Vulnerability, Reflection, and CS Education with Amy Ko

In this interview with Amy Ko, we discuss the importance of mentorship in education, learning what not to do with teaching, the positive results of being vulnerable, understanding and exploring the limitations and consequences of CS, problematizing grades in education, practicing teaching through mental simulations, the importance of engaging in the CS community, and much more.

  • Welcome back to another episode of the

    CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary

    each week we alternate between an

    interview with a guest and a solo

    episode where i unpack some scholarship

    in this week's episode i'm interviewing

    Amy Ko in our discussion we talk about

    the importance of mentorship and

    education

    learning what not to do with teaching

    the positive results of being vulnerable

    understanding and exploring the

    limitations and consequences of computer

    science

    problematizing grades in education

    practicing teaching through mental

    simulations

    the importance of engaging in the cs

    community and so much more

    we do mention several interviews and

    resources and blog posts and stuff

    in this interview so if you'd like a

    direct link to them make sure you check

    out the show notes

    which you can find by clicking the link

    in your app or by going to jaredlery.com

    and clicking on podcasts with that being

    said we will now start the interview

    with an introduction by amy

    my name is amy koh i'm a professor at

    the university of washington

    and i study programming how people learn

    it how they do it how it affects the

    world

    i teach a lot of different populations

    of people i teach undergraduates i teach

    master's students i teach

    doctoral students and i teach a lot of

    different subjects so

    information design user interfaces

    software engineering

    research methods i also spend every

    summer

    teaching computer science to high school

    students through our upward bound

    program

    and that serves a lot of our higher

    poverty schools in south king county

    can you tell me the story of how you got

    into computer science education

    that one actually goes back quite a ways

    i mean the shorter version of this

    is that professionally my interest in

    computer science really started off back

    in 2010

    when jan cooney at the national science

    foundation had just started funding

    basic research on the topic and so

    when i was looking for funding and

    looking for opportunities to do research

    that was a great example of a way to

    express my interest in cs education

    while still doing research and working

    with doctoral students at the same time

    but really my interest in cs education

    started a lot

    earlier than that i really fell in love

    with programming in

    middle school and seventh grade in my

    pre-algebra class

    we have these ti 82 graphing calculators

    that we had to buy and our

    math teacher taught us the basic

    programming language on it to just

    record a few formulas

    and i just got so obsessed with creating

    things like little text adventures and

    other things

    and so for me cs education what it

    looked like was this very personal

    thing right i spent a lot of time

    reading that calculator manual trying to

    understand the programming language

    in high school i had a lot of random

    informal mentors like there was this

    dutch exchange student who would hang

    out in the computer lab and

    he taught me about variables and arrays

    and data structures and things that

    nobody else was there to teach me since

    we didn't have any computer science

    classes

    and then i had this two-year college

    student who would come

    for some reason i cannot explain to our

    high school and just hang out in our

    computer lab

    and challenge us with his homework

    assignments i think maybe it was to get

    answers to his homework assignments

    but he ended up just being a wonderful

    mentor and like showing me what

    computer science might look like in

    college and inspired me to really study

    it too

    and so a lot of the cs education that i

    encountered when i was younger was

    really just through mentorship through

    people

    passing down knowledge and really

    supporting and encouraging me and

    helping to build some identity

    and i just ended up wanting to pay it

    forward and so that interest in csgo

    lingered that whole time in that same

    way of me wanting to provide mentorship

    too

    okay so that makes a lot of sense one of

    the quotes that i read on your website

    is that you like to quote center

    curiosity

    discovery knowledge learning and

    teaching in work and in life end quote

    and so i'm curious like how do you

    center those things in your own teaching

    and

    learning yeah that's a great question in

    some ways it mirrors my answer to the

    last question

    too which is part of this is just my job

    as a professor

    that's really my responsibility is to

    carry curiosity into the world

    and inspire other people to do discovery

    and fall in love with knowledge in the

    same way so it kind of fits a lot of

    what i do as a professor

    but it's not a coincidence that i'm a

    professor i was always a really curious

    person growing up i remember a lot of

    times when i was a child that my mom

    would take us

    to thrift shops and she would give us

    five dollars my brother and i and just

    say let's go buy something

    and we'll take it apart together and we

    would just spend a whole day going and

    picking out like blenders and microwaves

    and broken computer parts

    from a goodwill store and then taking it

    home and just trying to figure out all

    the different

    pieces that were inside of it and that

    idea that we would learn what was inside

    and then

    tell each other about it and tell our

    friends about it and bring random

    components that we'd found to school and

    show our friends that was just a really

    central part of my childhood

    so a career in research and teaching

    that was about curiosity and discovery

    that was just a really

    clear fit even when i was a computer

    science undergraduate

    i just remember thinking really clearly

    i have no interest in being a software

    engineer when i grow up

    what i want to do is follow my curiosity

    and i'm curious about computing so it

    seems like i should be a cs professor

    in a professorship role being able to

    engage in mentorship

    so i'm curious like obviously with grad

    students it's much easier to

    kind of apply the mentorship model that

    you went through in the informal

    learning that you grew up with

    because you're usually working

    one-on-one or in small group but how do

    you apply that in larger

    context yeah that's a fascinating

    challenge right with a phd student

    there's an expectation that they're

    going to come and be mentored for

    years really what the nature of that

    learning is is a mentorship model

    and so when i teach a class of 20 or 40

    or even 200 250 in some of my larger

    undergraduate classes

    there is this time that it takes to

    really establish

    that that's the kind of relationship

    that i want to have with them it takes a

    few weeks sometimes in a larger course

    for students to recognize that i

    actually

    am just the person that wants to talk

    with them have conversations with them

    chat about interesting ideas and office

    hours and

    usually by week three or four they start

    to trickle into office hours and realize

    that i'm really just a safe resource for

    exploring their curiosities

    right but it takes a month for them to

    not see me as some scary professor

    person that's

    there to destroy their academic career

    and give them a 0.0 in their class

    it's just a big transition to make from

    one role to the next

    yeah it's kind of a shame that that is

    the mindset going into some of these

    classes

    i've had a lot of experiences in

    education where i've learned what not to

    do

    as an educator because they were just

    such bad experiences

    and it kind of sours the taste and i

    just kind of happen to be able to make

    it through long enough

    to get through all my degrees and

    whatnot and become an educator but many

    people don't

    yeah and that's such a horrible story to

    have to tell about your experience

    in college right like surviving college

    is not what anybody that's a professor

    at a university wants the story to be

    and yet you know because a lot of

    professors don't have any preparation

    and teaching

    and we have very little access to

    professional development that's just

    it ends up being what happens as a

    result because we just don't know

    what else to do beyond that and it's

    actually been really empowering

    doing a lot of research in cs education

    and just recognizing this whole

    world of public k-12 education where

    teachers are prepared to be teachers

    and they have resources to continue

    their education

    and they're expected to improve over

    time it's a really different set of

    values than in higher education

    so it sounds like you've had some themes

    that have carried through from

    childhood into today but i'm curious how

    has your

    either teaching or life philosophy kind

    of changed over time yeah

    that's very grounded in my childhood too

    sometimes i think of my first teaching

    role

    as being a sibling i had a younger

    brother who was a year and a half

    younger

    than me and i just loved showing him how

    to do things and patiently giving him

    feedback

    once we got old enough he really

    despised the fact that i was always the

    one teaching him he wanted to be

    teaching me

    too we were so close in age we just

    wanted some reciprocity

    so a lot of that was kind of part of the

    nature of being in my family with just

    being a teacher and then the other piece

    of it was

    my mother was a third grade and fifth

    grade teacher for my entire

    childhood and so it wasn't just i knew

    that she was a teacher it was also just

    a random

    chance of history that our school

    district started two weeks after hers

    so i spent most of my childhood the

    first two weeks of her school year

    in her classroom as her age just seeing

    what she was doing and

    sometimes when i was younger i was the

    younger kid in a fifth grade classroom

    just trying to understand what was

    happening in this weird classroom and

    then later i was the older child and

    there were a lot of ways that

    just me observing her as a teacher

    really shaped my idea of what teaching

    could be

    and i remember this one particular thing

    that she did for several years which was

    trying to create a sense of wonder

    around

    ideas and learning by just situating it

    in context

    so she created this school-wide postal

    service where

    everybody in the school all the students

    including the students in her class had

    a role to play

    sometimes they were delivering mails

    sometimes they were processing it

    sometimes they were

    verifying things like stamps she had

    this little currency system for people

    getting

    payments for fulfilling their roles and

    i remember just seeing that and thinking

    like school's never been like this for

    me but she just made it that way i

    didn't even realize that you could

    create a learning context from scratch

    and just imagine something else

    so i always carried that idea with me

    that learning can be a lot of things and

    it doesn't really have to be

    any particular thing for a group of

    people it's something that a teacher

    really gets to invent

    for whoever it is that they're they're

    trying to connect with and teach

    obviously when i went through my own

    school and

    college i saw a lot of examples of that

    that

    you know just beared no resemblance to

    that kind of courageous teaching that my

    mom did

    but it sort of like you said it made me

    really aware of the things that i didn't

    like

    and it made me aware of when some

    teacher was doing something that she was

    doing

    really thinking consciously and

    intentionally around

    who is in this room with me what do they

    need how can i connect with them

    how can i connect their identities to

    the ideas that i want to teach them

    and that they might want to know i think

    that's what evolved over time was

    just my repertoire of bad examples but

    also

    further role models around what teaching

    could be

    by the time i became a professor in

    university it just meant that i was much

    more

    confident that i wasn't going to do

    things the way that that i'd seen

    and that i really wanted to just

    experiment even if it meant failure

    this may be a bit of projection on my

    own behalf but reading through

    a lot of the content on your website it

    seems like you

    are constantly engaging in reflection on

    your own teaching practices

    and learning from it yeah i think that's

    true and there's a lot of different

    things behind that

    i mean you can think about all of the

    ways that people are taught

    or learn to reflect probably early on it

    was a lot of my parents just asking me a

    lot of questions about how i felt or

    what i thought about something that

    really promoted a lot of

    self-reflection i was in a district that

    just had wonderful teachers

    like i learned right around the time i

    was graduating

    just how amazing some of the teachers

    were we had so many

    teachers who were recognized by the

    presidential

    teaching award and had gone to the white

    house and it was just one of these

    schools that just was

    this is what every school should be like

    right teachers that are so engaged so

    committed to their practice

    and that's what i saw them doing right

    they would reflect in front of us all

    the time

    they would teach something some way and

    then say you know what i really don't

    like how i did that we're going to try

    that again tomorrow

    let's see if it works better and they

    would involve us in that process of

    really trying to make sure that the

    learning we were doing together was

    something that was collectively working

    and not

    something that just worked for them or

    just worked for us and then you know

    there's lots of other

    sources of reflection too being in

    therapy a lot for example is really good

    practice for reflection

    so again by the time i became a teacher

    it was really clear

    that good teaching is fueled by

    reflection that's just the only

    central way that you can get a lot of

    feedback and that's especially true for

    higher education teachers because

    you don't necessarily have a whole team

    of other people who are

    there with you in your practice at the

    same time you might be the only person

    teaching your subject in the whole

    school

    and there's no context in which to share

    some of that professional learning

    together

    is that what led to writing some of the

    posts on the blog to try and connect

    with people who are outside of the

    buildings that you're working in

    i think there's a couple of different

    things behind that one is

    just i have always written in a diary to

    reflect that's just always been a

    practice that i've had to

    really force myself to engage with what

    my thoughts are and reflect on them and

    so the blog was really just an extension

    of that where it just meant that i was

    suddenly

    sharing my thoughts to myself with other

    people

    and you know in many ways it didn't

    really change much how i was writing or

    what i was writing it was more just

    me working out ideas and trying to

    understand things in the open

    instead of privately it has the nice

    side effect of me connecting with lots

    of people

    right because sometimes those ideas

    resonate sometimes other people are

    grappling with those same challenges and

    then i get to connect with them too

    so that's led to a lot of wonderful

    relationships and encounters with other

    people in the world and i think

    it's just taken a lot of courage to put

    those ideas out there yeah

    what are some ideas that surprised you

    in terms of how they resonated with

    others

    when you're grappling with challenging

    things or you're struggling with

    something

    there's a lot of other emotions wrapped

    up in those right you can imagine that

    you're the only person struggling with

    some teaching challenge you can imagine

    you're the only one that doesn't

    understand something

    so the surprising thing to me always is

    that i'm most likely to share the things

    that i

    don't think i understand and that i

    think are something that

    i'm alone in struggling with and then

    every time i do that i learn that

    there's a whole community of people

    who are struggling with the same thing

    and maybe have some other knowledge that

    they can share with me and so

    it just leads to a kind of reciprocity

    across a community of people where i can

    learn so many things about how other

    people are managing

    struggles and challenges not just in

    teaching but really in anything

    and there are other surprises too i mean

    i think part of my sharing

    is a way of demonstrating a kind of

    vulnerability

    and it's been surprising to me that

    being vulnerable

    with a community has just led other

    people to

    reciprocate in their vulnerability too

    so if i share secrets about myself

    they come and share secrets back with me

    and sometimes with others too

    and i think that there's a just an

    amazing way that that can kind of

    build community in this really simple

    way right if you can muster the courage

    to say something

    that has the potential to lead to harm

    it probably won't and it'll probably

    open things up for other people too

    and we can all sort of grow together

    instead of

    alone yeah i like that that really

    resonates with me one of the things that

    i've been

    working on on my own and through therapy

    went on is being more

    unreserved and empty from a buddhist

    perspective in terms of

    open to be filled and whatnot so it has

    been interesting

    opening up and just sharing here's how

    i'm honestly feeling whether it's good

    or bad

    and getting responses from people and

    allows for more

    points of connection and that

    vulnerability has honestly been

    a good thing for some of the

    relationships that i've had so that

    makes a lot of sense what you just

    described getting to that place of

    vulnerability can

    be challenging too right when i really

    think about how i got to a place where i

    was willing to share a lot of ideas even

    just

    intellectual ideas or more personal

    experiences

    half of it was things like protection of

    tenure

    right where there wasn't necessarily

    going to be

    career consequence to me sharing my

    ideas that's a really powerful kind of

    privilege that i have as a tenured

    professor

    it's not that there are no consequences

    to sharing but if people don't like my

    ideas i can harm my reputation

    people can change their mind about my

    expertise so there's

    certainly consequences but then other

    parts of it too are kind of a

    desperation

    like especially with a lot of the

    personal things that i've shared on my

    blog

    not sharing them for so long has just

    led to a lot of really pent-up desire

    to share them and me pushing out all of

    these personal stories is really just

    making it for a lifetime of hiding them

    from people yeah one of the things that

    i've mentioned in the podcast

    multiple times is i was suicidal for

    almost a decade like most of my high

    school and undergrad career

    it was one of those things that i didn't

    want people to know about and felt alone

    with and when i started opening up about

    it

    i was able to identify students who were

    suicidal get them to

    get some support like every time i just

    opened up

    more with things like that it helped me

    it also helped other people

    and so i recently in september released

    a podcast on suicidality and just

    read a paper that i wrote on it and it

    is the kind of topic where

    reading that paper like i get choked up

    if not just flat out start bawling

    through it because it's so personal but

    it's scary trying to share

    stuff like that publicly thinking out

    loud and being as vulnerable as it is

    with stuff like that

    yeah so it definitely takes a lot of

    courage to do that so

    i want to thank you as somebody who's

    read your works like for your

    vulnerability

    and the many different topics that

    you've talked about and what you're

    talking about with tenure that makes a

    lot of sense like one of them

    you were talking about some of the

    administrative stuff that goes on in

    higher education and

    the problems with it and being able to

    have tenure and to be able to talk about

    those real problems that somebody who

    doesn't have 10 years

    also struggling through it can really

    help them so thank you

    yeah and a lot of this applies to

    classrooms too right like how do you

    create a space for students to feel like

    they can share their whole selves

    you can't do that for them so trying to

    think about that kind of reciprocity

    in teaching is really challenging and i

    think one of the biggest things that i

    see

    many teachers struggling with and i've

    certainly struggled with myself

    is we might see ourselves as an

    authority figure

    and that's not a role that's really

    predisposed to vulnerability

    you're fearful of not looking like you

    have enough expertise

    not going to be open to vulnerability

    and then how do students make space for

    themselves in that room

    and so i think there's a lot of

    challenges here where even just teaching

    strictly technical topics really well

    sometimes requires that vulnerability so

    that there's room for students to make

    mistakes and for them to see that you

    don't know everything either

    and that there's an exchange happening

    rather than a

    transmission of knowledge this question

    is intentionally broad so feel free to

    take it in whatever direction that you

    want to go with but what do you wish

    more people within the field

    discussed or were more vulnerable with

    yeah

    it is a broad question there's also a

    broad field

    too right i think one of the things i

    learned most over the past 10 years of

    doing cs education stuff

    is that the world let's say of higher

    education cs is just

    so dramatically different than the world

    of k-12 and

    even in k-12 thinking about primary and

    secondary as a really different context

    is really important

    and so there are different things that i

    wish each of those communities would

    think about and wonder about

    and really interrogate in higher

    education for example

    i like to think of academia and higher

    education as a place where

    we develop as much confidence as

    possible in what we're talking about and

    have as much certainty

    as possible in what we're talking about

    we want to be the source of

    what cs is and what it can be and what

    it's not

    but it has this really negative

    consequence of

    just making us resistant to any other

    conceptions of what computer science is

    or can be

    especially in how we teach it and what

    we teach about it so

    you know your typical computer scientist

    has a pretty strong idea around

    what a programming language is how it

    shall be taught what people should

    use them for and that doesn't leave a

    lot of room for innovation

    or connecting with students identities

    or their interests

    and that's really different than in

    secondary for example

    middle school and high school where i

    think a lot of our cs teachers

    many of them are coming from backgrounds

    either in computer science and they're

    bringing that same idea from higher

    education

    down into k-12 which is problematic for

    entirely different reasons

    right in middle school and high school

    we want to inspire

    and cultivate and develop identity and

    not so much

    make people into the most amazing

    software engineers ever right that's

    just not what school is going to be for

    there's not enough time for that other

    teachers who maybe don't come with any

    cs background

    i think so much of their teaching is

    driven by that

    fear of lack of content knowledge that

    it's just a really challenging

    space and i think that bringing

    vulnerability into those situations

    having people with computing backgrounds

    really recognize that

    cs teaching can and should be many

    things especially

    in secondary and that teachers without

    computing backgrounds

    it's okay if the students are learning

    at the same time as you and there's a

    lot of potential for

    shared learning in that too and that

    just might mean that the kind of

    learning that's possible and which kinds

    of standards might be met just might

    vary depending on

    who's in the room and what kinds of

    learning the teacher is doing

    and then primary of course is this whole

    different world i just think of it as

    this wonderful

    wild west of of possibility where

    there's just

    infinite ways that you might connect

    computing to other subjects

    and in many ways because standards don't

    have too much to say about

    how that might happen i think that those

    teachers are the most free

    and recognize that freedom to just do

    whatever seemed

    like an opportunity so i'm most

    optimistic there

    about the kinds of teaching that might

    happen yeah the k8 space in particular

    was my favorite to work with because i

    didn't have to worry about ap tests i

    didn't have to worry about like all

    these other things

    that were related to teaching in high

    school or undergrad or graduate level

    and so there's a lot of creativity and

    fun in the k-8 realm in particular

    absolutely so one of the themes that i

    noticed

    on your website was that you like

    helping youth and teachers understand

    some of the limitations

    of technology so i'm curious if there's

    a cs educator in the k-12 space who's

    listening right now

    what limitations do you wish they knew

    about and taught

    in some ways there's really just one big

    one and it's

    really a counter narrative to the

    dominant narrative about computing

    the dominant narrative really is that

    computers are magic that's kind of how

    we

    talk about them in the media that's how

    we see them in movies and television

    that's how companies market about them

    and even when we're experiencing

    computers and using software they

    certainly appear to be magic

    if we can't imagine how they're working

    it just looks like magic and so i

    understand why we often come to this

    conclusion

    that they are magic but that's a really

    problematic narrative

    in a cs education context because they

    aren't magic

    and we want to demystify that magic and

    framing them as these

    infinitely powerful authoritative things

    that can do no wrong

    is very problematic because it's one not

    true and two

    it hides and masks all of these other

    ways in which they

    do go wrong so at the simplest level i

    think the thing that i want you to

    understand

    and that i think teachers need to

    understand to help you understand that

    is that software breaks all the time

    and it breaks you know in all kinds of

    unexpected ways and then if you ask any

    professional software engineer

    tell me what's broken about your

    software they would sit down and say

    do you have a couple of hours because

    there's about 5000 defects reported in

    our

    issue tracker and i can't possibly

    summarize them for you here

    in one sentence you know people engaged

    in creating software are

    intimately aware of just how often

    software is broken and how often

    it doesn't work and it's not magic and

    how hard one some of the basic

    functionality really was

    but then it goes further than that right

    like some of the ways in which software

    is broken

    software engineers don't even see and

    they're just really hard to notice

    unless you're paying very close

    attention to

    how software is situated in the world

    which is not something that computer

    science

    has often paid attention to so an

    example is i was just ranting about this

    on twitter

    i changed my name about a year and a

    half ago and one of the first things i

    did after i changed my name

    was to go on to the acm digital library

    website and change my profile

    so that my new name would be reflected

    acm unfortunately hasn't yet fixed all

    of my publication names but at least i

    could change my profile information so

    that people wouldn't stumble upon it and

    use my

    dead name which is what transgender

    people use to refer to their old names

    today i went to the profile to check on

    something and it had reverted

    and acm didn't notify me of this they

    didn't

    tell me that there was some change to

    this there was no notification it

    probably was just some weird defect on

    their side

    but there's a way that being trans and

    seeing your dead name is a really

    destabilizing thing it kind of ruined my

    morning

    yeah it was just not a lot of recovery

    from that it just took me a while to

    just

    get over the idea that not only had i

    seen it but there were just a whole

    who knows how many months maybe this

    entire year because i hadn't looked at

    it

    of people just going there identifying

    my work

    with something that's not my name

    anymore and i guarantee you

    that software engineer did not think

    about that case they did not think about

    that failure did they didn't think about

    that consequence

    it was not part of their release plan

    and even if they're aware of the defect

    now i'm pretty sure that

    there's nothing in that issue tracker

    that describes that error

    right that says this is the consequence

    of that mistake

    who knows if they're even prioritizing

    it like how often is it that somebody

    changes their profile name

    probably a defect because they haven't

    really thought carefully about that use

    case

    so you know that's the deeper and more

    subtle kinds of ways in which software

    isn't magic

    it's a tool we create that just ends up

    having all of these unintended

    consequences that we very rarely examine

    and i think that youth are just so

    uniquely positioned to understand those

    unintended consequences

    because they live with them every day

    they just haven't named them

    right they live with them in learning

    management systems they live with them

    and

    social media they learn with them in all

    of the ways that they interface with

    technology in their lives and

    you know they're just not connecting the

    harms they experience

    to the phrase computer science so how do

    you recommend cs educators this can be

    k12 higher ed whatever realm you're

    thinking of how do

    you recommend they encourage cs students

    to think in more

    ethically responsive inclusive and

    equitable ways well i'll start by

    putting on my researcher hat and just

    saying

    we don't know yet i think that's an open

    question

    it's something we have to do research on

    there's a lot of experimentation

    happening right now i think both on the

    part of researchers but also teachers

    who are starting to engage issues of

    ethics and justice and computer science

    and a lot of the things that seem to

    work pretty well are trying to start

    not from what a mathematician might do

    or a theoretical

    computer scientist might do and starting

    from the kind of the first principles of

    computer

    science but instead starting from really

    really concrete things

    like for example we had a study where we

    brought a bunch of students in

    to learn about machine learning and just

    do some basic linear regressions around

    data

    but rather than giving them a data set

    that was clean and perfect and well

    prepared for the kinds of learning we

    wanted them to do

    we gave them a tool that said go gather

    your data

    your social media posts from instagram

    or facebook or whatever it is that you

    use

    and we're going to use that as the data

    for making these predictions

    and there was this really magical thing

    that happened that when they started

    seeing the regression make predictions

    based on their own data

    instead of data that we curated for them

    they had really intimate

    understandings of precisely why the

    regression was bad

    and why it wasn't making good

    predictions and what variables and

    features and factors were missing from

    the models that they had built

    in ways when we just gave them the

    curated data they didn't have any domain

    insight into what that data meant and so

    when we asked them to

    think of things that might be wrong with

    the model they just couldn't brainstorm

    anything

    there was just nothing there for them to

    latch on to so

    connecting i think these ideas of bias

    and modeling two students lived

    experiences

    into their own data sets that reflect

    their lived experiences i think that's a

    really powerful

    possible direction that teachers might

    take and where these biases discuss

    with the full group because often in

    educational settings

    when students turn in something only the

    teacher the professor sees the thing

    that is turned in and it's kind of like

    a one-on-one conversation

    but when biases like these appear and

    students are reflecting on it are they

    sharing it widely with the class in this

    particular study

    there wasn't a group context like that

    for them to do that sharing

    but others have replicated some of these

    ideas and when there is sharing of some

    of those things even just voluntary

    students start very quickly realizing

    the diversity

    of ways that things can go wrong and i

    think that that's sort of this really

    clear link between ideas of diversity

    equity and inclusion

    in the context of technology and what it

    means to see that right when you

    leverage the diversity of experiences in

    a classroom

    as a way to teach the ways that

    technology

    doesn't account for diversity it becomes

    really really obvious

    how hard it is to make technology that

    really is responsive to all of the

    variation in the world

    and then you can get into more subtle

    things like you can start talking about

    things like

    conditionals in imperative programming

    languages and how they use boolean logic

    to make decisions and then connecting

    that with all of the different nuances

    and the decisions that we make as human

    beings and how they're almost never

    binary and they always account for many

    different factors not just

    three variables that we have in our

    conditional expression right

    yeah one of the things that i have kind

    of vocalized as a problem that i see in

    a lot of the k-8 space in particular is

    there's not enough

    room to account for solving problems and

    engaging in different perspective or

    different ways

    so coming to different solutions and

    then kind of conversing about it because

    obviously

    when you go with a puzzle based and

    there's one right answer there's not

    really an opportunity to discuss well

    what other possibilities are for this

    so i personally have enjoyed projects

    where it's like hey we're trying to

    solve

    this problem that can be solved many

    different ways let's talk about it as a

    class

    the different ways that we solve what

    worked why what didn't work why

    so like all my degrees are in music

    education and coming from an outside

    perspective like the field has been very

    open and welcoming to quote outsiders

    to learn the space and it seems like the

    theme that i've recognized from day one

    is that

    they are seeking diverse perspectives

    within the field whether as an educator

    as a student whatever

    and i personally have appreciated that

    yeah and i think that's a really

    subtle distinction to make there we're

    getting better at making but it's only

    something recent that's come up

    the students perspectives and the

    teachers perspectives absolutely those

    are essential things to get right from

    an inclusion perspective

    and a pedagogical perspective and then

    there's this whole other layer of

    diversity of all of the other

    experiences in the world

    that aren't represented in that

    classroom right and the connection

    between

    a software designer or a software

    engineer or a software company

    having to interface with that diverse

    world software companies have

    not grappled with that diversity yet

    and yet we're starting to see the

    effects of them kind of ignoring that

    diversity

    and so talking about diversity as a

    subject of computer science as a

    part of doing it as a part of designing

    software

    that's this new topic that i think is

    really central to kind of

    expanding the broader scope of computer

    science to include all of the other

    things that students are learning in

    their other classes

    in history in social studies in english

    and humanities

    that's where it starts touching on all

    of those other areas

    so with that in mind the idea of like

    solving many different problems in

    different ways and

    seeking diverse perspectives and whatnot

    and going back to one of the first

    things we talked about with

    centering things around curiosity and

    discovery and whatnot

    what are some of your thoughts on grades

    because i've seen

    some of your posts on it i'm wondering

    if you could kind of summarize for

    listeners

    what your thoughts are on grades and how

    they relate to what we've been talking

    about

    yeah grades everybody loves grades right

    no i'm not sure anybody loves grades i'm

    not sure teachers like grades i'm not

    sure students like grades

    i remember you know the summer before

    starting as a professor

    just really trying to grapple with the

    history of where they came from and why

    we have them

    and reading some histories that i'm not

    sure are

    true but they're certainly what we have

    documented that there was a tutor at

    cambridge university

    around the time that statistics was

    emerging in the 19th century as a

    powerful way of dealing with variation

    in industrial practices

    and that tutor just said well what if

    school was like industry and we could

    actually

    deal with variation intolerance measure

    student performance and that was it like

    that one idea

    back in you know 1870 something that

    brought us to where we are today

    and so that history seems really

    important because we haven't always done

    it this way

    right we've always thought about

    teaching in diverse ways and it hasn't

    always involved measurement of learning

    and then secondly i think you know we

    just have to use that history to

    recognize what problem we think we're

    solving with it and remember that

    history

    and when i think about grades i think

    about it as really kind of

    trying to solve two distinct problems

    one is problems of motivation

    right how do we help students that are

    not excited about learning some material

    to learn

    right grades are a blunt instrument to

    provide some extrinsic motivation

    it's sort of a scary though and unjust

    kind of instrument

    think about what it means to say i will

    give you this grade if you do this thing

    it actually means the opposite which is

    i'm gonna punish you if you don't

    right and what does that punishment mean

    taking away opportunity

    taking away a sense of self-efficacy i

    mean there's just so many downsides to

    that kind of punishment model

    of some of the assessment and then the

    other problem that greats try to solve

    are

    a broader systemic thing which is

    selection in society how do we choose

    which people get which resources

    and the idea that grades are for helping

    decide who gets into college

    or decide who gets a job or decide who

    gets some scholarship

    to me when you start talking about those

    issues then you just have to get into

    things like wait why are we even

    deciding why doesn't everybody just get

    to go to college

    why doesn't everybody just have the

    resources they need to go to school

    we've done that for

    k-12 why are we not doing that for

    two-year colleges why are you not doing

    that for four-year colleges

    at some level you might draw the line

    and say well not everybody gets to

    have the job they want not everybody

    gets to work at google not everybody

    gets to do some things and you might

    have to have some other criteria too

    are grades the best measure for deciding

    which of those scarce resources

    people get and who doesn't get them not

    even sure they're the best measure for

    that too

    if you know anything about psychometrics

    you know that none of us are really

    grading all that carefully or well

    and we really shouldn't be trusting many

    of those measurements for anything so

    when you you know take all of those

    critiques of grades and you really just

    set aside that motivation to select and

    you

    recognize the problem of motivating

    students well

    and just find better ways of motivating

    students find ways that are more

    positive and constructive and asset

    based

    rather than punishment based and if you

    really have to help people

    select you know we have other models for

    that we can

    do letters of recommendation and

    portfolios and we can do interviews and

    there's a lot of

    things that work relatively well they

    have their own caveats

    but we sort of just discount them

    because we've just accepted that back in

    the 1870s

    a tutor had an idea about statistics

    it just seems like the wrong rationale

    for doing this practice

    yeah one of the things that i know

    you've also read so k anders erickson's

    idea of deliberate practice and

    developing expertise and skill

    acquisition when i was reading through

    those

    studies it really resonated with me and

    really made me question grades because

    okay if we're going with the idea that

    in order to develop expertise you have

    to put in

    a significant amount of deliberate

    practice on something okay i totally buy

    into that as a musician i had to put in

    tens of thousands of hours to become

    good at it

    but if kids are able to go home and work

    on a computer

    and some kids are able to go home and

    they don't have internet they don't have

    a device

    that's going to create a huge difference

    in the amount of time that they can

    spend in deliberate practice so if i

    were to grade based off of

    quality or based off of like a curve or

    whatever any approach i take

    whoever is able to go home and engage

    with us more is going to

    learn at a faster pace than somebody who

    does not have access to the technology

    at home

    and so putting a grade on quality

    whatever

    it becomes an ethical problem that i was

    just like all right if you are engaged

    in class and you are actively learning

    and trying to improve yourself

    you get an a if you are setting your own

    goals and whatever those steps are

    whether it's

    smaller or larger than the people around

    you doesn't matter just as long as you

    are trying to learn

    what recommendations would you give to

    other educators or have you taken

    in terms of your own approach to grades

    because we still got to assign them at

    some point

    we do and i speak from a privileged

    position as a tenured professor where if

    i don't assign them or i just assign

    them to mean something that's what i

    want them to mean really nothing's gonna

    happen to me

    if i don't assign them something might

    happen to students they might not

    sustain a scholarship they might not be

    able to get into the graduate school

    that they want so clearly within the

    system i have to assign

    something but what they mean can be

    something that i decide

    an example would be in this last quarter

    which we just wrapped up this past week

    during this pandemic it's just not been

    a time that i've wanted to create the

    kind of stress that comes with grades

    and summative assessments and i just

    decided to remove that stress so i just

    said infinite resubmits

    infinite regrades anytime you want

    feedback and you want to do better on an

    assignment just let me know and i will

    regrade or my ta will regrade and the

    result was

    you know what should happen in most

    teaching and learning which is that i

    just give a lot of feedback

    students practice a lot they learn what

    they got wrong and what they got right

    and they start isolating which aspects

    of their knowledge they want to improve

    there's still that sort of incentive

    component built into the

    class because i'm giving a grade at the

    end of it but it just meant that

    students were spending a lot more time

    engaging with

    the mistakes they'd made and the things

    they got right and i was spending a lot

    more time just giving feedback

    and that felt really good i think the

    result was that

    a 4.0

    nothing will happen somebody can accuse

    me of great inflation and i will just

    tell them that

    well everybody learned a lot did the

    right thing

    right one of the quotes on one of the

    posts that you did about grades

    is is your goal for some to succeed and

    some to fail

    are you still operating with a belief

    that only some students are capable of

    learning what you're teaching

    and grades are supposed to detect who

    those are or is your goal for

    everyone to learn that quote like it

    totally resonated with me that

    makes a lot of sense i wish more people

    had the approach that you're outlining

    with the infinite resubmits and

    getting feedback and iterating on things

    and whatnot because it models what we do

    outside of these formalized spaces

    one of the quotes that a professor

    mentioned in passing

    was what do we do with students who take

    course

    they're able to develop complete

    understanding of this concept in 16

    weeks but

    we have to assign a grade at the end of

    the 14th week so what happens with those

    students

    and that just was like oh yeah we can't

    just like

    constrain learning into these

    predetermined slots of time

    and expect everyone to succeed within

    that no of course not

    and i mean it goes back to that

    experience i have in my

    pre-algebra class learning basic on my

    texas instruments tia 82 calculator

    had somebody told me that i only had 10

    weeks to learn that programming language

    and to change that version of tetris

    that i was trying to make run faster

    i wouldn't have succeeded it wouldn't

    have happened i

    certainly didn't have a teacher to help

    me do it i was doing it all on my own

    too so it was just going to take a long

    time

    i think i spent the entire summer just

    rereading that manual for the calculator

    just over and over and over again

    tinkering with things and trying to make

    the game work better that i was trying

    to change

    but all of the constraints that come

    with time and grades and other things

    that's what would have broken that model

    one more example of this when i was in

    college i took

    a required statistics for engineers

    course because

    at the time when i was there our cs

    degree was in the college of engineering

    and i had to take all of the engineering

    requirements

    so staff electrical fundamentals physics

    and all of these other random things

    that had nothing to do with computer

    science

    but in the stats course because they

    were teaching i don't know

    enough stats faculty for that they

    didn't have enough stats tas for it so

    they just did a mastery learning model

    they had a sequence of lessons you would

    read them

    and then they just had like a pile of 20

    versions of a quiz for every single one

    of those lessons you just

    kept taking the quiz until you passed it

    and not only passed it but could explain

    why each answer that you gave was right

    to the ta and once you've demonstrated

    mastery on them

    you were done with the course and you

    became a ta and it just led to this

    really interesting productive

    learning context that everybody's

    working hard to understand this material

    the moment they do understand it they

    can help others understand it the

    pool of instructors grows over time

    the people who take two weeks to mask

    the material you know they're done in

    two weeks and they can help out with

    others

    learning and those that might take 10

    weeks it just might take 10 weeks

    and that's okay and then the beautiful

    thing was if it took longer than 10

    weeks

    when somebody got to the end of the

    quarter they would just let you

    retake the class replace the old grade

    with a new grade and if it took you 20

    weeks to get to that 4.0 than you did

    so everybody got a 4.0 on that class

    every single time and eventually

    mastered that material

    so if you were to just suddenly lose

    your memory

    starting over blank slate right now in

    terms of

    relearning or gaining understanding in

    computer science or

    in pedagogy teaching what would you do

    to develop your expertise in either of

    those areas

    oh those are both really different areas

    right let's talk about programming first

    i think that's a little simpler than

    teaching programming in cs one of the

    things that made my deliberate practice

    work when i was in middle school was

    just the nature of a compiler

    as poor as the feedback is that

    compilers give when a program is wrong

    it is some feedback and it's more

    feedback than other disciplines will

    give you like if you're

    in biology and you're trying to grow

    some culture

    you're not going to get a lot of

    feedback from the petri dish about what

    you were doing wrong and why it didn't

    grow

    you might need a teacher and with some

    expertise to help guide you on that one

    but when you make a syntax error or

    there's some logic error there's a

    possibility of

    iterating with a compiler to get some

    insight around what went wrong

    it's more often the case that we get so

    many things wrong when we're programming

    that we end up

    exhausting our motivation before we

    discover what went wrong

    and we don't have enough confidence to

    persist in those things so

    i view a lot of learning of programming

    really as a

    the teacher's job is provide enough

    encouragement and support

    and strategies for helping somebody

    understand the feedback they're

    receiving

    that they can continue down that

    inevitable path of making sense of how

    programs can execute

    through the feedback that a compiler

    gives and sometimes supplementing it

    with the teacher

    so if i was relearning programming and i

    had a teacher at my disposal

    you know that's what i'd want to happen

    give me a lot of interesting exciting

    opportunities to make things

    help me understand what i'm getting

    wrong and the learning is going to

    happen

    that's just going to be the automatic

    part the trick is motivation and the

    trick is feedback and those are the two

    pieces that are the hard

    and scarce resources to come by in

    programming teaching of course is an

    entirely

    different challenge to be honest as a

    higher education

    teacher i think the only feedback i get

    about my teaching that's meaningful is

    the feedback i give myself

    and that slows me down quite a bit what

    i would love to have is people who are

    teaching my subjects

    in my classroom every single day telling

    me what they like and didn't like and

    just helping me improve my practice

    really rapidly and continuously but i

    never received that

    we have some peer teaching evaluations

    that happen once a year but

    you know pretty quickly if you're a

    committed teacher you don't have any

    peers that can advance your practice

    and so i'm usually the person as one of

    the senior people who has more teaching

    experience than my junior colleagues

    so it's me advancing their practice and

    not the other way around yeah i

    haven't engaged in some discussions with

    administrators and

    have talked about how learning the

    content knowledge of cs is often easier

    than the pedagogy behind it

    and the reason why is because you have

    more opportunities to learn and fail

    while working on the content knowledge

    but with the pedagogy like there's only

    so many hours in the week

    where you're going to be able to work

    with somebody in terms of being able to

    practice teaching in small or large

    group settings

    oh yeah i teach courses that happen once

    a year

    at most sometimes less frequently than

    that which means that i'll teach a

    lesson

    and i'll give myself 10 minutes after

    class to just write down everything that

    went wrong and

    it better be the case that my notes were

    good because i'm going to come back to

    them a year from then and that's my only

    hope of doing better

    next time was good notes about what was

    broken and what was successful

    about something yeah that's a good point

    when i interviewed dan schneider for

    the podcast he was talking about how he

    really liked having

    in the elementary space like the same

    class several times

    in the day in a row so you teach like

    five of the exact same class and each

    time just change it a little bit tweak

    it here and there and see how it changes

    that's one of the things i also really

    liked about being in the elementary

    space is you have the opportunity to

    just keep trying it over and over with

    different sets of kids and

    and see what works and what doesn't yeah

    the other thing i find myself doing

    to give myself more opportunities for

    practice is

    leveraging all of the prior teaching

    that i've done to just

    mentally simulate what i think is going

    to happen so i'll plan a bunch of

    activities for some

    class in one day i've actually been

    doing a lot of that today for an

    upcoming course

    and i'll find myself just like going

    through some slides and some

    instructions and just

    imagining what students might do just

    pulling on all of the dozens and

    hundreds of students that i've taught

    before and just kind of thinking through

    what might go wrong here

    what might work what might be fun about

    this what might be boring

    what's going to be the confusing concept

    and my mind ends up

    being the little laboratory for working

    through what i think is going to be

    successful and not

    and then if i've really done a great job

    kind of elaborately constructing all of

    the simulations in my head by the time i

    do teach it

    i'll have a really good sense of what

    was wrong and right about that model

    that i had in my mind of what was going

    to happen

    and over time as i've gotten to be a

    better teacher my predictions are better

    i'm you know more and more certain and

    more and more right about what's going

    to happen in the classroom and i can

    give that feedback to other teachers and

    make the same predictions

    for them but if i was starting over

    that's what i'd be missing i'd be

    missing all of that prior knowledge to

    really

    shape my ability to do that more rapid

    reflection and experimentation in my

    head

    yeah i really like that i'd love to see

    some more research

    on that in particular so i've read

    research on mental

    practice and in relation to like sports

    and

    like tactile physical things but it's

    interesting thinking about it from a

    pedagogical standpoint in terms of

    simulating things so like

    there have been studies that have shown

    that mental practice is about 80

    as effective as actually physically

    doing it whether it's like drumming or

    engaging in basketball or whatever it is

    that you're trying to learn so it'd be

    interesting to see what what would that

    look like from a pedagogical standpoint

    how would you develop that

    and i wondered you know how much

    teachers just do this without even

    noticing

    i have these moments like right before a

    class will start where i'll just have

    this sudden realization that something's

    gonna break

    and it's because i've been playing it

    out in my head over and over again right

    or i had a dream about it the night

    before

    or i was thinking about it in the shower

    or you know there's just all of these

    moments where you're really working

    through

    what's going to happen and sometimes

    it's a little too late to make that

    change

    yeah what do you feel is holding back

    educators or the field

    and what can we potentially do about it

    that's a great question

    i'm gonna get really really technical on

    this one i think that most of the things

    that we create in computer science and

    most of the things that we create in the

    software industry

    whether to support learning or not

    whether they're a learning technology or

    an educational platform

    or even just the general purpose

    programming language they're just

    really bad they're really poorly

    designed and hard to learn

    things and it's not the case that let's

    pick on a programming language like java

    or python

    or even scratch it's not the case that

    these are things that are kind of

    designed as they should be and shall

    always be these are not things that come

    from nature these are designed artifacts

    the teams come together and create an

    innovation

    and sometimes we just create things that

    are really really complicated and

    confusing and i think that a lot of that

    accidental complexity

    just gets in the way of a lot of teacher

    content knowledge but also pedagogical

    content knowledge too yep like think

    about the content knowledge piece

    how much time do we spend explaining to

    teachers

    how to observe the behavior of a scratch

    program because it doesn't have any way

    of setting break points and observing

    what's happening at runtime instead you

    need to insert like 5000

    print statements and or pause statements

    into each of the parts of your program

    right that's just a board design choice

    on the part of that platform it's not

    some intrinsic thing that everybody

    needs to know about computer science

    and then on the pedagogical content

    knowledge side of it that

    ends up flowing into all of these other

    complications suddenly you're not just

    having to know

    that that's a strategy for debugging in

    scratch you also have to know how to

    help people

    properly execute that strategy and

    notice the mistakes they've made when

    they've used that strategy but that

    strategy never should have existed in

    the first place

    it should have just been a better

    programming environment that

    reduced some of these complexities so

    when i think about

    cs education compared to other fields

    like let's say math education or science

    education

    we have so many more accidental design

    flaws that get in our way

    for teaching didn't exist in math or in

    physics or in chemistry

    the number of things that can pop up in

    your math notation there's not a

    software update for algebra notation

    right now

    we settled on it it is what it is and we

    can all just focus on making that better

    computer science even if we've settled

    on something for five years we know it's

    going to be gone in another five years

    and we have to learn a whole bunch of

    other random stuff that doesn't work

    right your response reminds me a lot of

    an interview i did

    almost a year ago with andreas stefik

    and

    he was talking about how they were

    basically

    had a control group and a treatment

    group so like one group was using like

    let's say python another group was using

    a placebo language that was like

    literally just random characters and

    whatnot and they wanted to see how would

    python compare against

    a programming language that was

    completely randomized and so his summary

    of that if people haven't listened to

    this and are listening to this episode

    they should go check that one out it's

    fascinating there's another connection

    there too

    programming language learning which i

    think is something that we've done a lot

    of research on in our lab

    part of the reason that we focused on

    this really specific part of computer

    science education is because i want to

    get rid of that accidental complexity

    i want it to be the case that no matter

    how poorly designed the language is

    i can efficiently and effectively teach

    it to anybody so that they understand it

    and all of its warts and all of the

    things to watch out for

    i can move on and get into the more

    interesting stuff like data structures

    and algorithms and ethics and everything

    else

    but at the moment until we can get

    people to understand programming

    languages really

    effectively and robustly i think it's

    just going to be in the way of all of

    those other subjects

    yeah you mentioned the pck framework

    that's one of the things that i like

    about

    like a variant that came out that was

    tpack so it's like

    the thinking of the venn diagram the

    technological the pedagogical and the

    content knowledge how those all overlap

    and like how you have to know the

    platform that you're using you have to

    know the content knowledge that you're

    using and you have to know how to

    effectively like teach all of those

    things and how they work together

    so people haven't heard of that i'll

    include a link to that in the show notes

    tpack is interesting especially in

    relation to computer science

    because it is certainly the case that we

    use technologies to teach computer

    science

    and that computer science also involves

    some technologies itself

    but it is also the technology that we

    use to create those technologies and so

    it gets really entangled when we think

    about all those different

    interactions between things yep it is

    helpful for teachers to understand

    how computer science was used to create

    the technologies that they're using to

    do the teaching

    so it's very circular when i was looking

    at your website you had an

    interesting page on it where it

    basically showed like the breakdown of

    what your workload was going to look

    like

    for each week like for the upcoming year

    and you're a very busy individual

    so i'm curious how do you handle the

    pressures of

    being an educator a scholar and

    not get burned out from having such an

    intense workload in a field that is

    constantly changing and evolving

    yeah that's a great question i want to

    start off just by recognizing that

    page and my busyness and my productivity

    it's probably a huge source of imposter

    syndrome for a lot of people because

    they can't imagine how i get all of

    these things done

    and they're struggling too so i just

    want to acknowledge that i struggle with

    it too

    it's why i have so many practices for it

    to make it better

    and i've been practicing the

    productivity piece of it for a long time

    way back when i was starting middle

    school back in sixth grade i mentioned

    that my mom was a grade school teacher

    too

    she was the most organized person i knew

    she had a lot of paper planners that she

    used for everything she was very

    organized about her

    lesson and unit plans for school and for

    teaching

    and since she was kind of my teacher

    role model growing up

    i wanted a planner too so really really

    early on in middle school i had a

    planner and to do lists and a calendar

    way overkill for the time right but it

    just meant that i had all of these

    practices that i was constantly

    cultivating

    and i saw hers and she would ask me

    questions about it

    like is that working for you do you want

    to change anything about it we can go to

    the store at the mall

    and they can give you a different kind

    of to-do list if you want a different

    one so

    the idea that we build practices to

    manage our time

    is something i learned really early on

    and then just got better at over time

    what are ways outside of the

    productivity that you

    rest or disconnect from the busyness

    and being productive yeah one of them is

    just the practice of

    drawing really sharp lines around things

    i

    work fixed hours i stop working at a

    certain time i don't look at work emails

    after a certain time i don't work on the

    weekends

    unless i've traded some weekday time for

    some weekend time

    i'm really strict about how much time i

    give my job

    there are weird edge cases being you

    know as a professor i'm supposed to

    follow my curiosity so if i'm curious

    about something and i want to go follow

    it does that work

    right is it not work i don't really know

    so there's some fuzzy boundaries there

    when it comes to research and

    scholarship

    you know but i really do unplug from

    work in ways that i think

    sometimes other people struggle to do i

    got good at that when i was a parent

    in graduate school i wanted to have time

    for my family and be there with my

    family and i

    just decided that grad school was going

    to be a nine-to-five job

    so i'd show up in the office at nine and

    i'd leave at five and i'd know that i'd

    have eight hours

    to get all of my classwork and research

    and

    other random service done and it kind of

    meant that i didn't spend a lot of time

    socializing like a lot of my

    peers did i just focused on my family

    and my research

    and then squeezed in social stuff into

    travel and other things

    but it just meant that i wasn't thinking

    about work when i was doing other stuff

    that was really a nice way of kind of

    making space for

    other things that mattered in my life i

    wish i did that in grad school

    in particular when i was working on my

    dissertation i was working in a k-8

    elementary school

    so that was my nine to five essentially

    i was teaching at a community college at

    night and then i was writing my

    dissertation

    on weeknights and on weekends and like

    christmas morning like etc like

    there were no breaks family vacations i

    was in hawaii working on my dissertation

    on the beach so

    that i do not recommend for anyone and i

    have since to move away from that kind

    of work

    work balance or lack of

    what do you wish there was more research

    on that could inform

    your own practices there are so many

    questions

    in computer science education that we

    don't have answers to

    there's just so many different things i

    am most curious and i think i struggle

    the most with the ones that connect with

    students identities

    you know we have so many research papers

    about things like

    how to teach a particular concept in

    computer science

    or how to assess a certain kind of

    knowledge in computer science but we

    just don't have a lot that really

    connects

    in substance with who our students are

    and what that has to do with them

    learning computer science an example of

    a project

    that one of my phd students is working

    on they've been really interested in how

    students think about careers in computer

    science and how their conceptions of

    careers

    ends up shaping their motivations in

    computer science classes

    and ends up determining what they value

    and don't value about what they're

    learning

    i think there's really interesting

    things there that are just so

    fundamental around

    what it even means to teach something

    well can you teach

    some theoretical concept in computer

    science well

    if students completely deny it as a

    legitimate thing to know

    from a career perspective and if you're

    teaching it anyway right what are you

    doing

    how are you connecting that to their

    identity and if you never do

    what is the consequence of that on how

    that knowledge plays out

    in their career because if they go and

    discount it as relevant will they ever

    bring it to bear on any of the problems

    that they encounter in practice

    and if they don't then what was the

    point of teaching it in the first place

    at all so i'd love to see that times all

    of the other random things

    around whose students are and how they

    bring themselves into the classroom and

    how that shapes

    how they see what we teach and how we

    connect with their identities

    yeah and are students entering in with

    their own blinders on

    like if i had not been asking questions

    and kind of pursuing my own curiosities

    i would not be doing this interview

    right now like i wouldn't have gone into

    computer science as a field like i would

    have continued with music education it's

    so when you go into a class like here's

    my end goal of what i want to get out of

    this degree

    without realizing the potential other

    avenues you could go down while pursuing

    that degree i don't know it's just kind

    of narrowing

    it is and then sometimes it's narrowing

    and sometimes it's not so

    an example is we found that some

    students their career aspirations around

    computer science are actually not

    content-based

    they're more economic stability based

    they're in computer science because

    they've grown up in poverty and they've

    received the narrative that the only way

    to not be in poverty is to be in

    computer science and that's a

    hard narrative to escape in a city like

    seattle and so they're

    totally open to learning whatever

    they're just like teach me anything i

    could possibly know about computer

    science because

    anything that will get me to that

    stability is something that i want and

    i'm just going to trust you that

    whatever you're teaching me is it's

    going to be that thing whereas others

    might come in with a really strict

    narrative around what computer science

    is

    right computer sciences all of the

    languages and apis that appear

    on the job position descriptions

    on the hiring website and those are the

    only things that are valid

    and microsoft and google and amazon get

    to decide what those are

    and you do not teacher teacher you are

    not the expert

    right so those are really different ways

    of bringing

    those narratives into the classroom that

    dramatically change what kinds of

    teaching are possible

    yeah no that's a good point and i like

    the two different examples you gave with

    that

    do you have any questions for myself or

    to the field at large i am really

    curious

    you know let's imagine time is not a

    thing and

    we have all of the resources that we

    need what do you want it to look like

    i'm particularly curious around k8 since

    you had some lots of expertise in that

    space what do you wish it looked like if

    we could just

    change the systems and the structures to

    be whatever we think the idea would be

    the late sir kim robbins did like the

    ted talk that

    a lot of people are familiar with

    basically arguing that schools kills

    creativity

    and that has something that i have felt

    as an individual that is something i

    have

    engaged in as an educator and didn't

    realize it and now reflect on it and go

    hmm i would have done that differently

    if i

    knew then what i know now i wish

    education

    was the formalized places and spaces

    that we went to was more about just

    being able to go on this journey of

    learning what is interesting to you

    and kind of engaging that in your own

    way and there is a model

    called the sudbury school where teachers

    are staff members quote

    and you are able to go in and say i want

    to learn this today

    there's a famous case of a kid who's

    like i just want to learn how to fish

    and spent two years just fishing that's

    all they did

    and then one day they came in and were

    like i want to learn astrophysics and so

    then they started exploring astrophysics

    and to me that sounds awesome like just

    creating a space where we can learn

    together create cool things and kind of

    have fun with that and explore

    and part of this has to do from seeing

    how many

    courses and subject areas are now

    mandated in the k-12 space

    it's diluting everything else that we're

    working on and so we're learning

    surface level things on a lot of

    different topics but never really having

    the opportunity to apply them

    in an interesting way and in a way that

    is meaningful to kids

    in their lives and in the communities

    that we work in it's just we're all

    learning the same surface level stuff

    and doing nothing with it and that is

    kind of a shame because

    then it positions these formalized

    spaces for learning and educators and

    whatnot as

    these outsiders that are disconnected or

    anachronistic

    with society and with what we want to do

    in life so if i were to kind of

    change things it would be to focus on

    let's have fun with learning and let's

    get rid of all this other

    excess mandates whether it's grades or

    mandatory subject areas or whatever but

    that's kind of my

    pie in the sky dream that i'd like to

    see

    i love that vision and i think it also

    is kind of points to this

    really tragic irony too of you know

    being in higher education myself

    where we have the freedom to create that

    system in higher ed

    right we can just get rid of all the

    prereqs and we can say go learn whatever

    you want and

    we can teach our classes however we want

    because there's nobody that's really

    telling us how they're taught or what

    kinds of methods we use

    we have that freedom in higher ed but we

    don't use it for any of that

    it's just not at all there because our

    imaginations are too small honestly

    right and the resources we have to learn

    to be great teachers are too small

    too and then you know your imaginations

    in k-12

    are not limiting you can imagine all

    these other different ways of it but

    then there's

    constraints so we should just trade

    places

    it's fascinating like working within and

    outside of the system

    and like all the constraints and the

    affordances

    that are possible within the educational

    space

    i like i love it on one hand on the

    other hand i see so many problems that i

    want to be able to fix or address and

    whatnot it's sometimes overwhelming

    yeah that's a big gap right between our

    imaginations and the

    amount of work it takes to make change

    happen struggled a lot with that

    especially taking on administrative

    roles in higher education the reality of

    change

    whether we like it or not just being

    really really challenging and slow

    and if we do it really really well

    sometimes it will happen and it will be

    incremental

    the really radical things are just very

    far out of reach sometimes

    and often because people are

    overburdened and tired and exhausted and

    they can't

    handle that much change right and can't

    even conceive of

    how it would work like when i have

    mentioned this with other people

    they'll say well what about when

    somebody needs to know this subject area

    that they're no longer learning the

    surface level on it's like

    well then they will have studied how to

    learn so they'll be able to figure it

    out

    like college professors who are really

    good in a content area have had to learn

    pedagogy and whatnot and that one class

    that they take on a saturday before

    classes start is not enough to teach

    them everything they need to know to be

    a great college professor so like

    they've had to learn that

    there are many subject areas and

    disciplines where people are learning

    things outside of what they've been

    formally taught

    and myself speaking like only having

    taken two formalized classes in computer

    science

    a lot of it was learning through online

    resources and learning through trial and

    error and whatnot so

    it's something that i value in which

    more people understood and that basic

    idea

    that people just learn i mean that's the

    thing that

    just seems like the inescapable fact

    that we all have to grapple with

    right schools are a way of doing it and

    teachers are a way of doing it

    and learning technologies are a way of

    doing it but if they were

    to all disappear we would still learn

    right we would probably just learn

    differently and learn different things

    less efficiently depending on the

    circumstance and the person

    it's not clear what that world would

    look like and it's not clear

    that you know industry would be happy

    with our ability to fuel it with

    students that know particular things but

    people would still learn

    are there any questions that i haven't

    asked that you want to talk about i

    guess there's questions about community

    too

    and what it means to be in a field

    that's growing and vibrant

    but also has a lot of work to do yeah in

    what ways

    do you see the field is growing but is

    being held back by

    the areas that it needs to improve yeah

    there's a really long list of things

    to do i think a lot about when i entered

    the

    research field formally and just meeting

    the community and recognizing the scope

    of educational reform

    that was really taking on and that a lot

    of researchers and teachers and

    educators have taken on

    only in hindsight has become obvious

    that that mission was

    you know a multi-decades mission and so

    that's a

    long marathon and so i think a lot about

    what it means for us to build community

    that's resilient for that long

    run what it means to really celebrate

    the small wins and the medium-sized wins

    and the incremental progress that we

    make and just

    you know recognize that all of those

    things are good things

    and then yet continue working with each

    other to make more of that happen

    i think that those two things around

    like making long-term change happen

    but having community that's really

    supportive of itself

    and of each other that those two can't

    be

    separated from each other you're not

    going to have change unless you have a

    community that's really committed to

    that

    support and you won't have community if

    you don't have some vision for long-term

    change either

    so i hope we keep continue cultivating

    that and supporting each other so we can

    keep that change going

    so if you had let's say a phd student

    coming in

    and isn't really familiar with the

    community and is asking for advice on

    how do i get in touch with the community

    and learn and grow from

    others within the field what advice

    would you recommend for them resources

    for one

    so i think our community has created so

    many wonderful resources around which

    communities exist

    what different types of reform efforts

    exist like any

    really diverse community it's very

    scattered and there's information

    everywhere and so

    a lot of our effort has to go into

    organizing some of that so that people

    can find

    simpler front doors to it and so that's

    what i usually do is i point my students

    to those front doors and say well here's

    a place to start and a community to

    start with

    and as long as i can get them plugged in

    on that first path the community itself

    is going to pull people in and really

    introduce them to the broader structure

    and ecosystem and opportunities it's

    really just that

    entry point that i think requires some

    bridging so i've worked a lot on things

    like

    the computing education research faq

    that i maintain

    so that anybody that's entering the

    research part of cs education

    can say oh this is what the research is

    this is

    the community these are the people in it

    these are some of the challenges that

    it's facing and the accomplishments that

    it's made

    and it's something that i wanted to have

    when i was entering research in the

    first place like

    what what does it look like who's in it

    and what's happening there

    so i find a lot of students and even

    other faculty that read that faq

    you know they leave with some broader

    systems level understanding

    of what's happening that they can then

    use to navigate which communities do i

    want to meet with which conference do i

    want to go to

    where might i find my interests best

    expressed and find some people with some

    common interests

    to meet so i think that navigational

    kind of content

    is really important yeah one thing that

    i'd add on to that having given this

    advice before is

    don't just go to those communities and

    spaces and

    be in a corner with other new people

    within the community go up to

    the senior scholar and just ask

    questions about their work and their

    research interests and whatnot and just

    get to know people

    people are willing to and love talking

    about what they're interested in

    absolutely and i mean i think senior

    people want that to happen too

    because we're not just interested in

    talking to the people that we

    already know or interested in newcomers

    as well i was at a conference a couple

    of years ago and

    somebody had given a keynote he was one

    of the people who'd really set some of

    the foundations for the field of

    software engineering

    and he was sitting at a table by himself

    nobody was talking to him

    and here's this person that had this

    multi-decades wealth of knowledge about

    the history of this entire field of

    which this conference is about and not a

    single person wanted to have a

    conversation with them

    and so i just sat down and introduced

    myself and we talked for like three

    hours about

    just all of these arcs of history and

    everything that i could possibly want to

    know about software engineering

    it just takes a little bit of courage to

    go and make that conversation happen

    yeah it is a little bit scary but like

    some really cool things can come from it

    like i've had presentations and

    publications come out of

    just those one-off conversations where

    somebody remembered that and they

    reached out to me

    sometimes years later hey would you be

    interested in writing about that topic

    yeah absolutely it's always worth it

    where might people go to connect with

    you

    and the organizations that you work with

    there are a lot of ways to connect with

    me so

    people can always write me an email i

    respond to them pretty quickly

    you can find me on twitter i respond on

    twitter pretty quickly

    a lot of the communities that i work

    with end up having somewhat more private

    spaces

    like slacks and discords and other types

    of things but

    a great way of connecting with those is

    to just connect with a person in that

    community like myself

    and then we send you invites so i think

    that that's the key thing is to just

    be bold to reach out to people in the

    community and i think more than many

    other communities i've been part of

    especially research communities

    the cs education community is a place

    that just wants

    to grow once new people wants new

    perspectives so

    i've never found anybody that's nastily

    rejected somebody for saying

    hi i'm new can you show me around

    and with that that concludes this week's

    episode of the csk8 podcast

    i really hope you enjoyed this interview

    i record these intros and outros after

    the fact and so it was great going back

    and listening to this interview again

    with amy

    if you also enjoyed it please consider

    sharing it with somebody else as there's

    some great information

    and wisdom imparted by amy thank you so

    much for listening to this episode stay

    tuned next week for another unpacking

    scholarship episode and two weeks from

    now for another interview i hope you're

    having a wonderful week and are staying

    safe

Guest Bio

Amy Ko.jpg

Amy J. Ko is a Professor at the University of Washington Information School and an Adjunct Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. She directs the Code & Cognition Lab, where she studies human aspects of programming. Her earliest work included techniques for automatically answering questions about program behavior to support debugging, program understanding, and reuse. Her later work studied interactions between developers and users, and techniques for web scale aggregation of user intent through help systems; she co-founded AnswerDash to commercialize these ideas. Her latest work investigates effective, equitable, and inclusive ways for humanity to learn computing, especially how data, algorithms, APIs, and machine learning can oppress by amplifying injustice. She received her Ph.D. at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008, and degrees in Computer Science and Psychology with Honors from Oregon State University in 2002.

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