Last time I was in Portland Oregon was March 2020. Came in for SIGCSE - the big CS Education conference. Got in a couple of days early, played tourist, and then morning of, everything was canceled. Flew back to NYC on a near empty jet and Covid became very, very real.

March 2024 and I'm back in Portland and SIGCSE's giving it another go. This time I came out with my daughter Batya who's developed an interest in CS education and my wife Devorah who's been playing tourist while we've been conferencing.

The conference kicked off with a keynote by Todd Zakrajsek of UNC. I was ready to be disappointed. A researcher, that is, not a teacher who's spent decades all day every day in the classroom, who's published lots of books about how to teach and he's going to tell me how to teach.

I couldn't have been more wrong. Content wise, he was spot on. Maybe the bet SIGCSE keynote I've attended. Delivery? He was great there as well.

He gave some backstory - first in family to go to college. Almost flunked out, wanted to be a cop - never thought of becoming an educator and over the talk also kept hitting a few key points.

One of the overarching themes was that there is no single true way. Right from the start, he emphasized, for instance that lecturing wasn't necessarily bad and that active learning wasn't always necessarily the best. Lecturing can be effective but good lecturing with some good active learning smatterred in can be even more effective. He later said "I love constructivism when I have the time." I loved that. I spent five or six years around a decade ago hearing from the "experts" that constructivism was the one true way ignoring the fact that it was neither practical for most public school CS teachers nor was it optimal due to a variety of constraints. It was refreshing to hear this expert say what my team and I have been saying for years. There are lots of ways to teach and what's best at any given time depends on a lot of factors and the most effective teachers figure out what tool to use when and where.

Related to this, Zakrajsek emphasized that failure was a combination of student and teacher. It's not solely the student's fault nor solely the teacher's. This is related to another pedagogical thought I've long pitched - the best technique to use at any given time is best determined by evaluating a combination of student needs and situation, teacher's strengths, and contextual circumstances.

Even though this first theme considered both teacher and student, it came across to me as a teacher issue - ultimately, it was how to teach. Another theme I felt was much more student centered.

The focus was introvert and extrovert.

Group work? Another "one true way" to teach that has been foisted upon teachers on and off for decades. Zakrajsek claimed, and I agreed, that while some students love and thrive under it, some hate it. Similarly some like and do much better with lectures.

He also spoke of the extrovert who would raise their hand before the question was even finished vs the introvert who took their time and pondered before even considering responding and that as teachers we must work to accommodate both.

I chuckled when he told a story of when he was a guest speaker in a class and when a student kept raising his hand before the question was even finished, he'd call on him and ask him to answer. I chuckled because what he did was very similar to how I handled a similar student in my class.

Back to the group work, another theme was that students don't know how to do it unless you teach them - the hidden curriculum and that's frequently ignored.

This led Zakrajsek to another theme - that when he started he thought teaching was about content but later he realized it was about learning to learn.

This resonated with me. Zakrajsek was 100% right but it's 100% not how teachers are prepared today. Too often teachers are not given the toolbox of methods and the deep content knowledge to develop educational experiences appropriate for their populations. Rather their given canned curricula, scripts, and instructions - what to teach and how to teach it. Far too many of today's teachers are trained to deliver specific content in a specific way and far too few are prepared to teach students how to learn how to learn.

Todd Zakrajsek's keynote was really amazing. Maybe I'm just saying it because it echoed so many of my thoughts about teaching and teacher preparation and he was really entertaining but I'll stand by that statement.

It was a great way to kick off the conference. There was a lot more to come on day 1. A great session on teaching, some papers on software engineering, lightening talks, and then a god BOF and a really bad one.

I'll save those for my next couple of posts.

For now, I'll just say, if and when Todd Zakrajsek's keynote is made available online, watch it.