Category: Pedagogy

Asynchronous lessons

Halite
3D model of halite unit cell from GeoMod

An interesting thing happened last week that I perhaps should have anticipated. Because we had a little extra time during Thanksgiving week I offered to do a technology lesson on 3d programming if anyone was interested. One student was very interested and a couple others wanted to do it later. I usually try to do basic lessons for everyone at the same time in order to save time, but because the one students was very excited about the lesson I just gave it to them.

Over the next two days, the first student had given the lesson to another who’d planned to wait until later, and I was having requests from other students who had not been interested in programming at all to be able to do the subject.

I guess I learned a couple things from this. First, that asynchronous lessons might be something I should do more often. If certain students are more interested in the subject then the lesson is more effective given to them. Second, that student interest in infectious. If they are excited about a subject they tend to want to share with others, and that seems like a very effective way of propagating information; each student only gets the info when their interest has been sparked. Furthermore, since different students are more interested in different subjects they, theoretically, all have the opportunity to be the expert, if they’re interested in that type of recognition. The trick, I guess, is making sure that everyone gets the lesson and information at some point before they loose interest.

Cat traps

One interesting metaphor for teacher-student interactions is that of cats and dogs. Cats tend to want things like acknowledgment and praise on their own terms. They can be quite the challenge to interact with and it is often difficult to get them to show interest in anything. One thing that’s worked for me is to leave “cat traps” around the classroom. The box of pulleys, or a couple boxes with batteries, wires and motors. The “traps” are usually related to something we’ll be covering later in the year, but they are left out with no explanation or instructions for purely exploratory experimentation. I might, if they seem interested, show them something cool that can be done with the gear once I see them start playing with them on their own.

By the time the subject comes around in the curriculum the cats have usually developed a pretty good basic idea of the gear and have often shared this with others. I think it is a great way of driving learning through intrinsic student interests and peer-teaching. The only problem, is sometimes the students will gravitate toward the traps more than toward what they’re supposed to be doing.