Week 3
Principle #2 - Structure Lessons and Instructional Design

Weekly Coding

You do not need to complete every weekly coding activity to be competent. But, you should make an effort to complete at least half of the assignments over the course of the semester.

• Extracting Customers with a particular email domain

Monday

We will discuss the code from weeks 1 and 2

After Class

Textbook Readings

• pp 18-31 from BBCP
  • Cognitive Load Theory [Required]
  • The PRIMM Approach [Required]
  • Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in Computer Science [Required]
  • Coding & 21st-Century Skills [Recommended]
  • Curriculum Design and ABC [Recommended]

Wednesday

• Discuss the materials about Principle #2
  • What articles stood out to you? Why?
  • What information in these readings were you familiar with?
    • How and why?
  • What information in these readings was "new" to you?
    • What were the takeaways for your own classroom(s)?
  • How do you think this information aligns (or doesn't) with the grade bands you teach? How and why?

After Class

Additional Readings

Whether you are creating your own curriculum, adapting a preexisting curriculum, or directly following an existing curriculum, you still have to do some design. For example, you will need to decide which learning activities/assignments students should do and decide how to assess student learning and assign grades. This unit addresses key ideas of instructional design.

As most of you know, I was an education major as an undergraduate [Math and science education. I spent four years as a middle school teacher.] I suspect that I had coursework in the College of Education and in my discipline specific Methods classes that talked about how to design instruction. But if I am very honest with you, I don't remember any of that. I mean, I clearly made it through four years of teaching middle school and 20+ years of teaching college computer science so I must have learned SOMETHING. But I don't remember what I was formally taught. As a young teacher much of my instructional design was designing lessons and several weeks later scrambling to write a test about what I had been teaching for the last few weeks. If I am honest, it wasn't always as organized or as effective as it could/should have been.

And from a lot of my experiences talking with in-service teachers I think that they often feel this same way.

It wasn't until about 2017 when we started designing the CSEd program at UNI that I really started to THINK about what it means to DESIGN Instruction. In the process I did some reading that absolutely revolutionized how I think about teaching and learning and the importance of designing from the big picture down to the small details rather than the other way around. In developing this unit, this course, heck, even this whole five course curriculum program, we have used two texts:

• Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (1st Edition, 1998)
• Grading for Equity: What is is, Why it Matters, and How it Can Transform Schools and Classrooms by Joe Feldman (2019)

I STRONGLY encourage you to track those books down at some point and read them at your leisure.  But you need not read them for this course. Instead, I want you to read the following summaries of UbD.

• The article about Understanding by Design from Wikipedia
• This 10 minute video by Grant Wiggins (one of the creators of UbD).
• A slightly more detailed white paper on the process.

Friday

• We will conduct an activity to model what happens during PRIMM

Weekly Deliverables

• Complete the Competency Demo for this week. (0-4)
  • Do NOT attempt this until after you have done all other activities for the week.
  • Submit the final version of your CD on Blackboard