This article is a snippet of a future book entitled: “How To Really Teach Programming.” A sequel of “How To Really Teach Yourself Programming.”
Currently at the time of this article’s publication, I am taking up a minor in education. One course in particular said that every instructor had three knowledge circles that intersect with each other: content, pedagogical, and technological.
Content knowledge is the basic prerequisite for teaching any topic. You cannot teach what you do not know. Pedagogical knowledge is how you teach the content that you know. Technological knowledge is simply knowledge of relevant and effective tools that aid pedagogy and support content.
These are the three basic circles that each instructor knows they should possess. Each instructor must find their “intersection” wherein they are able to apply the maximum amount of content, pedagogy, and technology without one being overpowered by the rest. Finding this intersection means holding back on things that you may know. Not everything in your circles can be included in the intersection unless you find a way to synergize everything that you know into a cluster of coexisting circles.
Nevertheless, I argue that there should be a fourth circle— context knowledge.
Instructors should know (up to a certain extent) their students’ context inside and outside the academic environment. Instructors should have an idea of their students’ past, present, and future.
This includes knowing what other subjects/courses students are taking alongside your own course. Or what the work environment is in the professional context of your students. What is the future of their field when your students graduate?
Sometimes, instructors can be so focused on teaching what they know they should teach, instead of focusing on the effectiveness of whatever they are teaching.
For example, we all heard of the phrase, “you probably know this already from your other class.” But to this I ask, “what if we do not?” As such, there are some who are, in fact, clueless of the current topic at hand, they will be left behind due to an incorrect assumption of students’ context.
Many times, the only thing stopping students from doing better is the lack of understanding that educators have for their context. For example, if the systems and requirements of two subjects coincide enough, it is an opportunity to merge the final projects of these two courses so that students will not have to split their attention and therefore build better projects. However, this choice requires a preexisting knowledge of students’ academic context.
Most of the time, the only thing stopping the three circles from working effectively is the lack of the fourth circle— context knowledge.
Context knowledge can take many forms. I will focus on one form in particular— professional context.
Professional Context
As a student, one thing I appreciate is if the professor actually knows what it is like outside of the university. While some may think that a professor talking about their professional life is something minor or insignificant, I believe that it gives the topics that they teach an extra dimension of insight that can otherwise not be achieved.
However, it should be noted that not all professors who come from a professional background possess professional contextual knowledge that is teachable. The opposite is also true— a professor has never experienced corporate work can still possess professional contextual knowledge.
Professional contextual knowledge must be relevant with respect to the expected time that a student will graduate. It is not necessarily with respect to the present, nor is it with respect to the last time a professor did non-academic work.
While a professor’s non-academic experiences make for good stories and a good source of insight, it is not this context that we should be basing our teaching on. Instead, professors must know and research what the environment will be like for students by the time they graduate.
While it is true that some of this responsibility falls under the students, it is also true that professors must know how to teach their topics with respect to what is relevant in the future. This is especially true with programming.
There are some frameworks or pipelines that are just outdated and are never seen in professional contexts today. While these can be taught for added insight, these should not be focused on. Meanwhile, there are also frameworks that are picking up traction and are going to be prerequisites for future opportunities by the time students graduate. These should be focused on more.
Knowing what to teach and what to focus on is such an important piece of teaching anything relating to technology because, like I said in my previous book, technology moves fast. School should not be stuck in the present.
It can be argued that much of this work should not fall on the immediate professors and instead should be assigned to university personnel. Nevertheless, it is still the professor’s role to integrate as much of this knowledge as possible into the teaching of their topics.
Whether or not the university will take note of the future context, professors should maximize professional contextual knowledge.
The true job of all teachers
In today’s day and age, the role of teachers extends outside just teaching. Decades ago, video technology has not yet been this good. Decades ago, teachers had to focus on just repeating themselves for years and years and years until they changed their subject focus or switched schools or positions. Or at least that’s what I thought.
When I was a child, I never dreamed of becoming an educator. Teaching was never my passion. The thought of how repetitive it would be disgusted me. I do not want to spend my life just teaching the same things with the only difference being the faces that I see. But now I realize, even disregarding the advancements of video technology or AI, teachers should do more than just repeat themselves.
Contexts change. This much is true. A set of students may all have a different affinity for a topic than the last batch of students. This can be due to so many different external factors such as technology and how students of each generation interact with these factors.
Nevertheless, it is the instructor’s responsibility to understand this context and adapt to it. For every generation of students, instructors are always faced with the responsibility of understanding what current mental models exist in this generation that I can use to connect to those models and build deeper and more interconnected knowledge.
This is especially true when teaching anything in the field of tech. So many professors are teaching things that everyone already knows and repeating these topics without putting them in a different perspective, this only promotes boredom and wastes time. Why do you think this generation prefers Youtube videos that are updated every year?
A good example for this are history teachers. These educators know that the topic they need to teach is always unchanged throughout any generation of students. In fact, I always saw this subject as boring. I had this mindset of “if we can’t change it, why learn it?” This was until I realized what good history teachers do— they contextualize history to what the current common knowledge of today is. The concepts, the principles, the rationales, all of it contextualized to what students know today. That connection makes students feel that history is still relevant today to guide us into tomorrow.
This is something that recordings cannot do. Nevertheless, there are things that we undeniably have to repeat, and for that, we have technology. As instructors, we should constantly be finding ways to spend less time doing the repetitive stuff to ensure that we actually do what matters.
And what matters?— insight. Contextual insight.
Gab With Tie 
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