Neomi Liberman
ABSTRACT
Due to a reform in the Israeli CS high school curricula, in-service teachers who studied and taught procedural programming are now required to cope with the new paradigm of OOP. In this paper we describe a case study in which we traced the difficulties of one in-service teacher as she taught the topic of inheritance and polymorphism for the first time. We noticed a growth in her knowledge in the laboratory problem-session, whereas in a similar pen-and-paper session no substantial knowledge growth took place. A qualitative analysis enabled us to discern how the combined factors of the teacher's experience, the presence of the computer, and students' expectations for workable solutions, pressured the teacher to seek to resolve difficulties through trial and error, which facilitated knowledge growth. We argue that all these factors have to be fulfilled in order for teacher learning to happen.
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Index Terms
- In-service teachers learning of a new paradigm: a case study
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Reviews
Matthew Mark Huntbach
This short paper analyzes the efforts of a high school teacher who is experienced in teaching procedural programming, and is attempting to teach object-oriented programming for the first time. The teacher's only experience in object-oriented programming is an in-service training course for teachers and a commercial course in Java. The teacher is shown employing stalling tactics to avoid answering students' questions in class, sometimes giving the wrong answer, but gaining more understanding as she supervises programming laboratory sessions, and becoming better prepared to teach the topic in the future. Although one of the goals of the paper is to show how an experienced teacher uses coping techniques to maintain a confident presence in class, one issue showed poor practice: the teacher assigned the students a programming problem, but did not first try solving it herself; she only "read and executed" a solution. She learned by supervising students as they were solving this problem, but she would have supervised better had she experimented beforehand by developing her own solutions. The paper makes one question whether short training courses are an adequate basis to teach something new. It provides some useful practical data, which could contribute to further discussion on computer programming education, supporting the message, "You only really learn by doing it." Online Computing Reviews Service
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