One of the frustrating recurring themes in the UNBC Ed Program is the repeated requests for students to identify “aha moments” that they have experienced. I don’t typically have trnsformative cognitive breakthroughs or perspective altering spur-of-the-moment realizations, my thinking instead evolving slowly over a period of time following much thought. I am not an epiphany sort of person. Last week’s presentation on computational thinking across the curriculum (and assessment!) was an exception to this pattern, leaving me with a sudden and newfound understanding of what it means and looks like to incorporate coding across the curriculum.
Coding is a useful skill in the current day and age, but the value of integrating it into every subject and the technicalities of doing so seemed like serious obstacles, especially given my lack of knowledge on the subject. Conceptualizing the essential nature of coding as consisting of a way of thinking rather than as a set of arcane languages enables much more natural and effective cross-curricular integration.
While learning to think in analytical, logical, and abstract terms seems like it would be useful for understanding coding as a technical skill insofar as doing so trains one to “think like a computer,” the real universal applicability of computational thinking has to do with metacognition. Seen this way, computational thinking is essentially problem-solving skills which are applicable to any curricular area. This style of thinking and understanding is well-suited to the use and assessment of core competencies within projects that meet curricular content and competency goals.
I had the opportunity to take part in this workshop twice, once with teacher candidates and once with practicing teachers. The latter session covered the same basic ideas, but was accompanied by activities that prompted the making of deeper connections with competencies and more explicit connection of computational thinking to different curricular areas. Working in rotating groups to connect computational thinking skills to different areas of the curriculum was a helpful way of understanding how broadly applicable this way of thinking is, but the major insight I took away from this activity, and which did not crop up so much during the teacher candidate session, was the usefulness of computational thinking to behavioural processes. Classroom routines, goal-setting, and other activities are no less algorithmic or pattern-based than any of the intellectual skills explicitly included in the curriculum. It’s striking just how much computational thinking teachers do in the course of their daily practice without being aware of it, and it’s interesting to consider these habits in the light of an explicit framework analysing it. Being able to approach one’s own work habits analytically seems an important part of effective self-reflection, and computational thinking certainly fits the bill for pedagogical reflection as well as for the teaching of meta-cognitive skills to students.
A note on triangulation in assessment. Most educational diagrams are as ugly as they are useless, but look at this here model of assessment:
Crisp, clear, concrete, and doesn’t try to do too much. Covers the possible sources of assessment information, and allows the teacher to weight them as necessary/appropriate to the individual learner. Love it.
A final throwback to the earlier presentation on multi-access modality: computational thinking skills lend themselves well to collaborative activities, as evidenced by the activities employed in the presentations. Would the acquisition and practice of these skills be potentially impaired outside of the face-to-face modality?
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