From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching:
On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here.
You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help.
You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it.
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Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts:
1) Productive struggle
2) Feedback
Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss?
If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it.
This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners.
If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn.
In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with.
Next up is feedback...
Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong?
If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter?
These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle.
1) productive struggle is good
2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively
There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum.
Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.
When I was picking a dissertation topic I'd suggest things to my advisor and she'd say brightly, "Why don't you go do some research on that, come back in two weeks and tell me what you found?"
I'd go off to the library for a couple of weeks, do the reading, come back and say, "You know I think X is a terrible topic, the scholarship on it all seems to drag."
"Oh yes," she'd say, with a look that said this was the worst topic in the world.
"So why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?"
Then she'd get diplomatic. "You're young, maybe you see something that I don't!"
I realised though that it wasn't just that. Had she told me my idea about topic X was a loser, I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity. I really had to figure out on my own how much the topic sucked. It had to come from my own discovery, not from her authority.
Anyway, I do this now and it drives my students nuts, because they want me to hand them a paper topic, ideally tell them what books to read, and send them off so they can execute the steps. Meanwhile, I want them to spend time in the messy, difficult process of working things out. I think my process probably results in more failure (at least as far as the grades are concerned), but the good work is so much better.
I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity
Thanks for sharing this story.
I think a lot of about potential impacts like this on students/learners. My goals when teaching are to nurture agency, autonomy, and a positive disposition towards what is being learned in addition to a student learning the content or practices/skills.
People often misconstrue this as wanting to make learning "fun" for students. For me it begins with inversion, look at how to crush a student's spirit, agency, and disposition towards a topic. Don't do that.
Then find ways to put them in situations where they can struggle productively, be creative, show ingenuity, and see the fruits of doing so. Sometimes students aren't aware of their own ingenuity, creativity, or their own productive struggle so that gives me an opportunity to go meta with them and help them see it.
Yes, I love this! I try to convince my students to work on something they find interesting, even to take risks in doing so. My experience is that they tend to do better work when the topic reflects their own curiosity, obsessions.
Unfortunately the educational system I work in prioritizes conformity. I don't blame them for having a hard time taking a risk.
Unfortunately the educational system I work in prioritizes conformity.
I feel that in my bones.
If you see this I'd be curious to hear more about your education experience. Drop me a line at heymijo.hn at google mail if you'd like to continue the discussion :)
Btw, since this is HN and its oriented towards startups let me pull this out of the teaching world and into management.+
I'm not alone. Andy Grove and his concept of Task Relevant Maturity (TRM) have a lot of overlap here. Primarily in understanding that someone's prior knowledge/experience will dictate their ability to accomplish the task at hand.
Where I differ from Grove is how to help someone when their TRM is low. He states this is a time to tell them what/when/how.
1) In a structured org like Intel in the 80's when Grove wrote High Output Management, maybe this worked. In a startup where the work to be done is often as yet unknown by manager and worker alike, trying to tell someone what/when/how doesn't work
2) The ability to handle ambiguity is itself a skill and one people need to develop maturity in handling. This is where I see the idea of productive struggle/desirable difficulties as a useful addition to Grove's TRM framework
+Good teaching is good management--both roles are about developing people and setting them up for success
Thanks for this write up - the cognitive model of “productive struggle” is exactly the thing I was fumbling around in the dark for. This was really well explained and something I’m going to carry with me next time I run into a similar situation in the classroom. Much appreciated!
You're welcome. It's useful and enjoyable for me to see how people think through their teaching.
Should you want to find out more you can search "productive struggle nctm/math/teaching." The concept came to me via the math education community but I would actually recommend starting out with the work of Robert and Elizabeth Bjork [0,1].
The Bjorks have researched the same concept extensively. Their term for it is "desirable difficulties."
Their work made the leap from academia to popular culture via David Epstein's book, Range.
On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here.
You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help.
You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. ------------------------
Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback
Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss?
If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it.
This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners.
If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn.
In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with.
Next up is feedback...
Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong?
If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter?
These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle.
1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively
There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum.
Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.