TITLE: Learning by Guided Struggle AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: May 30, 2017 4:28 PM DESC: ----- BODY: A few years ago, someone asked MathOverflow, "Why do so many textbooks have so much technical detail and so little enlightenment?" Some CS textbooks suffer from this problem, too, though these days the more likely case is that the book tries to provide too much context. They try to motivate so much that they drown the reader in a lot of unhelpful words. The top answer on MathOverflow (via Brian Marick) points out that the real problem does not usually lie in the lack of motivation or context provided by textbooks. The real goal is to learn how to do math, not "know" it. That is even more true of software developent. A textbook can't really teach to write programs; most of that is learned through doing itself. Perhaps the best purpose that the text can serve, says the answer, is to show the reader what he or she needs to learn. From there, the reader must go off and practice. How does learning occur from there?
Based on my own experience as both a student and a teacher, I have come to the conclusion that the best way to learn is through "guided struggle". You have to do the work yourself, but you need someone else there to either help you over obstacles you can't get around despite a lot of effort or provide you with some critical knowledge (usually the right perspective but sometimes a clever trick) you are missing. Without the prior effort by the student, the knowledge supplied by a teacher has much less impact.
Some college CS students seem to understand this, or perhaps they simply get lucky because they are motivated to program for some other reason. They go off and try to do something using the knowledge they have. Then they come to class, or to the prof's office hours, to ask questions about what does not go smoothly. Students who skip the practice and hope that lectures will soak into them like a magic balm generally find that they don't know much when they attempt problems after class. The MathOverflow answer matches up pretty well with my experience. Teachers and written material can have strong positive effect on learning, but they are most effective once the student has engaged with the material by trying to solve problems or write code. The teacher's job then has two parts: First, create conditions in which students can work productively. Second, pay close attention to what students are doing, diagnose misconceptions and mistakes, and help students get back onto a productive path by pointing out missing practices or bits of knowledge. All of this reminds me of some of mymore effective class sessions teaching novice programmers, using design patterns. A typical session looks something like this: This is a guided struggle in the small. Students then go off to write a larger program that lets them struggle a bit more, and we discuss whatever gets in their way. A final note... One of the comments on the answer points out that a good lecture can "do" math (or CS), rather than "tell", and that such lectures can be quite effective. I agree, but in my experience this is one of the hardest skills for a professor to develop. Once I have solved a problem, it is quite difficult for me to make it look to my students as if I am solving it anew in class. The more ingrained the skill, the harder it is for me to lecture about it in a way that is more helpful than telling a story. Such stories are an essential tool in the teacher's toolbox, but their lies more in motivating students than in teaching them how to write programs. Students still have to go off and do the hard work themselves. The teacher's job is to guide them through their struggles. -----