[A transcript of the SIGCSE 2010 conference: Table of Contents]
I spent most of my afternoon at the New Educators Roundtable, as on of the veteran faculty seeding and guiding conversation. The veteran team came from big schools like Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and Washington, medium-sized schools like Creighton and UNI, and a small liberal-arts college, Union. The new educators themselves came from this range of schools and more (one teaches at Milwaukee Area Technical College up the street) and were otherwise an even more mixed lot, ranging from undergrads to university instructors with several years experience. The one thing they all have in common is a remarkable passion for teaching. They inspired this old-timer with their energy for 100-hour work weeks and their desire to do great things in the classroom. The conversation ranged as far and as wide as the participants' backgrounds and experience. leaders Julie Zelenski and Dave Reed wisely planned not to impose much structure on the workshop, instead letting the the participants drive the conversation with questions and observations. We elders interjected with stories and observations of our own -- and even a question or two of our own, which let the young ones know that they'll still be learning the craft of teaching when they get old like us. I did end up with one new item for my list of books to read: Mindset, by Carol Dweck. It came up in a discussion about how to help students overcome an unhealthy focus on grades, which eventually turned into a discussion about student motivation and attitudes about what it takes to succeed in CS. As one elder summarized nicely, "It's not about talent. It's about work." -----