Teaching new concept

Last week, a young teacher told me: “I do not understand why so many students are having difficulty with basic concepts such as sorts, searches, and binary tree. I spent two weeks teaching them but most still do not understand it. It is frustrating.”

I told him: “As computer science teacher, these basic concepts are so obvious to you because you are the expert but to the students, this is the first time they learn it so they need time. What you need is to put yourself in the student's place, you should try to understand what is happening in the student's mind as they have not yet developed the skills. What you need is to help students identify their misunderstanding, confusion, or errors and correct them so they can learn and develop their own skills.”

He asked: “What do you suggest?”

I explained: “When learning new concept, there are things that students do not clearly understand. You cannot just lecture and expect them to know everything but you need to ask them questions, give them problems to solve to prove that they understand it. Asking questions is easy but not effective because you do not know who among them understand well and who do not since only some will answer your questions. A better way to teach new concept is to give students some tasks to do to demonstrate that they know the concept well and by actually doing it several times they will develop the skills. After given lecture, you need to ask students to identify any specific difficulties, or confusions about the new concept. If they cannot describe them, you should determine where they are having trouble by give them some simple tasks to solve. This slows down the class teaching but it is important to build a solid foundation before go to the next topics. You should select a student who completes the task well to explain it to the class by solving it on the black board so others can see it rather than you give them the correct answer. After that, you modify the task slightly and have the whole class works through the task on their own. By this time, most students should be able to do that but there are few who are still confused so you select another student to solve the task on the board again so the whole class can see how the problem is solved the second time. You modify the task again then let the class works on it the third time to see if anyone is still having difficulty. As teacher, you should let students solve problems themselves and only provide assistance when needed.”

“Basically, when trying to solve problems, many students are unsure of themselves. This lack of confidence prevent them from learning the new concept. It is important to encourage them to be independent by giving them some feeling of accomplishment. That is why instead of solving the problem yourself on the black board, you should let other students do it and continue the task two or three times. This will provide positive reinforcement to let students know that they can do it themselves. It is important to let them solve problems several times until they actually learn it rather than give the correct answer so student will learn that there is no such instant solution. They must learn through their own pace of actually “doing it to learn it.” By refuse to give the answer, you encourage them to learn by seeing examples of problem solving given by other students. If their classmates can do it, they can do it too and this is where they learn to build confident in themselves and develop their own problem solving skills.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University

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