it in simplistic terms, over-simplifying), then with them I would “design” a solution (though even these simplistic problems might have had several approaches, we ended up with one).  They’d “solve” the problem (of course the detailed design encouraged almost identical solutions) and I would develop the test cases to see if their program “worked.”

There is little ownership by the students, little opportunity for real insight into any of these steps, little reason to learn and understand the programming techniques  beyond the next test.

I know I had to work hard to get  my students to expand their involvement beyond coding something that either we or I had understood, designed and assessed.  It wasn’t always easy but helping students find a context for their work with more realistic problems and situations always paid off with students being able to apply what they learned later in the course and more importantly in later courses.  Open-ended problems  helps out a lot.

Think about helping students understand the “why” along with the “how” of computer programming, especially when you’re given a course and a text to “cover” with a group of students.

Find a context for the content.

(full URL for the article:  http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/03/27/26crowley.h32.html?tkn=LNSFw%2FMoqekT4IEeYBSFfusZ4rOHVCeJYo%2F0&cmp=ENL-EU-VIEWS1 )

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. — Albert Einstein

On a recent Saturday, I had the distinct privilege of being part of one of the workshops being offered to Chicago Public School teachers who are teaching the Exploring Computer Science curriculum http://exploringcs.org. This was a terrific opportunity for me to experience what I had heard about a number of times from, among others, the authors Joanna Goode and Gail Chapman. You can get an excellent feel for this curriculum and how it fits in a larger scheme of change in CS instruction by reading the articles Beyond Access: Broadening Participation in High School Computer Science in the current (December, 2012) issue of ACM Inroads; also Beyond Curriculum: The Exploring Computer Science Program in the June 2012 issue of ACM Inroads

What makes this workshop very different from others I’ve attended is the focus not only on content but also on pedagogy. This was a computer science workshop where instead of just hearing about and playing with content, we were mostly exercising and (for most of us) challenging our thinking about teaching computer science. Much of the six-hour workshop was spent in small teams of 3-4 teachers who were given a lesson we (at least I) hadn’t seen before. We had about 90 minutes to come up with our approach to teaching this inquiry-based lesson and then later some of the teams were chosen and given the opportunity to actually teach our 40-minute lesson to the “class”. The beauty of this is that we didn’t just talk about inquiry-based teaching but actually practiced it among our peers.

The content itself was not difficult (and this is true for much of the course), but the change in pedagogy challenges the root behaviors of most teachers. The course lessons are set up to avoid lecturing as much as possible and to provide an interesting, engaging problem setting for the students to work on in pairs or groups. Collaboration, reflection, evaluation, higher order thinking skills are among the key elements.In fact there were three words that the workshop leaders wrote on the easel: Equity, Inquiry, Content. This really sums up the intent of this very successful curriculum. Each lesson in ECS is focused around these.

In fact, after reading, hearing and finally experiencing this curriculum, I’m convinced that all computer science, and probably all courses ought to be taught in this engaging manner. The key is the pedagogy – the shift in the instructional paradigm away from what most of us do now.

We aren’t succeeding in reaching lots of kids with the way we’re teaching computer science today. This approach provides a pathway to huge change in the classroom. We have to change to succeed.