Revisiting Pedagogical Practices

Introduction

I was learning Website Development for Beginners from Microsoft. I read their courses religiously until I noticed that something was clicking on my mind. It’s about how Microsoft structure and deliver their learning materials. I pour my thoughts here.

Empathy and Learning Outcomes to Maintain Student Engagement

My motivation to become a web developer has been burning since I was in school. I tried to make a game using Javascript back when I was 8th grade, although what I did was copy-pasting other’s code and changing the assets (images and animations). These days, I revisited computer sciences because I wanted to learn them and hopefully land a job in the IT world.

I stumbled upon Microsoft’s Web Dev For Beginners free course into website development and was surprised by their way of teaching.

At the moment of this writing, I finished reading the chapter 1 topic 1 about “Introduction to Programming Language”, and now is starting to read topic 2 about “Introduction to GitHub”.

Computer sciences alone is already an intimidating name to hear, let along programming language. People assume that for someone to learn computer sciences, a smart brain is a necessity. And to be honest, I thought so too! But Microsoft demystified it with a more emphatic approach when explaining what computer sciences are, what programming languages are, and how and why digital world of today exist.

Microsoft team who authored the lesson admitted that the field of computer science is evolving at a tremendous pace. Many part of the lesson explicitly said so. They showed their frustrations, their struggles, their feelings of overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information to digest in this field. They narrated it in the lesson, the digital “textbook”. And they used empathy to resonate with the readers and students, to tell that “if you are overwhelmed by the subject, so did we! But fret not, for we shall pass this one too!”

Personally, I found it appealing, amusing, and entertaining when reading the materials. I’m pointing exactly at how they use language to convince the reader (in this case, me) to learn and think about their learning. They expressed their feelings into words, and those words are perceived well by the readers. This is a sign of successful communication, in my opinion.

Along with their empathy is the goal that the students are going to achieve (Learning Outcomes). The Microsoft team always showed the end of the journey, but what seem to be the goal of the journey was also the beginning of yet another journey. It is also worth to note that the Microsoft team did not say “Come on, the road is still long” to motivate the students, and this is something pivotal to reflect upon as an educator myself (I will explain this in different section).

In summary, showing empathy to students/learners as a teacher/educator may give positive impact on student’s engagement on a psychological level.

Linguistic Devices to Humanize Education

In my experiences in learning many things, people tend to motivate learners with words that show expectation (or maybe demand). For example:

• The path ahead is long.
• This is just the beginning, you still have a long way to go.
• This is nothing compared to blahblahblah.

Personally, I perceive those motivational expressions as something demanding and have the opposite effect instead. They are as if telling me that the road is so far away that it would take me a lifetime and I probably get tired of it or burned-out of it mid-way.

Microsoft team in their courses used many motivational expressions as well, but they are different to the examples I gave above.

• Senior developers were once junior developers, struggled just like you.
• Top developers were once struggled like you did and it’s something not to be ashamed of.
• Senior developers still read the fundamentals just like you did right now.

If we look closer into the two groups of expressions (the ones you often hear, and the ones used by Microsoft team), the meaning conveyed looked similar but also different in a way or another.

I will label the ones we often hear as expression group “GE”, while the ones used by Microsoft team as expression group “AE”.

GE focuses on progress. It emphasizes duration and time. In addition, it implies long journey. While long road may be perceived differently among people, some may take it as something “never-ending” and it poses a threat to their beliefs. Considering the era we live in today, people tend to demand something/anything in an instant. What I’m talking about is that we tend to expect something to deliver fast/instant. We ordered a food using a mobile apps and shortly the food arrived, we sent a message and the recipient received our message in a fraction of a second. Thus, GE has a tendency to “challenge” the norms that is already rooted in everybody’s unconsciousness.

AE, on the other hand, focuses on affection state. It may sound like a compare and contrast between the juniors and the seniors, but that comparison is modified linguistically so that it appears and feels friendly to the learner’s heart. By saying that even the top developers were once struggling with programming language, newcomers are presented with a projection of themselves in the future, that they will become a senior developer one day. This is more of an optimistic view compared to the GE

Proposed Model to Activate Humanizing Education

Further Reflection

Bad experiences become wisdom.

Wisdom from bad experiences ignite empathy.

Empathy can result in Humanization (of education).

But what about people who have little “bad experiences” due to their geniuses, can they use “humanizing education” when they don’t have empathy on the related topic?

For example, would a pure prodigy in Math develop empathy from struggles of learning Math? And would they be able to teach (that is, if they decided to) people using humanizing education approach?

Another one (authentic from my personal experience):

I was born in a family of English teachers. My father was an English teacher, and so is my mother, she is an English teacher too. I was raised in an “English environment”. As such, my English skill is kind of inherited. I went to university (bachelor) without any test (or in other words a special talent) into English Language Education, and my master’s degree is also in English Language Education. But when it comes to teaching English to students, I’m hopeless because all of the grammar rules and vocabularies were “inherited” from my parents. Thus, I don’t and can’t relate with the learners who struggled learning English. This makes me less “empathy” when it comes to teaching English. But when I teach Mathematics (in computer science subject), I can empathize with the students about how hard it is to wrap Mathematics around our head.