[wagslane]

This is particularly interesting to me as I've been building a CS education platform this year (https://qvault.io). My favorite bit was right at the end:

> In computer science, we often have a model of teaching that is heavily focused on content matter knowledge—if you know your CS, you'll likely be a good teacher. But all our evidence about quality teaching says that that's wrong. There's a lot of knowledge involved in teaching computer science well, and perhaps the most important is pedagogical content knowledge.

Basically, its not enough to understand your CS, you have to understand how to teach the CS.

[paxys]

The same applies to any field. The primary skill of a good teacher is...teaching. Domain expertise is important but still secondary.

[redis_mlc]

Working in IT but having a commercial pilot license, it's bizarre how continuing education in IT is non-existent, yet mandatory in the aviation world - and IT people don't even know it.

To teach in aviation in the US, you need a Chief Flight Instructor (CFI) rating, where you demonstrate to an examiner how to teach the various maneuvers.

IT could learn a lot from regulated industries like aviation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_instructor

[pjc50]

Education in IT is so continuous that people don't recognize that it's happening. Every use of google counts.

You can either have a dynamic field or a mandatory curriculum. Once the curriculum is fixed, the field advances at the speed changes can be pushed into the curriculum, which is at best annually.

[arkitaip]

lmfao, pedagogical education is its own discipline and becoming a competent teacher takes proper education and training. Googling how to teach ain't going to do shit for you.

[barry-cotter]

There's no evidence that education degrees make teachers more effective. If an entire degree in pedagogy has no detectable effect on student outcomes how can it help become a competent teacher?

> It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

> Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001-2002 through 2008-2009.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227414368_It's_easi...

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/pepg/MeritPayPapers/Chingos_Peter...

[pjc50]

Every time the "how did you get into programming" discussion comes up, a large chunk of people on HN report being autodidacts. It's far more widespread in programming than any other kind of profession or speciality. I feel this hasn't been seriously investigated or taken into account.

Not googling how to teach, but skipping the entire "teaching" process altogether.

[arkitaip]

The post is about teaching CS, not learning it. They are related but different disciplines.

[seanmcdirmid]

The analogy doesn’t really stack up, flying a plane is nothing like designing software or even managing software systems. Imagine if aviation had a few million kinds of planes to worry about where pilots were expected to modify their planes in flight, in might begin to resemble IT.

[TuringTest]

That's the reason why CS degrees teach core principles, not a collection of every possible platform and technology.

[seanmcdirmid]

Yes, and teaching such very abstract things is very different from teaching flight.

[dehrmann]

For 99% of work out there, flying a plane is higher stakes.

[klodolph]

Anyone working in IT who doesn't continue to learn will likely be out of a job soon enough, but it's much less likely that anyone would be injured as a result.

[tester34]

Maybe not "IT" because IT includes printer toner replacing and stuff

but software engineers? definitely.

[klodolph]

"Definitely" what?

The parent comment called it IT, so I called it IT, but if use the more specific term "software engineer" I'm still going to say that most software engineering projects aren't likely to injure people when they fail.

Software engineering just doesn't seem to fall in the category of jobs where you'd want to mandate ongoing training... jobs like pilots or psychologists.

[tester34]

Definitely SE is kind of job where people are constantly learning

a lot of them even in their free time.

[klodolph]

Some definitely don't. It's easy to end up with no experience with modern tech stacks after leaving a position. Some environments ossified years or decades ago and make it easy to bury your head in the sand once you're there.

You could spend years at a company working with internal frameworks or internal forks of old open-source projects, and when you change jobs, you realize that everyone's using React and all of your experience is with some half-baked alternative to Rails that someone at your last company cooked up in 2008.

Or you could even be a bona fide OS/360 wizard who hasn't touched anything else for the past thirty years, who suddenly finds themselves looking for a new job--not that there's zero demand for OS/360 experts, but it can be very tough to find positions.