💡Choose the Best Method for Teaching Your Programming Course. Part 1📖

Knowledge is a valuable thing. People have been trying to learn something new for as long as humanity exists. That’s why teaching became such a necessary, complex and demanding profession. Over the years the methods of presenting the subject matter to ensure students’ mastery over it have been evolving. Their effectiveness highly depends on the subject itself and the learning abilities of your students. Many teachers prefer to combine several methods in their practice to broaden the spectrum of students’ perception.

There are different classification of teaching methods. So, we’ll go over the most common ones to give you an understanding and the field to choose from for your own class. This is the first article in the series, in which we’ll go over the basic instruction teaching methods.

Instruction methods:

Lecturing

Lecture is considered to be the oldest, easiest and the most used method of teaching. It can be applied to any subject, since it doesn’t requite many or any supplementary materials or activities. The teacher presents information for a large audience, he is the source of instructions. The students are more like passive listeners who have to pay attention and stay focused to acquire knowledge with minimal interactions with the teacher. It minimizes their involvement, but on the bright side, it might actually improve their listening skills.

The lecture method is the most inexpensive in terms of time and effort. Of course, it also depends on the teacher, how good and dedicated he is to elaborating the content. The teacher who wants to make the most out of his lecture might actually use audio-visual aids. Some of the teachers might just monotonously read (yeah, really just read) the whole lecture until students pass out from boredom.

Some of the students learn better through listening, so lecture is a good way for them to obtain knowledge. Also, lecture is good for making an into into the subject matter or to cover some large topic unit. It’s also not a bad choice when you already have some additional knowledge to build upon. An interesting lecture can motivate students and make them more excited about getting further into the particular subject. It can also be useful for filling some gabs and clarifying concepts. Mostly, lecture is an okay thing for creating a background for more deep understanding of the material.

As a teacher you have to make preparations for the lecture (especially if you are using additional materials, like presentation, slides, audio or video), figure out how are you going to motivate students, keep their attention and interest. The lecture has to be planned out the same way as any other lesson. (We’ve actually covered the importance of being prepared for a lesson). You should make introduction to captivate students and then present the body of the lecture in the most logical way. This means giving the information step by step, systematically relying to the already known or related data. Also, you always have to make a wrap up concluding and summarizing the main points. Even if students lost your trail of thought somewhere along the way, they can recover some crucial info and form generalizations.

To my opinion, there are two main disadvantages of this method. The first one is that students are mostly uninvolved, only with the exception of asking questions when teacher allows it. And the second is that individual differences of students aren’t being taken into the consideration, everyone should keep up with the teacher in the center.

Demonstrating

The demonstration method is usually used when students cannot connect theories with the practical usage. So, basically, demonstration is needed to ensure students’ ability to apply the obtained knowledge. It can be used for a group of students as well as for the individual lessons. The method itself is being carried our though examples and experiments. So, after presenting the information the teacher also shows it’s simple application. This way students can actually relate to what’s being explained, they can form connections to the real-world usage instances. We’ve went though the topic of why teachers should provide real-life examples.

When teacher uses this method, the students are more engaged in the learning process. Moreover, it’s more oriented on the students’ differences in perception and previous experience, so individual needs of students are more likely to be met. In contrary to lection, demonstration ensures personal relation which is easier to memorize, rather then a flow of impersonal data. Also, teacher can and should use various additional materials and aids to make the example more illustrated and understandable.

The pros of the demonstration teaching method are that it gives a much deeper understanding of the particular topic, it urges reflective thinking and makes students more actively involved. But still, it’s not the same as learning by doing.

Collaborating

The collaboration method implies that a teacher assigns a small group or groups of students to work together in order to complete a specific task, solve problems, research and create presentation on learning the new concepts.

This teaching method is great for team-work and determining the students’ ability to communicate, listen to each others opinions, form ideas, articulate viewpoints, and show leadership skills. It’s often being used to establish interactions and include different types of learning. Students have to process the information rather than simply memorize facts. They are able to take real-world problems and apply their practical skills by solving them.

Collaboration method is not only useful for team building, it’s has a lot of advantages for each person involved in it. A student in a group learn to organize his thoughts and present valuable and convincing arguments for them to be taken into consideration by a group of others. A student forms the ability to adjust when new ideas are being introduced, rethinking and correcting his arguments on the go. The diversity of thoughts and views gives the opportunity to learn from each other, from different perspectives. When other groupmates listen to a student’s idea, they are making suggestions for improvements, expressing criticism or support. It’s a very useful trait - to be able to take and even learn from accepting criticism. It also helps students to learn from approaching the topic from different angles.

There are a lot ways to approach this method and implement it in your class. For a collaborative learning activity a teacher can assign group projects, like giving the groups a problem to solve. If it’s a coding class, you can assign fixing some bug in a program or creating a particular future for an existing program. So that the group can work together and present their solution along with the elaborate explanation on how they’ve reached it and justify their approach to the task.

👋 Conclusion

We went though the first classification of the basic instruction teaching methods. Remember that the methods are often intertwined and several of them can be used simultaneously, so don’t limit yourself by trying to stick to one of them. Be creative and find what’s more suitable for you and your students.

What method are you using in your class? We’d be very interested in your feedback!