The other day I read Kristin Stephens-Martinez's latest blog post talking about how she has started to insert a daily plan slide at the front of her class slide decks.

Stephens-Martinez, you might know, hosts the CS-Ed Podcast which I very much enjoy even if the episode lengths never quite go long enough for my morning run which is my primary podcast listening time.

Here, the blog post talked about what Stephens-Martinez described as the "teaching practice" of creating a slide and putting it at the front of the daily class slide deck. The slide would describe via a short bullet list, the plan for the day so that students would have a road map for the lesson.

Not a bad idea but reading it I started thinking about a few things - one, the difference between teaching and teacher preparation in K12 vs college and also when a practice is considered a best practice and when one should implement any practice.

For starters, the idea of using a set opening slide. It reminded me how often I hear college instructors talk about slides - can you share your class slides with me? Does the text come with slides? And so on. Some K12 teachers use slides and maybe in the current day of smartboards more teachers use them but I rarely if ever use slides and neither do most High School teachers I know. They're too restrictive. I might have some set text or some code or a diagram here or there to project so I will use occasional individual slides or similar projected content but I've never had or used a slide deck for a lesson.

Slide decks constrain things too much. For the later slides to work, I have to follow the narrow instructional path of the earlier slides and, in an active lesson, hope that the class follows the same path at the appropriate pace.

Much easier to adjust to the needs of a particular class on a particular day without a set deck.

True, slides can save time and they have their place, but sometimes typing on a screen, drawing with a paint tool or doing either directly on a white board make more sense. So too at times does having students transcribe as opposed grabbing the slides from the website later. Doing things in these varied ways engage students differently and can be utilized to tune the cadence and tempo of a class - something that educators should probably think about more than most do.

The slides/no slides difference probably comes from the history of how things were taught. Although I'm I'm heartened to see more and more professors, including Stephens-Martinez who really care about and work on their teaching, anecdotally at least , college instruction grew out of the rote lecture. While I'm sure old school HS teaching was and sometimes is like this, K12 education as a whole is also influenced a lot by the earlier grades and how things were taught there with more interactive and active practices which, in my lifetime have become relatively mainstream in HS. So, coming out of a tradition of lecture, slides make sense. Coming out of training that also includes K-8, not nearly as much. Of course this is just conjecture.

Now, to the actual practice. It struck me as something that, in general is a good idea and it also reminded me of the age old HS practice of the Aim. That is, either before class, or within the first few minutes of class, a teacher is supposed to have on the board, or possibly elicit from the class, a sentence that describes what the class period would be spent on. Typically top front and center on a HS blackboard (do they even still have those?) you'd see the word Aim: followed by that key sentence.

Very similar idea.

I was happy to see the post sharing the practice but was also a bit sad that this fundamental technique, something maybe taught to every K12 teaching in America and probably something most American educated adults saw during their high school days isn't common knowledge for college instructors. Of course, that's nothing new. Every SIGCSE I've been do has been chock-full of "new" practices that a college person came up with that I had seen in K12 years if not decades earlier.

So, the ideas are similar but subtly different. The lead slide can contain more information and as shown in the blog post, a checklist that can be updated and the slide reused. This is good. On the other hand, the slide only stays up for a short time unless explicitly returned to. On the other hand the Aim stays up at the top of the board for the entire lesson. Less information but an anchor point that survives through the entire class.

Now, I said that the Aim or in this case, slide, is generally a good idea but I'd argue not always, and not just because I could be sloppy as a teacher and would sometimes forget the aim. In fact, one time, my principal wrote it up as one of the things I could improve on. The thing is, I'm a believer that there are no best practices, just practices that can be good, bad, or even great when used in the write time in the right way with the right population. Having an Aim or intro slide is easy and you'll generally get good bang for you buck.

Sometimes, though, you don't want to give away the punchline and telling the students the plan can do just that. As a simple example, let's say you're about to teach binary search. Typically I'd want to lead the students towards the algorithm, first by having them "discover" the possible limitations and advantages of linear search and then "discover" the binary search as a solution. In this case, an Aim or Slide that describes the why and what of the lesson would spoil the lesson. Sure, you can still have a meaningful Aim but not something that gives away the plan.

There are lots of lessons where this is the case.

I'd like to think that the teachers that have come through the program I built at Hunter get this - they know all these practices and techniques form a belt full of tools to be used as appropriate. On the other hand, I've seen far too many K12 teachers who weren't given the tool belt and tools but were rather taught "Here's how to do it" and they would always have an Aim or teach via a particular practice no matter what. Of course, too few college instructors get any form of preparation in terms of teaching so they're left in an even less desirable place.

So, that's my take.

I applaud Kristin Stephens-Martinez for helping to share better teaching practices at the college level through both her blog and the CS-ed podcast. In this day and age with fewer and fewer of us CS Educators blogging it's read and hear more voices sharing good stuff.