TITLE: How We Share Teaching Practice
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 13, 2007  8:23 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
... or <STRONG>When the Seventh Commandment Doesn't Apply</STRONG>

I have had
<A HREF="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/conferences/icer2007/papers/1.pdf">
   Warren's Question</A>,
a paper by Sally Fincher and Josh Tenenberg, in my <TT>to-read/</TT>
folder for a while, since soon after it hit the
<A HREF="http://www.cc.gatech.edu/conferences/icer2007/">
   ICER 2007</A>
conference web site.  (The paper will be presented on Saturday.)
I grabbed it on my way to get a sandwich yesterday, for a nice
lunchtime read.  I am glad I did, and that surprises me.  I didn't
expect to enjoy it as much as I did.

Why wouldn't I enjoy it?  Well, it's a CS education paper.  That
sounds wrong, I know, but "education papers" usually turn me off
before I can get to the value.  Section titles such as "The
political context of self-disclosure" make my technical self cringe.
I am sympathetic to the goals of CS education research, but the
jargon and methodological baggage usually overwhelm me.

By skimming through the paper I was able to find the basic story,
and it drew me in, and I soon realized that the paper makes some
good points and raises some interesting questions.

The story of Warren's question is one of teachers sharing their
practical knowledge.  Fincher and Tenenberg deconstruct several
messages on a mailing list of CS instructors, starting with a couple
of questions from Warren seeking help on teaching interactively and
on fixing a broken lab grading procedure.  He receives answers off-list
to some questions, and some answers on-list that answer obliquely but
offer advice of a more general nature.

This is how most teaching knowledge is shared: one-on-one, or in small
groups of friends.  Many people refer to this style exchange as stealing.
There is almost a badge of honor among some of my friends and colleagues
to steal from as many accomplished, creative teachers as possible.
I steal shamelessly from people such as
<A HREF="http://www.cs.duke.edu/~ola/">
   Owen Astrachan</A>,
<A HREF="http://www.cs.duke.edu/~rcd/">
   Robert Duvall</A>,
<A HREF="http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/">
   Joe Bergin</A>,
and
<A HREF="http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~clancy/">
   Mike Clancy </A>,
and I've heard from others that they have stolen ideas from me.  Good
ideas spread through networks of friends and colleagues, sometimes
jumping into new pools through journal publications and conference
presentations.

Fincher and Tenenberg point out that this means of sharing knowledge has
several shortcomings.  It's not that stealing is wrong, or that most
folks mind that their ideas have been lifted.  I'm happy to hear that
someone has found one of my ideas or techniques so useful that he has
adapted it for his own use.  My friends and I share ideas with the
expectation that others might find them useful -- that's the point.

But informal sharing of this share results in a loss of
<EM>provenance</EM>.  In the arts, a work's provenance is the record
of the work's history, in particular its ownership.  This "audit trail"
offers some measure of confidence in the authenticity of the work,
which reduces the risk of being defrauded in exchange.  When it comes
to teaching practice, provenance isn't really about the risk of being
sold a fake; it's more about trusting the efficacy of the technique in
practice:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
If we do not know the history of the practice we examine, then we
take it as if new.  We cannot tell whether this is long-established
and well-evolved, worked on by respected educators over time, or
whether it was fresh-minted yesterday.  Not only that, but we cannot
know why any adaptations, or changes, have been made.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

If I knew a technique originated with Owen Astrachan, has been
adapted by Nick Parlante for use in an object-oriented course, and
has been "ported" to interactive classes by Robert Duvall, then I'll
feel a lot more confident about using the technique in my interactive
OOP classroom than if the technique comes to me blind, from a source
I don't know -- and so, out of safety, trust less.  In a network of
friends, provenance is part of the group's collective memory.  But
groups evolve over time, and ideas leak out into into groups who do
not share the memory.

This loss of provenance leads to a "rootlessness and reinvention of
practice" that hampers the improvement of teaching everywhere.  We
all keep reinventing the wheel.

How does this differ from the research side of academia?  In the
research culture, stealing from others is strictly forbidden.  One
must cite the work of others and acknowledge the source of ideas.
This plays several important roles in the culture, among them giving
credit for the development of theories, authenticating the trail of
ideas, differentiating work done in different contexts, and
evaluating the efficacy of theories.

When I speak of lifting ideas as standard practice, I am exaggerating
a bit.  Stealing isn't really okay.  Whenever I see someone using an
idea I think I developed, I feel a violated, much as I do when
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-07.html#e2004-07-25T15_28_10.htm">
   someone steals my treasure</A>.
When we appropriate an idea, we should share credit.  I may steal
shamelessly, but I tell everyone where I got the candy.  But when we
share credit informally, we still lose the provenance of the idea.
Publication and citing the work of others is still the primary way 
to document teaching practice formally.  When there is no archival
publication to cite, the author becomes the first line of history
and has to document her sources in the new paper.

Documenting teaching practice, beyond documenting research results,
would help us to teach computer science better, and that would help
us to improve computer science and help the CS community serve the
world better.  This is one of the insights of the software patterns
community: that documenting software development practice from the
trenches can improve the state of software development.  The writers'
workshops of
<A HREF="http://www.hillside.net/conferences/plop.htm">
   PLoP</A>
both help to share practice and to help practitioners communicate
their practice more effectively.

The patterns culture came to the teaching world in the form of
<A HREF="http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/">
   pedagogical patterns</A>,
which draw their inspiration from software patterns but aim to
record the practice of experienced instructors.  This movement
started in the domains of software development and computer science,
but that is an artifact of history.  The techniques so far documented
as pedagogical patterns are more general.

The CS education community has non-pattern venues for sharing teaching
practice.  In addition to refereed papers, SIGCSE has for several years
offered
<A HREF="http://nifty.stanford.edu/">
   nifty assignments</A>
sessions that open what once was a closed network of colleagues to the
broader community, and that now offer a platform to a wider set of
instructors.  Likewise, at
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/">
   OOPSLA</A>
one once found
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/elementary/conferences/oopsla98_workshop.html">
   workshops on teaching OO design</A>
and recently has offered a series of
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/index.php?page=sub/&id=161">
   "killer examples" workshops</A>.

Fincher and Tenenberg argue that, even if we had a more complete
literature of teaching practice, the task of finding what one needs
would be difficult.  It is hard to specify all of the variables in
play within most teaching scenarios, which makes it hard to index
resources and then traverse the literature.  In the language of
patterns, teachers have a hard time characterizing the problem that
a technique solves and the context in which the technique applies.
I experienced this difficulty when trying to write pedagogical
patterns, and observed it when I read pedagogical patterns written
by others.  How does one define the context and problem concretely
enough to be useful?  Without such boundaries, a pattern has more
the character of a sweet sentiment than a teaching technique.

Researchers engage in abstraction and instantiation.  So do teachers.
They
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-05.html#e2007-05-16T15_53_48.htm">
   tell stories</A>.
Together, the story teller and the hearer generalize the story out
of the teller's context and adapt it to work in other contexts.

I gain from being a part of networks of colleagues who discuss and
share practice.  I'm on a couple of mailing lists like the one described
in "Warren's Question", and they all enrich my teaching, as well as
my appreciation for computer science.  I play a slightly different
role on each list and enjoy a different status.  On one particular,
I am a peripheral member of a core group of friends who are master CS
teachers.  Over the years, I have become friends with several of them
through various ways and thus came to be attached to the fringe of the
group.  On another, I am a core member and a leader.  Whatever my role,
I find that I learn much from my interactions with the group, as we
share ideas and their results.

That's one of the reasons I like to blog.  It gives me a venue in which
to tell an occasional story about what I do and how it turns out in the
trench with my students.  Many of those ideas are "stolen" -- from
friends one-on-one, from other blogs, and even from from other contexts.
For example, I love to make connections between software development
and teaching, and between software development and running.  I like to
look for ways to improve how I teach from writing, other arts, running
and other sports, almost any source.  But my blog gives me a way to
give credit to the source of my ideas -- colleagues, authors, and whole
other disciplines.  A blog may not be as formal as archival publication,
or as highly respected, but it does allow a more immediate exchange of
ideas and a far wider conversation than I could ever have with just my
friends.

As usual for me, reading "Warren's Question" is just a starting point.
I have long known about Donald Schon's books on the reflective
practitioner and heard of how good they are.  But I must confess...
I have never read Schon.  Given the applicability of his ideas to so
many ideas that have occupied me over the years -- apprenticeship and
studio instruction among them, I really should be embarrassed.  I was
really intrigued by Fincher and Tenenberg's discussion of Schon's
"hall of mirrors" and how one's ideas are reflected back when adopted
and modified by others, and so I think I'll be making a short trip to
the library soon!
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