Lesson design

This is a checklist and hints when writing and designing a new lesson. The master material is in Teaching Tech Together, primarily chapters 6 and 12 for practicalities and 2 and 4 for big picture considerations. But really, all the book. See the summary we made or the actual book. The article Ten quick tips for creating an effective lesson is also a good summary of the main points. Finally, the Carpentries Curriculum Development Handbook gives practical information on how to design a new lesson and covers the entire lesson life-cycle with a good overview of the lesson release timeline.

This doesn’t replace your own knowledge in doing the actual teaching part. Instead, the first half gives pointers on making sure your audience can connect to the material, and the last half gives hints to help you come up with good exercises and examples.

Backwards lesson design

Think test-driven development: decide what you want students to be able to do, design exercises to measure it, then fill in the gaps with teaching. You can see their summary. The steps are:

  1. Brainstorm what you want to cover.

  2. Create or reuse learner personas - understand who you want to teach. What do they care about? Perhaps as important is what they don’t care about: make sure that you don’t go too in depth too early and turn people off.

  3. Create some summative assessments, that show what learners should learn by the end. Try to connect these to the learner personas.

  4. Create formative assessments (exercises) that let the learners practice what you want them to learn. See below for hints on coming up with good exercises. These should also connect to things the learners will actually do, but can also be more of checkpoints.

  5. Put exercises in a logical order, and fill in any gaps. Ideally there should be 15-20 min of teaching between each exercise. Perhaps most are short (a few longer examples as needed), to identify a certain learning goal and misconception.

  6. Write just enough material to get from one exercise to the other.

The most important point here is to start from learner’s needs and how they can feel connected, not from the tech details.

When advertising the course, connect it to your learner personas so that you get the right audience and they know why they should come.

Emotional and intrinsic appeal, other basics

You can think of why people should feel emotionally connected to your material - maybe it’s too much to expect people to get emotionally invested, but if you try for that, you’ll end somewhere better.

Try to design around tasks and exercises which your audience will care about. For example, don’t say “here are some shell commands”, but “aren’t you tired of copying all of these files one by one… check out the shell… once you know it, you will really feel at home. Here are some typical things you might do.”. Intrinsic motivators include sense of agency (being able to do things themselves), competence (usefulness of what they are doing, feeling they know something), and relatedness (doing things that others are doing).

A manual is reference, a tutorial builds a cognitive model. If you can build the cognitive model and tell them the “why”, students may be able to refer to the manuals themselves and become self-sufficient. Thus, teaching should be more of a tutorial, with good links to manuals (it can also explicitly teach how to use the manuals).

Perhaps a related point is inclusiveness: make sure there’s not some “in” crowd. Perhaps the best description I have seen: don’t assume that some people are missing something, but that others have had the fortune of learning it earlier. This may not matter in a purely factual lesson design, but if you are trying to make things intrinsically or emotionally appealing, it is essential.

Who is the audience?

Making the learner personas are essential to making a good lesson, even if you think you know who you are teaching to. This is because it grounds you into what your audience already knows (or doesn’t know) and what they are interested in.

You also have different ways people can refer to the material:

  • In a class, with an instructor guiding them

  • Reading along by themselves

  • In a class, being much more advanced than others, so that they skip ahead and do advanced material themselves.

Planning

  • Do some planning, and document it - the design process helps others to teach and modify. At least put it in the README. (this is the designer/maintainer’s guide)

    • Put the main points from the “backwards lesson design process” in here, enough that it is easier for someone to improve your lesson than to redo it.

  • Make learner personas: what is your target audience?

  • Decide learning objectives based on the personas: high-level end goals. What students get out, not what they do.

  • Also make a guide for teaching (instructor’s guide), “if you want to present this, do this”.

    • How much preparation is needed? Is it enough to know the topic and have read the material?

    • Things to prepare before the presentation. Does anything need to be set up?

    • Practical notes on presenting.

    • Are there solutions to exercises somewhere? Are they needed?

    • Include some pre-assessment questions which can be asked at the beginning.

    • Perhaps you should do this at the end, but at least starting the instructor’s guide at the beginning will frame your writing.

Writing

There is not much here yet, mostly just follow the “backwards lesson design” above. The hardest part is coming up with good exercises, so our practical advice is to mix and match from the two taxonomies at the bottom and the exercise types. Try to think of diverse types of exercises.

Exercise design is the time it is most useful to be with others to do brainstorming, so we highly recommend discussing with others at this point. Because exercises are used to set the overall outline of the lesson, this also gives people a say in the overall outline - in a very concrete way.

  • Make sure you include the emotional starting point at the beginning - why should you care and why is this cool?

  • This should also be at the start and end of each section: not just what or how, but why?

  • Part of this is also having a student’s guide, so that people independently studying can know how to follow the material.

  • It’s OK to have more material than can be presented or than people should know, but label things well, including labeling the difficulty.

    • In the beginning, what sections are expected to be taught in short/long versions? What’s advanced/optional?

    • Label advanced and optional sections as such. Perhaps also really basic sections that can be skipped for that reason.

Plan for mixed abilities. It’s OK to have optional (basic) and advanced sections, as long as they are clearly labeled. Mainly, don’t have people think that you are uncoordinated because you are skipping advanced sections.

Once you are done, update maintainer’s and instructor’s guides.

Introduction (and conclusion)

The introduction is the first thing people hear, and needs special thought. Don’t start with a cold open, just going straight to the topic (“what” or “how”). Instead, have some careful motivation (“why”). It could be especially good to talk about what is wrong with the current state of affairs (give a good, simple example) and why it should be improved. Then start talking about what the improvements are.

Ideally, the introduction should serve as an self-contained abstract of your material. If you need to teach your lesson in only 10% of the time you have, can you use just the introduction to do it?

Conclusion should remind people about why this is cool and discuss what comes next.

Thinking of exercises

Not every exercise has to be an amazing hand-on example. It’s mixing with smaller, more conceptual things to reduce the cognitive load and be able to have more frequent exercises.

One of your other primary goals should be to make your exercises relevant. Abstract will lead to disconnection. Connect the exercises to the real world. Also, can you tell a complete story with exercises? (Remember, in backwards lesson design, the exercises form the story of the lesson.)

Remember that not every exercise has to be long. Try to have frequent short exercises to get immediate feedback, with some long ones.

Good exercises are the most important factor in a good lesson. Even if you are preparing the rest of the lesson mostly alone, consider a good long brainstorming session to go from “list of topics to cover” to “sequence of exercises”.

When you are stuck thinking “how can I make an exercise that covers X”, think of the lists below inspiration. Not every exercise has to be an sophisticated hands-on thing, so don’t be afraid to use different types:

Basic types:

  • Multiple choice (easy to get feedback via a classroom tool - try to design each wrong answer so that it identifies a specific misconception).

  • Code yourself (traditional programming)

  • Code yourself + multiple choice to see what the answer is (allows you to get feedback)

  • Inverted coding (given code, have to debug)

  • Parsons problems (working solution but lines in random order, learner must only put in proper order)

  • Fill in the blank

More advanced:

  • Tracing execution

  • Tracing values through code flow (e.g. what is the sequence of values that x takes on?)

  • Reverse execution (find input that gives an output)

  • Minimal fix (given broken code, make it work)

  • Theme and variations (working code, adapt to other type of situation/problem)

  • Refactoring

More conceptual:

  • Draw a diagram

  • Label diagram

  • Matching problem: two sets of Q/A, match them.

Thinking through the learning taxonomies also helps to come up with diverse types of exercises:

  • Bloom’s taxonomy: hierarchical skill levels (can you help students to “grow a level”?):

    • Remembering

    • Understanding

    • Applying

    • Analyzing

    • Evaluating

    • Creating

  • Fink’s taxonomy: complementary types instead of hierarchical:

    • Foundational knowledge

    • Applications

    • Integration

    • Human dimension

    • Caring

    • Learning how to learn