Teaching the Tidyverse (January 2019 edition)

Copyright 2019, RStudio Inc. All material made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license.

Contributors:

• Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel
• Garrett Grolemund
• Greg Wilson

Please see https://github.com/rstudio-education/teach-the-tidyverse for the original. (We expect that this material will be folded into that repository once it's completed.)

Day 1

1. Getting Started (0:15/09:15)

2. Two Ways to Teach (0:45/10:00)

   • 01-two-ways-to-teach.key
   • Introductions
   • Comparison with movie/play (add comedy improv)
   • Tell participants there's lots of research (much of which people don't know/act on)
   • Explain schedule for both days
   • Explain what active learning is (creates a real-time feedback loop in class)
   • Introduce cognitive architecture diagram (revisit it several times)
     • Teaching is "load into short-term memory and keep it there long enough to be transferred"
   • Bloom's Taxonomy
     • Use revised version from early 2000s
     • Google isn't enough if you don't know what to search for or how to recognize a useful answer when you find one
     • GG added "awareness" to the bottom of the Bloom hierarchy since it's the most realistic goal for a workshop like this
   • Exercise: classify three learning objectives by level

3. Novice/Competent Practitioner/Expert (0:45/10:45)

   • Mental models
     • Emphasize linkages: we rarely forget completely, but we lose the ability to retrieve
   • Mental models don't have to be right to be useful (ball-and-spring models in chemistry)
   • Concept maps as visual representations of mental models
   • Using concept maps:
     • To design lesson
     • To convey information to learners
     • For insight into their learning
   • Exercise: draw and compare concept maps for ggplot2

4. Coffee (0:15/11:00)

5. Teaching as Performance I (0:45/11:45)

   • Critique the Nederbragt videos
     • https://youtu.be/bXxBeNkKmJE
     • https://youtu.be/SkPmwe_WjeY
   • Exercise: teach in pairs (no recording)
   • Build rubric for use in afternoon

6. The Cognitive Craft (0:45/12:30)

   • Revisit cognitive architecture diagram and introduce 7 +/- 2
   • Lesson "scenes" should fit into working memory
     • Use exercises/discussion/elaborative examples to keep new material there long enough to be transcribed
   • Cognitive load theory (as is)
   • Exercise: outline a faded example

7. Lunch (0:45/13:15)

8. Formative Assessment (0:30/13:45)

   • Importance of feedback loop while teaching (for instructor as well as learners)
   • MCQ example
   • Dual purposes of formative assessments (feedback loop + reinforcement)
   • Different kinds of formative assessment
   • Exercise: create MCQ and explain misconceptions it diagnoses

9. Teaching as Performance II (1:00/14:45)

   • In threes (recorded) using morning rubric
   • Lead up to the MCQ

10. Coffee (0:15/15:00)

11. Motivation (0:45/15:45)

    • Three big motivators (self-efficacy, utility, community)
    • Three big demotivators (unpredictability, unfairness, indifference)
    • Zone of Proximal Development
    • Exercise: what demotivates people in programming classes and how do we prevent/fix it?

12. Multimedia Learning (0:45/16:30)

    • Material drawn primarily from 04-Make-It-Clear.pdf
    • Exercise: create a visual to explain what the course is about

13. Wrapping Up/Looking Forward (0:30/17:00)

    • Summarize what we have learned
    • Gather open questions
    • Remind participants of Day 2's agenda(s)

To Do

• Expert blind spot (from 04-Make-It-Clear.key)
• 6-point pitch template ("for people who...")