Teaching Demo
Table of contents
Assignment
ULAs often conduct review sessions where they go over various course topics, explain how to solve certain types of problems, and demonstrate how to approach/deconstruct a specific concept. At the end of this assignment, you will have seen the differenct types of concepts / questions your fellow 190J peers have seen this quarter, and the strategies they use to address and explain them.
For this assignment, we ask that you prepare a 5-7 minute teaching demo explaining a topic/concept or a walk-through of an example from the course your are a ULA for, and then test how well your audience/”students” are able to apply what you’ve explained by asking some follow-up questions, giving them a poll/clicker-style question or asking them to complete an activity. We encourage you to be creative and think of engaging, fun, and/or practical examples.
This demo will be recorded, so that after this exercise, you can watch it and reflect on your experience, what you did well, and what you or would have liked to do differently during the demo or would like to do differently in the future.
The goals of this assignment are to:
- Practice identifying learning goals/objectives
- Use the backward design to determine what information students will need to reach this goal
- Design an assessment to check students’ ability
Additionally, as part of this assignment, you will
- Organize and consolidate information
- Design slides / materials / notes / assessment
- Present your demo to the 190J students
- Reflect on your experience
Select your topic/concept and determine the learning goal(s)
The easiest way for you to select a topic is to think of the commonly asked questions or misconceptions that you’ve addressed in your course. If you created any resources for your course, you could use that topic as an example.
Once you have identified the topic for your demo, think about what should the students need to be able to do to demonstrate their learning. Use the Action Verbs to write down your learning goals for the demo. (Side note: Learning goals are interchangeably called learning outcomes or learning objectives. Read more about the Learning Outcomes and Backward Design). Take a look at some examples to get a sense of the well-written learning objectives.
Prepare the demo and the assessment
Now that you have identified the topic and the learning objectives, prepare your demo that would provide students with the information that they need in order to understand the topic. Feel free to use slides, interactive walk-throughs, write or draw in order to facilitate the learning process.
As much as possible, design your explanation so that someone with a limited background of CS/DS can still understand your demo: for example, limit the jargon and explain related terms whenever appropriate.
After your demo, assess how well the audience “learned” from your demo: give them a quick clicker-style quiz or questions to answer, ask them to respond to a prompt, give them a worksheet to fill out or an activity to do. What would measurably demonstrate that the audience understood the topic?
Submission instructions
- Submit a file that outlines the following:
- Title of your activity / topic
- Learning objectives (that use action verbs)
- Assessment questions / exercise
Include your visuals / notes for the activity (e.g., a ppt, an explanation of what you will draw, a pre-filled Python notebook and the data file)
- Upload your materials to Gradescope to H03.
After your presesntation, you will receive a link with the recording and a form through which you can submit your reflection.
If, for some reason, you would be unable to lead your demo live during our lecture, then send me an email before Friday, with the subject “CS 190J Teaching Demo” and the link to your pre-recorded video. In that email, let me know whether you’d be able to lead the assessment activity during the lecture; otherwise, the materials and the instructions for how to lead it should be uploaded to Gradescope (also before Friday).