Spring 2025: Welcome to the COGS 18 Teaching Staff!
Learning takes as many forms as there are learners, and no single formula or framework will apply to every student. Across this diverse array of learning styles, though, patterns have emerged and been studied with decades of academic research. Some are widely accepted, and some are still being understood. The more we know about how students learn and how people teach, the better we (and our students) can approach both of these processes.
As a teacher, you'll draw from both well-established realities and improvisation. You’ll have your own moments of insight, which could have the potential to become part of a new well-established reality. This means that when you do have interesting insights, it would be great to share them! Just like our students, we’re learning.
This training was created to be able to fit into weekly teaching staff meetings during a course. It has the following timeline:
Week 1 - 1 hour: The instructor holds a two hour staff meeting, one hour of which is general course logistics and anything else the instructor would like to cover, and the second hour of which is dedicated to the teaching staff training Week 1 materials on this site.
Each week - 30 mins: The instructor holds a one hour staff meeting each week, half an hour of which is for usual staff meeting discussions, and the second half hour of which is dedicated to the teaching staff materials on this site.
Then, there are to-dos assigned for each week. These should take each teaching staff member no more than one hour, with the intention that it can be included within their contracted hours (generally 10 or 20 hours per week for each teaching staff member, depending on the contract/appointment) with minimal impact on their other teaching staff duties.
Before the first teaching staff meeting, please read about the following:
Hidden curriculum (Philip Guo): Read (at least) the first 2 paragraphs.
Responding to students (Luther Tychonievich): Read/watch the materials in section 4.5: Responding to Students.
Week 1: Reflections on readings, structuring student interactions. Decide on groups for future weeks.
To Dos:
Read the materials in the sample dialogs page: Teaching Staff Training: Sample Dialogs. Then, with your group, write about the following (can be bullets, paragraphs, anything you like):
Things you learned from the sample dialogs
What you’d like to improve on in teaching this quarter
Week 2: Reflections on Teaching Staff Training: Sample Dialogs, and role-play/mock tutoring sessions. Discuss what we learned in these role-plays.
To Dos:
Sign up for a week with your group to present (every group should sign up for at least 1 week).
Start taking a look at the learning theories primer and start familiarizing yourself with the ideas there.
Groups present on a learning theory from the learning theories primer. Non-presenting members come up with practice questions or other materials and reflections related to the topic of the week.
Week 3: Behaviorism
Week 4: Cognitivism
Week 5: Constructivism
Week 6: Situativism & Socio Cultural Theories
To Dos:
Presentations (if you're the presenting group for the week), and creating practice questions based on/inspired by the current week's learning theory (if not presenting).
Groups complete readings from The ABCs of How We Learn and other reading materials. For the readings, ideally you’ll get a chance to read the whole chapter for each, but if not, there are 1-2 page chapter summaries at the end.
To Dos:
For each week, complete the readings, and with your group, come up with at least one discussion question and one way that it applies to your student interactions in COGS 18.
Read the A, K, and W chapters from The ABCs of How We Learn.
These chapters talk about key teaching strategies. Analogies are a helpful technique that many of us use, and it’s important to think about what makes an analogy helpful or unhelpful to students. The knowledge chapter talks about how sometimes the most “efficient” way of giving someone information isn’t the best at helping them learn–letting students take a winding path to understand why something works is often helpful. On the other hand, sometimes worked examples are helpful for students to directly see all the steps to solving a problem. With your group, think about how you decide which approach to take in a given situation.
An amazing teaching staff training course is here: https://luthert.web.illinois.edu/UVA_CS2910_S2021/. This course was created by Luther Tychonievich, a teaching professor at UIUC (previously at UVA, where he developed this training). All of the topics there are worth thinking about and reading, but this week we’re going to focus on cognitive load theory and diversity and implicit bias.
You’ll find these in the “Student Learning” section and “Diversity – TA-mind and external phenomena” on that page (screenshots shown below). There’s a written version of the content, along with a video version. You’re welcome to choose either to read/watch. You’re welcome (and encouraged!) to read/watch all of them, but the ones we want to make sure everyone covers are CLT Intro, CLT and TAing, IB, and IB Mitigation.
Note that some of the “Computing Parallels” might be a bit technical (e.g. they refer to things like “registers” that you may not have encountered before)–these are not strictly necessary for understanding the content, so don’t worry if you’ve never heard of them. If you’re interested though, you can ask others in your group if anyone knows about them and wants to explain the analogy being made (or feel free to search online).
How might these topics relate to each other? Are there perhaps ways that underrepresented students might experience more cognitive load as they try to “prove” that they belong or managing how they are perceived? Discuss each of the topics and how they relate
Read the N, O, and T chapters from The ABCs of How We Learn.
This week’s chapters all relate to the idea of leading by example. We set Norms by exemplifying behaviors we want our students to emulate; they Observe us and pick up our behaviors (both content-related and interpersonal things like respecting classmates). As a Teacher, you’re setting an example for the depth of knowledge you want students to have in a particular topic (and you can help them see why certain things are/aren’t important to understand–and, as the chapter says, learn it better yourself!)
Read the M, P, and R chapters from The ABCs of How We Learn.
This week’s chapters all relate to the idea of student buy-in and intrinsic motivation. Students are much more willing to learn and complete coursework when they understand why it’s important to them–that is, when they’ve bought in to something being a good idea. These chapters all cover strategies to make clearer connections between what students are learning and why it’s in their best interest to do so–in some cases, explicitly creating rewards for learning behaviors we want.
This training has been developed by Annapurna Vadaparty with support from Shannon Ellis, with inspiration from the following sources:
Daniel Schwartz, Jessica Tsang, and Kristen Blair - The ABCs of How We Learn
Justin Hsia, Ruth Anderson, Nathan Brunelle - UW Teaching Assistant Training
Brett Wortzman - Equitable and Inclusive Computer Science Pedagogy
Many thanks to Philip Guo, Sam Lau, Nancy Qiu, and Kumar Vadaparty for illuminating discussions about teacher training and help with the materials presented here.