If you are looking for ways to improve your teaching practice, spending some time reading about what other teachers are trying in their classroom is important. Each teacher has their own approach and by investigating and trying new teaching approaches we can become better teachers.
The teaching profession presents many challenges, and when we focus on teaching Computer Science, we soon realise that it is one of the most difficult subjects to teach. The time is limited, the average teacher teaches this subject for 1 hour a week to each year group; the students’ ability to code is broad, some students have amazing problem-solving skills while others might require more time on this aspect of the subject; and, each student has a different way of learning, some prefer to read a book, others to watch a video, others to practise past papers!
Now, the good thing about teaching pedagogies in Computer Science is that they provide structure and strategies to share knowledge in the classroom. Depending on the type of lesson, whether it is theory or programming practice, I like to always follow the same structure: starter, main content, activities and plenary. This is the main structure I follow in any lesson plan, and from there, I combine different teaching pedagogies I have learnt throughout my career.
When I prepare my starter, this is the first part of the lesson which lasts between 2 to 5 minutes, I ask questions about the previous concepts taught. This is a great retrieval exercise to get the students in ‘the zone’. It allows students to think about what we learnt in our previous lesson and see if they can remember it. It is intended to be an easy question that they can answer effortlessly, and ideally, I like them to write it on a piece of paper.
Then, we move onto the part of the lesson where I deliver the main content. In this part, it is crucial to break down complex ideas into manageable parts. To do so, we can use models like PRIMM, pair programming, TIME, etc. They are all very useful to scaffold learning.
These computing pedagogies help teachers to identify and address common misconceptions and build deep understanding.
I am particularly fond of the PRIMM pedagogy, which consists of dividing each section of a task into 5 stages: Predict, Run, Investigate, Modify and Make.
I am going to leave you a link here for you to have a quick read about this amazing computing pedagogy:
What do you think?
I believe it’s a great strategy to support progression from block-based to text-based languages. You could start in primary school with block-based activities in Scratch or micro:bit, and move to text-based languages in Minecraft by using PRIMM pedagogy.
For me, the key thing is that without effective pedagogy, Computer Science topics are often abstract, frustrating or disengaging, especially for beginners, and this is why following a method in your classroom will make the learning experience much more interesting.
COMPUTER SCIENCE REVISION 
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