Deductive Lecture

Through the course discussions with my peers I learned that it is most common in my discipline to teach deductively, introducing students to core computer science concepts through lectures. 

I include a one-hour lecture at the beginning of my full-day, week-long bootcamp-style courses to provide an overview of a topic, key concepts and definitions and to discuss the context of where a concept can exist and why. 

Using the more traditional lecture format in my discipline to outline concepts this way allows students to learn concepts and reflect them in interviews in a similar way to their peers. My hope, of course, is that they gain a competitive edge through the project and case-based learning throughout the rest of the day that allows them to apply these core concepts directly to industry partner projects and more interactive and inductive activities.

Inductive Tutorial

In this part of the session, I as a lecturer have a step-by-step technical tutorial ready for students to follow along with. Often handouts are given out at the beginning of this section of the session so that students have multiple means of engagement with the material and can move through the illustrated and printed out tutorial or follow-along with the slides and my verbal instruction. 

Sometimes we will complete one long tutorial in this hour. Other times we will perform multiple code katas to cover a spread of concepts that are similar or can be synthesized and applied in various ways by students to build to a larger project in the afternoon. It is also possible that only part of the tutorial will be handed out and students will be invited to get creative with the end of the project, or, alternatively, attempt to backwards engineer the end of the project to learn a programmatic concept and then explain to us what they discovered.

This approach to learning comes out of my non-traditional background in education and industry, where I was trained as an apprentice in a large ecommerce company by imitating production code and creating mock projects according to company specs rather than learning deductively through a Computer Science degree, as is common for many folks in my industry. 

Combined with the more traditional deductive lecture, this approach to instruction elevates the commercial bootcamp model to combine skills and knowledge to create student outcomes.

Interactive Summary

Reflection

Interactive summaries can take different forms and are meant to engage students in active memory creation and active recall. 

These activities use 10-15 minutes of the end of class time to invite students to actively engage in summarizing key concepts from the day. 

Approaches can include: 

• 1-minute papers
  - having all students write on a cue card the key takeaway or most important concept from the day
  - in larger classes, these can be collected and reflected back at students by the lecturer; in smaller classes these can be read aloud by the students themselves
• A Kahoot quiz
  - this is an online quiz that has fun music and interactive animations 
  - teachers can make quizzes for any topic they like and use these as formative assessments
  - my preference is to start rather than finish the day with this summary activity
• a student becomes the teacher for 3 minutes
  - a different student every day comes up and summarizes three key points from the class and asks other students if they agree with the summary points
  - the student then collects these in 3 main points on the whiteboard once consensus is reached

Reflections are assigned at the end of the day for students to take home and consider. The reflections' main goal and purpose is to connect the day's learning with other topics in the class, as well as to connect the learning to the student's everyday or professional life outside of the classroom. 

Activities can include: 

• finding a YouTube video that demonstrates the meaning or feeling of a topic explored in class and sharing this with the class or in a forum post
• one sentence summary - this activity can be completed in a short time at the end of class. The student is invited to write a one sentence summary of the class and keep them in a journal for prompting for memory recall later. In later summaries, students should reflect on previous summaries and describe how ideas connect or if they would revise what they had summarized previously.
• create a spreadsheet of new terms and define them
• create a mindmap of the concepts from the week or between multiple units of study