We stayed an extra day in Portland to do some site seeing. I'll write about the tourist side in my final SIGCSE2024 post. Right now, we're back in the hotel resting before dinner so I thought I'd start the next part of my SIGCSE2024 report.

For Day one's first session, I attended Colleen Lewis's Microteaching session. I've wrote about this session last year and also about Colleen's recent appearance on the CSEd podcast where she discussed manipulatives. Much of Colleen's public facing work involves CS pedagogy and if you haven't noticed, I'm a fan.

Microteaching has fast become my favorite SIGCSE session. Six teachers each give a quick, abbreviated mini-lesson and afterwards Colleen highlights pedagogical techniques.

It's not perfect. The mini-lessons are taught out of context, the audience aren't the presenters real classes, and it's only something like a 10 minute snippet but still, it made for a great session.

In one mini-lesson, Colleen pointed out that the presenter gave the "class" (us) time to process a question before asking for responses. Questioning technique and timing is an important part of K12 teacher training and I'm betting it's not covered nearly enough at the college level. There's a huge amount to explore on questioning but a simple technique like this - waiting say, 10 seconds after asking a question before entertaining a response can be huge.

In another lesson, Colleen commented how the teacher provided to concrete but different examples to set the stage for a class exercise. I liked that particular lesson, delivered by Adam Blank because it wasn't a core lesson in his class but rather a fun side topic to set the stage for the cybersecurity work yet to come. He elicited suggestions from the class how they could first crack a safe (using the typical movie trope of listening with a stethoscope) and how to crack a keypad lock by looking at the worn out keys on the keypad. This led to a class "lab" where we had to figure out which mystery toy was in an egg shell without opening it. All of this was to teach the class about side channel attacks. It was terrific.

This went on for six mini-lessons in all.

It was a great session but I had one thought that might make it better. Instead of six mini-lessons, how about only three so that we'd then have time to discuss the lessons. This could be tricky because it puts the people presenting on the spot and open to criticism but it could be so valuable.

For example, in one of the mini-lessons, the instructor presented a binary tree. Each node had a student name on it and also a priority value.Later the teacher removed the names. Colleen highlighted that putting the name in to the tree (along with priority values) was a strong technique as was later removing them. I partially agreed with this but also felt that removing the names could also have weakened the lesson. We didn't have full context so I can't be sure. In any event, this could have led to some really rich discussion.

A second example, and one I loved was when one teacher engaged the "class" prior to the lesson. He asked a student their future plans and after an exchange invited the student to come to office hours to discuss. This was a great example of a hidden technique for a number of reasons. One reason in particular I'll address when I talk about the other SIGCSE keynotes but it's also a technique that can be a negative. On the plus side it's a way to engage the class at a more informal manner, it can be used to build class community and culture, and also, if it's a morning class, start to get sleep minds stirring (not to mention the plus I'll talk about later). On the other hand, if you do this consistently with just a couple of students, you risk building resentment or concern from the students that aren't part of the "in crowd."

All in all, a super session that gave attendees a chance to see aspects of teaching that are never covered in research papers and rarely talked about in general. Looking forward to next year's edition.

I think I'll organize the rest of my SIGCSE report into session types - BOFs, paper sessions, and panels so stay tuned for more.