What are the dynamics of learning a practice? Draw your experiences from any and every corner of your life.
What I come up with is we need to talk about the role of peers, how to work with them, in addition to who and what are they.
Let's go back to a classic classroom of kids at their desks, teacher up front, like we see in so many movies. The peers are the students, and they check each other out, for looks, for behaviors, for cues, for clues. They also check out the teacher, and learn from student teacher interactions. How the adult in the room behaves with peers one's own age, is of interest, in addition to the subject matter.
Suppose the teacher encourages show & tell, meaning she or he sets aside time during meetups for lightning talks, meaning students showcase their own work for minutes at a time. Perhaps these sessions get recorded. Perhaps students have access to the raw recordings and edit together their own works, in turn topical in show & tell (like in a filmmaking class).
A core purpose of Show & Tell is to give peers a way to assess their own performance relative to the class material, and not just relative to classroom theatrics, which I reiterate are not irrelevant. They do this by comparing their own increasing level of mastery with that of others.
Some life coaches will butt in to say one should never compare. I say always compare but not in the judgey way of "who's better?" because in a multidimensional space (most of them are) there's no obvious "better" dimension. Develop your tastes. Learn to articulate them.
If I all walk into the same class knowing nothing about sculpting with clay (the "even playing field" metaphor), and within a week, three peers are showcasing the realistic-looking busts of famous people they've made, then I might feel motivated to practice more, to make my Show & Tell likewise interesting. We call that peer pressure, but that's only one form of it. Call it "I want to be a star too" pressure.
Perhaps I'm a Python teacher online, and my students are all adults with jobs in IT. I'm recalling my real world experience with Saisoft here. What we did some, but what we could have done more of, is schedule lightning talks every other session, perhaps for only 15 minutes, enough time to get three show & tell presentations.
This would have been equally applicable when I taught data visualization (histograms and like that) for Clarusway, although in this case we had whole separate practice sections as distinct from the content lectures (which I provided).
I've also been a Python teacher in person, going from school to school after school, providing content in the programmable period between "classes over, teachers done" and yet parental pickup is still at least another ninety minutes away, as they're at work.
What to do with this time, pre rush hour?
Greater Portland schools provide a smorgasbord of optional electives, provided by various providers, from nonprofits to for-profits. My entree was through a for-profit, Coding with Kids, and we stress show & tell for the reasons above, and more.
After some coaching in Codesters, an online Python learning environment sharing many features with MIT Scratch (a curriculum prerequisite one could say), students would try stuff on their own computers. We aimed at one laptop or desktop per child (OLPC).
I'd actually bring Chromebooks if the school had no computer lab to lend us -- but usually we used the school's lab, in which case Windows, but not always.
After playing with Codesters for awhile, some student would raise a hand to get enqueued in the next round of Show & Tell. The student took control of the projector, and screencast their own work. It didn't have to be a work of art.
They could also show off work they'd been doing in the meantime, meaning at home, in case the magic was working and they felt motivated to program "off the clock" as it were, during free time (we had no formal homework in this program). Occasionally a student would become "an addict" but in a socially approved way that had them rocketing up our "Coding Ladder" of coding abilities.
In sum, whether you're teaching online, or in person, if you have a cohort of students we might call peers, given them opportunities to show off their own work, in terms of what they've been learning. I realize this is not a novel suggestion. In a creative writing class, people read from their own writing. In a creative coding class, people run their little demos, be those games or animated greeting cards, or even musical numbers (both Codesters and MIT Scratch allow for musical composition, another kind of programming, to some level).
[enhanced version on Medium via LinkedIn ]
