Pedagogy#

In this section we discuss how the structure (Scope, Scaffolding, Purpose) supports pedagogical goals.

Structure#

Three structural elements are important for an effective session: scoping, scaffolding, and purpose.

  • Scoping is the art of choosing what—and especially what not—to include in a session.

  • Scaffolding is the process of building later skill development on prior skill development.

  • Purpose provides an answer to the participant who asks, “Why should I care about this?”

Scope#

When leading a session, it’s tempting to want to comprehensively cover all important aspects of a tool, method, or skill. After all, this is an area you’re expert in, and every topic left out of the session is likely something you use frequently and find indispensable. However, in most cases, students will come away having learned more if a lesson is carefully scoped—that is, covering only carefully selected material. This allows the session to account for unexpected delays, which occur approximately 100% of the time. It also allows for review, question and answer, unstructured practice, and challenges. These approaches don’t need to be present in every lesson, but they can often improve outcomes for students.

People tend to underestimate how long tasks will take in practice and to overestimate how much material it’s feasible to cover in a lesson. There’s a name for this phenomenon: the planning fallacy. For this reason, you should err on the side of planning to cover less material in a session. To make this easier, build in some challenges or unstructured activities to your lesson, ones that can be omitted or shortened if you’re running out of time. Often, you’ll find you don’t have time for these, but including them can increase your confidence in a well-scoped lesson.

Scaffolding#

Scaffolding is the art of structuring lessons so that students begin with more fundamental concepts or tasks and work towards increasingly difficult learning goals. With technical sessions, this often means finding ways to introduce concepts in isolation, so that students can come to terms with them without distraction from additional new or unfamiliar concepts. New methods and new vocabulary should be introduced explicitly rather than implicitly, and students should have time to integrate new knowledge before moving on to new information.

When thinking about the structure of your lesson, consider what jargon or terms of art will be essential for students to know and plan where and how you’ll introduce those words or concepts. Don’t use jargon terms before introducing them.

When planning a lesson, try to make your tooling and setup look as close to your students’ as possible. For example, if you have shell modifications, disable them before teaching. If that’s not possible, explain any differences students might be seeing. Remember that students are trying to match patterns in an unfamiliar and cognitively taxing environment and may not know what differences are significant and which are merely cosmetic.

Try to incorporate review into your lesson organically. If a concept won’t be used repeatedly throughout your lesson, you might consider leaving it out altogether. Challenges or unstructured practice can also provide opportunities for review.

Purpose#

The most common question in a workshop is, “How does this relate to my research?” Researchers are more motivated to learn when they know that a tool or method can be used directly to advance their own goals. One way to help researchers to understand the purpose of a tool or method is to structure the lesson around a “deliverable”—a website, a piece of persuasive writing, a cleaned data set, an application, a visualization, or any other useful product. Even if the result does not relate directly to a participant’s research, it’s often easier to extrapolate usefulness from a concrete product than from a series of loosely coupled actions or skills.

Working toward creating a specific artifact in your lesson can also help with scaffolding and scoping. If you know exactly what students will need to learn to create, for example, a course website, that makes it easier to leave out concepts that don’t directly relate to that goal. It also suggests discrete steps and challenges that students must engage before completing the deliverable, often leading to a more intuitive lesson structure.

SRI Workshop planning resources#

  • Also see: