Can pedagogy research help developer education?

Jane: So I am a computer science education researcher and I obviously research computer science education often with very young children, so children who are in schools, but also I do undergraduate work and I've branched out and I've started to do research with respect to industry professionals and whether there's a way to take the research that's coming out of school contexts around programming pedagogy. So that's how we teach programming in schools where there's an opportunity to transport it into an industry context. So that's my research area and that's what we're going to share. Brilliant. So as I mentioned before, we're looking at can pedagogy research and pedagogy is not what we teach, but how we teach. And it's whether the research that's being done in schools and universities, whether that can help professionals train and support others in programming. And if you want to come and join me in slide two, if as we're going through the presentation you have any questions at all, of course you can put them in discord or you can put them in here.

I don't really mind. I got the impression that some people were struggling a bit with discord. So I've spent 20 years as a professional developer myself. I had a pager in my pocket when we switched over from 1999 to 2000 and the batch cycle didn't fail in the bank, so that was all good. But then I spent 10 years as a school teacher and because of this really strange experience I had, I've been a computer scientist, developer and a school teacher. I was then spent about eight years being a researcher, a resource developer, a teacher trainer, a community leader. So kind of all things to do with implementing computer science in schools. And I worked there for different universities as well as an organisation called Computing at school who represent educators in school who are teaching computing.

But I'm very excited that now I'm working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I'm in a research centre which is a joint initiative between the foundation and the University of Cambridge and it's completely dedicated to research of computer science computing in schools.

And so it's not just about the Raspberry Pi devices, that's not our focus. It's about everything at the moment. I'm doing research on how we should teach AI in schools and how we could use what's called culturally relevant pedagogy in order to make learning more accessible to all learners in computer science. So that's me and if you'd like to join me now in slide four, this is a project that I'm going to share with you and this is a presentation that's like a game of two halves. The first half I'm going to tell you about the research and hopefully I'm going to persuade you why this is a good idea. And then in the second half I'm going to do a little bit of actual CPD that's continuing professional development. So I'm going to train you or teach you or show you one of the pedagogies that we shared with people within our research.

So it's kind of two bits. And the research projects I'm going to share was before, from a little while ago, it's actually just before Covid and all those things. So we're on slide four if anybody's just arrived and it was funded by the mayor of London. It was we devised or I devised a set of CPD that's continuing professional development for educators of 11 to 24 year olds. And it was in partnership with an organisation called London CLC. And I was working at Queen Mary University of London and it was supported by an organisation called the Institute of Coding that you might have heard of. A big thing for the mayor of London at that time was that we should have really strong links with industry. And so one of the courses that we developed was a course for industry and as well as it being a course that we delivered, we also did some research about it at the same time.

So if you join me in slide five, and I'll tell you about this industry course so I can see all some of the creatures coming along to the industry course on slide five, the point of it was to introduce computing education, research pedagogy. So this is what I said before, it's how we teach particularly programming in schools, but it's the research around it. The idea was to introduce that to you to IT professionals with the idea that it might improve how programming is taught in the workplace. That was our hypothesis. Maybe we can take things that we're doing in schools and universities and we can transport them into the workplace and it might improve how programming is taught there. And we were also very interested, lots of people in the profession in it, they go into schools and they support in schools as volunteers and we wanted to improve the way they did that in schools and for them to understand how things are taught in schools.

So there was lots of win-wins and we ran this course four times. We did a face-to-face iteration three online iterations. We had 108 participants. Of those participants, 30 people completed the post-course survey. But the best bit was six months after we'd done the first iteration. I went back and I said to this group in industry professionals, so what have you done? And we interviewed them and we can see we've got an idea of what happened immediately after the course. And then we've got an idea six months later to see if anything stuck are as what's called appropriated.

So if we look at slide six, I'm not expecting on slide six of lots of this to make very much sense to everybody because this is a lot of education. But these are the models and approaches that we shared basically over a four week course. But when I say four weeks, it was actually just four one hour sessions and we ran each one hour session as a lunchtime session.

So people kind of came along with their lunches and we kind of delivered this course and when it was online we did it as four 90 minute sessions over four weeks. But we introduced these theories. Now lots of these theories is particularly this first group here, this is the bread and butter of teachers. So this is a thing that when you go to initial teacher training, you're just going to do this and it's the first thing, it's called pedagological content knowledge. It's by a chat called Schulman. It's really old theory and it's decided that you've got stuff to teach. So your content and then you've got methods to teach it. And when you're teaching a particular topic, there are special ways that you use to teach certain types of certain types of material is to do with how we assess and we use particular verbs to describe the children's progression in learning.

Solar taxonomy bigs and colies is to do with how you sequence learning and how you make it more abstract and semantic waves. You're going to hear a lot about semantic waves, which is one down the bottom because that's what we're going to talk about in detail. These ones over here. These are ways that we teach computer science in schools which are specific to teaching programming. So they're different theories and models that we found to be very useful for teaching programming in schools. And effectively what's happening is as we go further to the right, they become more and more specific or more detailed with there's some really strong evidence that some of these techniques, they help students to make very significant progress in terms of learning to programme. We don't have time to look at all of them. What we're going to do is going to look at the research next and then we're going to look at one of them.

So if you'd like to join me in slide seven, I'm going to talk you through the research questions that we had and the results. So the first research question that we had was what was the reported impact to the people who turned up to the course immediately after it? So what impact did it have? And 90%, you always want this kind of score, don't you? 90% were more confident to support and train their colleagues. So we had a big tick there. And then we had another big tick in that 79% were more confident to volunteer in schools to support programming. So that was all good for the mayor of London.

And we also had, we used what's called a validated instrument to kind of look about professional development in more detail. And we found that it had a high impact in terms of participant enjoyment and on their learning and also on what they thought would be a potential impact on those they would then support.

So it was all looking good. Our second research question, if you go to slide eight was what was the reported impact six months later? So this is when six months later I kind of went back and talked to these, it was six people that I interviewed from the first cohort and blow me down. They'd gone off and they'd created some actual projects, sorry, some actual training courses. So they'd gone off this group and they'd created all of these different courses that they were teaching in-house to their colleagues. There was one group had created a little mini course where they were using in-house libraries in Excel and everything actually was moving towards Python, but for people who were not Python programmers already. So there were kind of people like people in the business. So the introduction to Python for any staff that was for anyone who wanted to learn Python and the Python for technology staff course was really interesting.

That was for technology staff who are not programmers. So who are maybe doing something in say IT support or some other kind of area more interested. So first of all, that was great impact because something had happened where they'd kind of gone off and done something. And if we go to slide nine, there's a little bit more about what was this reported impact. If you slide, go to slide nine, and I'm not going to talk about the pedagogy that they used or the planning changes because we're going to look at that in more detail in a minute. I'm going to say to you, well these are the big things. So if I'm just going to go and get my tool that I use in order to show things. So one slide nine, you can see down the bottom here the effect that the training had.

Well one of them, it just increased their confidence and one of the big things was it almost gave people a motivation to ask. Someone said, I've been thinking about doing that for years. I thought, well you've come and done it. Well I can. And they also felt like they had a new bag of techniques that were trusted that they could take out and use it. Also, the other thing was that they felt that their learners were making more progress and they were overcoming barriers. And I can talk to you more about what that meant. And it's kind of to do with their fault that the techniques that they used helped learners feel more themselves, feel more confident to take risks.

There were lots of things that kind of improved the learning experience. And then there was another thing that we were particularly looking at, which is something called a community of practise.

And what it did was it made this group like a wider educator group and it influenced the whole company really in terms of their attitude towards, I can't say the whole company, but the people who came to the training courses influenced them and it created then this community of learners. So there were lots of really positive things that happened about this ecosystem of education, community learning community. Our third research question if you come along to slide 10 was we wanted to compare, I'm just wait for a few to catch up. I've lost a Lima on slide seven, but on slide 10 over here, let me just get my tool again over on the left hand side.

So immediately after the course, this was the ranking of the different models that we presented and what the immediate response was and people went semantic waves. We think that's what's going to have the biggest effect and prim next co reading. And you can see that this was the order in terms of it's a small sample, it was only 27 who maybe answered that particular question of the overall 108 who kind of came along, but it's giving us an indication the semantic waves was top when the immediately came out of the course after those four sessions. And then over here is actually what they did six months later and they did something completely different. So they did actually do semantic waves. So semantic waves, oh, I need to move that one out of the way. Semantic waves, they kept that. They did do semantic waves.

Everyone said out six, we use semantic waves, it's really important for us.

We made sure that we scheduled, we kind of organised our learning to follow a semantic wave. They did a little windy bit of used modified create but not, it was kind of quite light touch and they did a little tiny bit of code reading, but mostly what they did was what I would call bread and butter educational theory, which I hadn't even included specifically, but I'd exemplified. So always in all the activities they did, they did a context specific example that was pertinent to their context. So always we did something that was context specific. They always had learning objectives at the beginning, and I'm going to experience that in a minute. They always did something called bragging, which you'll find out about in a minute. They added assessment, which is to do with this bragging and stuff, and they added more structure. So they took control of their learning episodes in a way that they'd not done before.

They didn't just stand up the front and lecture. They did a very active, they included activities but they did the semantic waving, but within what I'd call a structured learning experience. And these are not people in l and d, these are people who are normal programmers and developers but who see themselves as being educators within their context. So how are we doing for time? 7 45. We're doing fine. So we're now going to move out of the research. So hopefully I've persuaded you that there's something in it.

So there's be something in this idea of sharing educational theory and specific educational pedagogy around programming potentially with a group of developers. Maybe something good is going to come out of it. So if you join me in slide 11, you're actually now going to take part in a little bit tiny bit of the course. So it's a very small part of the course because we've only got 15 minutes rather than lots of hours.

So if you'd like to join me in slide 12 and we're going to do the first interactive activity. So this is when we find out when people are on their phones and they're really going to struggle to do this. On slide four there is our learning objective and the objective of this session is to help teach others programming. This is what we're trying to do, I know about and can use. So the learning objective really is that I want you to be able to, I know about and can use semantic waves. That's the learning objective. So the question is do you already know about and can already use semantic waves. Now if you think, actually I came to Jane's course already, so I'm green to go, I completely can do this.

I can apply semantic waves when I'm explaining to my colleagues about a new function that I've just built or about the new, I dunno, we've just changed programming languages and there's some new feature that I need to explain.

So you would be green, good to go. Or you might think, oh, I've read about this but I know about it but I'm not sure I could apply it. Or you might think I've got no idea what Jane's talking about and you would be red. So I'm just going to sit quietly. Now I put, I was going to put you in different groups, but there's not that many of you. So can you all just do it On slide 12, I'm going to delete slide 13 because it's not that many of you. So just do it all on slide 12 and I'll just delete these other ones there go.

So if you do it on slide 12, and it doesn't matter what your name is, we'll just do your all on slide 12. So if you want to slide in the sticky note, sticky note. And if you can imagine, we were actually doing this with sticky notes and it is all very practical when we were face-to-face. But this is how we did it when we ran it online. Those are the three times. And so I can see this is assessment now this is what we call very course formative assessment. I can see where my learners have started and actually when the industry professionals use this with their colleagues, their colleagues, because you do it in quite an anonymous way, they suddenly realise that everybody else didn't know about these things. And it gave this sense of a collective almost relief that actually it was okay not to know.

So this was starting to lead to this kind of community of learners and also it gave the people who were delivering a sense of, oh, well there's something that I can do now the next stage is to do something that's called unpacking. So if you'd like to go to slide 13. Now the fact that you've all said you don't know this is going to make this really easy because it's not like you're going to tell me lots. But what I want you to do in the Discord channel is I'd like you just to type what you think semantic waves might be about. So just any clue that you might have about the word semantic waves, what might it be about? Or maybe you hiding your knowledge of the topic away. So if you'd like to just go into the Discord channel and into speaker questions and tell me, you might say, I dunno anything, but let's see.

I'm in the speaker questions now I'm going to see if anybody is going to type. So I've got a guess maybe we have various waves of language we use to describe the topic where they get, ooh, more complex, nice idea. I'll just give you a few minutes. Even if it's, I really don't know, it could be about C. This phase is really important because it's getting the learners to start to really engage with the topic. Cool. So we've got this idea of is it to do with the metaphor? And then you build on that.

Great, because often we do have inklings of something and with the topic that the industry professionals were sharing, actually a lot of the learners had more knowledge than they kind of realised. So they were reticent to say they were kind of mid-level or expert. But actually what was important for the people who were delivering the material was to really start to understand where people started at.

And this unpacking is personally important for you as learners. So we've got a great idea, is it about how the topic is delivered and it's got more complex understanding as you learn more and maybe around the syntax and how we teach and describe a new topic. These are all really great ideas. So you started to unpack your knowledge. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to do some teaching. So if you'd like to go to slide 14, and I'm going to do some heavy duty theory now. So if you come to slide 14, and it's important for you to be on slide 14. So I'm really sorry I'm pulling you out of discord.

I would normally have kept it in the slides, but I decided would switch it up. I'm sure it was a good idea. Anyway, so slide 14, what are semantic waves?

And here's some theory. Semantics is one dimension. I've a learning theory called legitimation code theory and it actually comes from sociology. It's not computer science theory, it's a generic theory that's been applied in ballet nursing chemistry. Biology is a general learning theory and it's used to analyse changes in a learning activity over time. And it measures two things. It measures the complexity of meaning. And someone talked I think about understanding and meaning.

So if you think about words, sometimes a word such as algorithm, it can be packed full of meaning for some people but means just a recipe for someone else. But the complexity of vocabulary and the meaning that's packed inside it is the first dimension. And the second thing is a dependency on context. So in terms of context, you might give an explanation where it's completely abstract, there is no context or you can give an example where it's situated within a specific context and to analyse a lesson using semantic waves, we profile it a bit like we profile a criminal and some profiles have waves and some profiles they don't.

So let's have a look at that. So if you'd like to join me in slide 15, I'm going to explain a little bit more about what we mean by a wave and you plot it on a diagram. If you go to slide 15, time goes along the bottom along with the X AEs and then on the Y axis at the top you have more technical vocabulary. So I talked about this density of vocabulary. So you have more technical vocabulary at the top and you have less technical vocabulary down. Oops, wrong one. You have less technical vocabulary down the bottom. So that would be vocabulary, that's everyday language.

So rather than using the word algorithm, you might say instructions or rules or something like that. Again, at the top we have it is, oh sorry, I've got the wrong one. So it's less technical for cabaret at the bottom, apologies.

So more technical at the top, less technical at the bottom. And that's all talking about what's called semantic density. And it's about meaning. The other dimension is about context. And so at the top, if you imagine you've got a very technical definition and it's abstracted, it's got no context. That's the most difficult kind of thing for a human being to understand. Whereas down the bottom you've got less technical vocabulary loss, everyday language and it's set in a specific context. If you imagine you could imagine a learning experience where you go into the classroom or you go into the event and the lecturer gives you a definition or a model that's completely abstract.

And then they might do that unpacking that we've just done where they say, well what do you think that all means? And that's when you unpack your knowledge. You then might do an everyday activity or an activity that's set within a context which exemplifies that particular concept you're learning.

And then at the end we do a repacking activity and we summarise back up to the top to this, again a very technical abstract view and that links in with people's descriptions of what they thought it might be. It's about how you build knowledge. This is all about knowledge building, but we need to give you some more examples to make it make sense. So if you'd like to join me in slide 16, slide 16 is what's called a high flat line. And these are the lessons that I've been in often in stats lessons as a PhD student, whereas an abstract concept, it's a technical language, it's a language of experts. I haven't got a clue what's going on and it just sits at that level the whole time. So you can have a learning experience which over time is all abstract, all technical, and that's a high flat line.

So there's no wave. If you go to slide 17, you can have a low flat line. And if I think about my experience of teaching very young children, so it might be if you go into say a key stage one or a kindergarten or very young children, there's just stuff happening and it's all concrete examples, it's all everyday language, but there's no linkage to what the abstract concepts are that are being built. It's activity, but it's not being linked. Now actually, if you really do go into primary classrooms, teachers are ever so clever in the way that they ask questions in the way they place for vocabulary cards or the way that they use language to actually make a wave. So it might look like it's a low flat line, but actually it's not. If you go to slide 18, these are how I often as a teacher would do my lessons.

And now I know that wasn't a great idea. So slide 18 is what's called a down escalator and it's when you introduce a concept, you do a bit of unpacking, you do some stuff and then you go onto the next concept and then you do some unpacking, you do an activity and then you go onto the next concept concept. And so children or learners, even in adult education in industry, they go concept activity, concept activity, but they're never given the opportunity to repack their knowledge in order to formulate it in such a way that then it can be reused next time round. So I'm going to put my hundred, I've been a naughty down escalator person. So we're just going to do a really tiny activity because we're kind of getting close to the end. We've got about 10 minutes left, just less than 10 minutes.

If we were doing it for real, then what we would do if we're in a big proper training course, I would actually get you to in pairs groups, particularly if you could be with somebody who you worked with, you would take an activity, something that you teach or train somebody and you would put it on sticky notes and you would decompose and abstract your particular activity into parts and then you would profile it. But I've got time to get you all profiling. So I'm just going to ask you to, again, we'll use discord for this. I've got three tasks and I'm not profiling them, I'm just putting them randomly over here, A, B, and C. And what I'd like you to think is if you read A and it says, I explain a task in easy to understand words of what my colleagues should do in a particular situation, where would you place that on the profile is at a number 10.

Is it an A at number five or is A at number one? Where do you think it's similarly? B, when they get stuck trying to do the task, I show them how to do it. Is that kind of level 10 up there in that technical abstract or is it down the bottom as one? And then the last one is I have a framework I use to help me know all of the steps. It's very generalised. I give it them to read. And then I want you to think about if you are going to teach this, what order would you do it in?

Would you start with A go to B or C? How would you do it? Now, I don't want you to move them because there's too many of you. Or maybe actually, how many of you is there? 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, no, do it in the discord. So what I want you to do is to say is it like C one B five, CA 10?

Did you understand that? Can someone say whether they understand that in the discord, someone's typing, I think I get it, Bob gets it. The idea what you're trying to do is say where each of the sticky notes goes in terms of whether it's at a one or a 10 and then decide what order you'd like to put them in to kind of get a bit of a wave. You might not be able to get a wave and we'll move on to that in a minute. So thank you trip. Thank you Rob. And I'll talk through what I think. I'll let you all have a go.

So Sue's going to have a go. Marissa might have a go. Fuzzy bear might have a go.

Speaker 1: I

Jane: Go and that's fine if you, that's good. Okay, so if I was to look at these and I'm going to look at a, and if we were doing it for real or we'd you doing it kind of with sticky notes or you'd have your own page and you'd be doing these things. A one A I explain a task is easy. I explain a task in easy to understand words. Well straight away I know it's going to be down the bottom because it's easy to understand words, it's not technical words. But then the thing that pushes it right down to the bottom, it's in a particular situation. It's not in an abstract context. You could explain something in everyday language, but it's still be quite abstract.

So this is right down the bottom, this is an A one B. When they get stuck trying to do the task, I showed them how to do it.

Again, it sounds like it's something where you're exemplifying, it might be slightly higher because you might be using language which is more technical, but it's definitely down the bottom because it's width specifically about a particular task. And then c, I have a framework I use to help me know all the technical steps. It's very generalised and give them it to read. That's right at the top. Now if we did it this way, we'd kind of have this up escalator. We could create my old favourite, which is what I used to do. So we could create kind of a down escalator. But I think yeah, I think probably you can get a little wave, you can get a mini wave, can't you?

So you can get something that's kind of starting to move with, but you've not completely repacked. So what you'd need to do in this kind of situation, let's see how much time I've got here would be to change the learning activities and add some more steps in. So you might have this technical framework and then you might add in, lemme get a new sticky note. You might add in another step that's here. And you might ask colleague what they know or what they understand about this and explain, can they explain in their own words?

By doing that, you are getting them to unpack their knowledge and they're coming down the wave. And I think probably then just explaining it, I'd probably have another activity down here, which would be something where I give them an example, set up an example for them to try and support as they ask questions. We're down the bottom. And then as they're finished then I think I just use this when they get stuck, I can show them how I could do a bit of this B activity or I might ask them to summarise what they now know. And then I'd have something at the end right at the very end where I'd get them or I could summarise. So it would be better if they did it summarise their rules as though they were explaining to a colleague in two minutes by making it really fast. Often what that does is that they abstract really quickly and you find out whether they actually can only explain it with contexts.

Now it is okay if you didn't get all of that because I've done a really fast introduction to semantic waves. But what we're going to do now is I'm going to ask you to repack what you now know. So if you'd like to go to slide 21, I'm just going to delete out the other ones because there's not that many of you. So just as I did the same thing, I had one of these sticky notes, draw it into the centre of slide 21. Tell me now what you know about semantic waves. I'll make some more sticky notes. What do you now know about semantic waves? I've got four minutes left.

Anybody who's just arrived to this presentation will be thinking this is a very odd presentation because the person who's presented has been very quiet, but it's because the amazing people who have taken part are just demonstrating what they've learned in the last half an hour. They're repacking their knowledge. And if you feel like you need a little bit of help, if you go to slide 22, there's a little summary slide because it has been very fast and furious.

And if as you're doing it you think, I really like how someone's described that there's some little plus one stickers here that you can use and you can kind of up vote other peoples pulls descriptions so that you're learning from each other is like peer instruction. And if you finished, could go to slide 23 and I'd like you to rer yourself. I'd like you to consider on slide 23, have you moved any before? You might have been red. Have you gone a bit to Amber? Are you still red? That's okay. So if you yourself on slide 23, yeah, I think there are a lot high, I dunno what DevRel content, I completely agree with you.

A lot of high flat lines. And in order to bring it down, there's two ways. One is to convert to everyday language and the other way is to put it into context. So that's giving an example. And you might have to do a lot of waving because for every concept really you need to wave to the bottom. And over time people often need at least three waves, which is a bit of a weird idea, but that's to do with solar taxonomy.

So we've got one minute left and I'm going to leave you with final thoughts then for discussion, because I think we've got 10 minutes for discussion. So on slide 24, there's some final thoughts. If you've finished all the other stuff, if you're still repacking, please repack, there should be no rushing of the repack. We need time to

Speaker 1: Do that.

Jane: I know it's so easy to do a downward escalator, and I think often that's about time that you think I've done the activity move on. But actually this repacking is thought to be really important for people and particularly if they put it into their own words, or you can do things where you can ask people to use technical terms, but to give a new example so you can move up and down the two sides of the curve by adjusting either vocabulary or context. So I think I'm going to be zoomed back to a discussion point now, but my final thoughts are, and this is what I'm really interested in, what you think is if IT professionals had more knowledge and experience of CSED pedagogy, of which semantic waves is just one example, how might that impact the learning and development of others in industry? I worked in industry, I spent so much of my time explaining things to other people or having things explained to me.

It's a knowledge economy. It's a knowledge industry. Or how might having IT professionals with CSF pedagogy knowledge impact the culture of the profession? Could us being better able to explain what we do, might that impact who wants to work in the industry? And finally, if education modules were added to CS undergraduates or IT training opportunities, would anyone take them? And that's me finished. So she, they called her workshop. Oh, Susie, completely agree with you.

It's not a workshop at all. There's no unpacking and repacking, it's called direct instruction. And the tutorials often they're what are called copy code. So where you're just given an example of new copy it and we're absolutely positive that that is really not particularly useful for people to construct their own understanding. But there's lots of techniques that we can use apart from those, but I think people just have not experienced them themselves. So how would you know, because you've not been taught these things and things like PRIM and some of the other pedagogical approaches, they're still wet, they're still brand new, they're kind of only just been suggested. So a lot of these things have really, you couldn't know. So I'm done.

So I dunno. I'll go back to Streamy yard and see what happens.

Matthew: Hello? Hello. Well, that was amazing, thank you. Yeah,

Bryan: I was going to ask if ahead we have time for a few questions or if we

Matthew: Need We do indeed. Yeah, we've got a little bit of time. Yeah.

Bryan: Well, I know I've got an absolute tonne of questions, but I want to make sure there's time for discord as well. But one of the things I was kind of thinking about as we talked about flat lines and downward escalators and upward escalators, how do we work at convincing people that this is a better educational paradigm? Like I was saying, I typically do downward escalators, and I'm thinking about a lot of people actually do upward escalators. How do you put that in a framework that gets them to accept a new paradigm?

Jane: Haven't got. So one of the other models that we used in order to analyse is something's called the knowledge appropriation model. And it's this idea that you can do training and it doesn't stick. So what has to happen is that somebody's given the confidence to have a go, they have a go and they go, oh, I get a good outcome. And then it actually then becomes institutionalised. It becomes something that you just do, and then you never even realise you didn't do it. You go, of course I do that. But often what happens is people, they're not in a safe environment where they can take that risk to change something.

And what was really interesting from our cohort was they all felt at risk. They all felt like because they did exactly, I can't remember Susie, as somebody said, normally they would stand up at the front if they were doing anything, they would just talk and walk out.

They had no clue if anyone knew anything at the beginning and the end, suddenly they were taking a risk. But because I'd gone in and everybody knew I'd been in because it was all a big hoo-ha, ku are coming in, blah, blah, blah. And they had my prof, poor cousin come in, did all these wild things with them. They were allowed to take a risk and it created this community of learners where people went, yeah, oh yeah, it's a bit different. And felt, everyone felt a little bit uncomfortable. There's nothing wrong with, and they were a bit challenged, but the fact that everyone could, one of the big comments was people felt better about the training because they were being asked what they knew. But that was such a risk for those who were giving the training because normally they were insulated, their egos were insulated. And we know that all educators have fragile ego.

I do. Everybody does. So there, so that's my answer is we can only do it really that way.

Bryan: And I like that you even demonstrated that risk today we had this interactive presentation, we're in an online, very speaker to audience situation, and it paid off. We had people interacting and that was great. We have a question from Sue Smith about dev education learners own context varying, pretty wildly and hugely around what they already know. Are there any tips for accommodating cohorts or classes that are widely varied?

Jane: Yes. So the thing is know your learner. So what if I'm doing online and I'm doing a longer course, then I spend probably about 20, 15, 20 minutes at the beginning finding out where people are, first of all what their context is, you've got to know their context and then you put them into groups. So when I was doing the face-to-face group, I basically had all the FinTech there and I had all the kind of people from it helped us there and had all the, so we made them sit together. It was none of this shuffling them together. They had to sit together so that then the context made sense to them because it doesn't work otherwise or it didn't work for the course we were doing. Then the next thing was about putting, trying to find people who are about the same kind of level really, so that you can do a thing where you put very experienced people with very unexperienced people, but that can be frustrating for both of them.

So there's a lot of research in that and a lot of argument. But my preference is to have two people who are about the same level, so then they don't feel too embarrassed and then they both commit progress and they can feel I'm very much into people feeling comfortable and having, again, that community of learners. So I think the answer is spend a bit of time at the beginning getting to know your learners, make them push them into groups where there's some commonality. Sometimes that's hard. So it was much harder for me in online course because I was not just in one company. I had people coming for all different companies, but we found something that made them feel like they belonged and then always had the same group so that they build up a relationship and all the activities they create, so they create their context. So in slide 20, I've got an example of how you do it. Basically you work in threes and you have one person describes an activity, somebody else goes, what do you mean?

And then the third person puts 'em on sticky notes and you get between the three of them, they get three contexts. And then for the activities they basically profile or bloom or solo it so that they see for the same context, they use all the different pedagogical approaches to analyse it. Well, that's a long answer, sorry.

Bryan: No, that was great though. I think it also slowly answers Marissa's question about overlaying neurodivergent learning styles. It sounds like you break it up into cohorts and try to

Jane: Understand

Bryan: Those learners.

Jane: So be very careful with learning styles. So learning styles has kind of been debunked in terms of the visual or and kinesthetic, I think. And there's lots of really strong evidence about that. However, how people, sometimes people feel comfortable in different contexts and with different people. And I think the important thing is that whoever's learning, they're in a situation where the people around them care about them and that whoever, whoever's teaching them has shown as well that they're taking account of them and they're hearing them in whatever way that is. So it's less, you might call that learning styles, but learning styles as visual or kinesthetics. But this idea of taking account for making that person have the materials that they need in order to access the learning, then that's really important. So I think that's a really, really, really good and important question.

Really important. So thank you for that question.

Bryan: Yeah, and so I hate to say, but we actually have to keep things moving again, and there's so much, as you might say to unpack and repack with all this that maybe we should do more with you later around this topic, right, Matthew?

Matthew: Absolutely. We'd love to have you back for another session because I feel like we're just starting here and there are so many questions in the discord and so on that there's a lot of interest in this.

Jane: Good. And we've got lots of material at the foundation, so I can kind of leave you with lots of, we've got what we call quick reads where we explain semantic waves and we explain cognitive load or explain prim or those kinds of things. They're written for teachers at the moment, so they're not written for industry professionals, but you'll get the hang of it.