More pictures!

I’m nearing my first year anniversary at the Flatiron School and was thinking about the projects I’ve undertaken and what I’ve learned in the last year. While doing so, it struck me that I had never written about how I came into education from a career in corporate IT and full-stack programming. This is, after all, my second go at being a manager of a curriculum-producing team. When did doing this become my life’s work more than a career of pursuing code?

But moving into education wasn’t a new move as much as it was a return to a fork that I’d opted not to take as I graduated in 2000. In my last year at university, I’d faced the question of whether to pursue the academic life or a life working in business. I had been planning on an academic life, but I chose the other path at the last moment.

But now I realize that the fork I chose gave me lessons that I was able to add to the lessons that my most-fondly remembered teachers gave me. And now, in my role, I get to bear those golden fruits of the dollar and the philosopher to a new generation at a scale hitherto unimaginable.

Here is the story of my trajectory toward an educational path, how I came to delay traveling it, a recollection of some of the most important lessons I learned and people I met along the way, and how I hope to honor them and their teachings as I work in this new model of education.

In my role as educator, parents sometimes ask me what I think about some educational program or activity. Instead of speaking to any one program, I’d rather detail behaviors that have, observationally, predicted success in students at DevBootcamp and the Flatiron School. If an educational program builds deep, consistent depth in the five listed capabilities, it is “good” and merits consistent, large investment.

Caveat I feign no scientific rigor for these observations. Attendees at the schools were / are are assuredly non-representative of the general population. Additionally, my assessment of their educational background is based on inferences made from in-person interviews, work product, examinations, etc.

In my experiences to date, the biggest signals that predict success for students are:

1. A pre-existing ability to stick with reading challenging material without moving
2. A pre-existing strategy for “how to study”
3. A pre-existing respect and capacity for memorization and drilling
4. A pre-existing willingness to be boldly wrong
5. A pre-existing willingness to imagine the solution before looking to see if it exists

An ethnic school activity really crushes these five (Hebrew School, Chinese School). Chess camp might well cover many of these as well. Piano lessons also strike me as a pretty good winner as well.

Aside: It’s not really and surprise that a bar mitzvah requires all of these (ceremonially, at the least) because these capacities are the capacities of one who can care for himself and others i.e. “be a man.”

Among these disciplines, some probably have a quantitative edge, but as long as the student engages with discipline in disciplines, i.e. process, they will have a massive edge versus those who have not engaged in such a way.

Additionally, I think the student (child, preferably) should be engaged with the idea that they’re learning a process that is applicable in many contexts. Engage them with the idea that how they think can be “thunk” about.

But how to teach learners, students, children, to build these capabilities? I have some recommendations after the jump.

Like many people, I have a huge book backlog. I have books that I’ve intended to read for many moons, many moves, and many homes. While Kindle and library usage has made this some better, I can’t claim that my throughput rate in any way matches my acquisition rate. What’s to be done?

As noted in my post on Adler and van Doren’s How to Read a Book, “Inspectional Reading (IR)” is a two-phase technique that answers the question of whether a book requires deeper (“Analytical”) reading to be understood and whether the reader will benefit from such an understanding. The first phase locates the “big reveal” of the argument and its key premises first. In the second phase, the reader works to embellish that scaffolding here and there but moves through the content quickly.

As a result, readers have an augmented skeleton of the book such that the skeletal elements are fitted to the premises in a way that nets the conclusion.

I used this technique on Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School?.

My determination is that IR, when practiced consciously, with notepad handy, does produce a strong grasp of non-fiction materials. For this book, I invested approximately 90 minutes of time and finished with several good ideas that I could present in cocktail party conversation and will likely integrate into some of the educational material my team curates.

As I mentioned in my piece about the textbook of schoolgirl Maud Fenstermaker, I am fascinated by the old-style of pedagogy from the late 19^th century which continues to use the axiomatic listing styles of Euclid’s Elements.

While it might not be surprising that a book on English Grammar or Latin Grammar or Geometry would retain this structure, even a book on penmanship used this format. I recently borrowed “Spencerian Handwriting: The Complete Collection of Theory and Practical Workbooks for Perfect Cursive and Hand Lettering” by Platt Rogers Spencer" from the NYPL and, to my great surprise, this is also written in an axiomatic style.

More after the jump

Introduction

Over the last year, my team and I have created a single-source-of-truth accounting for the Software Engineering program at The Flatiron School built on AirTable. I believe this system offers a superior means for managing curriculum development, documentation, and collaboration.

I’ve written a series of posts documenting this solution that starts here.

The audience for the full series is fellow-educators or content-production pipeline managers. In this post, I’ll provide an introduction to the problem at hand.

Thanks

Let me express thanks to our executive sponsor, my boss, Brian Tobal as well as my staff: Jen, Maxwell, Mohawk, our previous collaborators Jason and Daniel. Let me also thank the countless issue-reporters or pull-request authors that helped along the way. It was Brian’s faith in the idea of “modular” curriculum and support for it at the organizational level when the ROI was murky that gave us the time to prove the payoff to our convictions.

I believe that the secret to designing thoughtful educational experiences as well as teams that design them is building a robust artifact that I call an accounting.

“The Accounting”

An “accounting” can be grasped by this graphic:

To translate into words, the accounting:

1. documents the binding between atomic student capabilities ("Learning Goals") and macro-objects ("Lessons") or nth-order macro-objects (e.g. "Unit", "Modules", or "Products"), and
2. calculates the chain of dependencies for any given capability that includes its recursive dependencies back to first principles (i.e. transitive dependencies)