Learning to teach better by observation: What I did on my sabbatical

“You can observe a lot by just watching.” – Yogi Berra

I had a couple of amazing experiences that made me think about how little we see each other teach and how much can be gained from doing it more.

Having a teacher watch me

We’re challenged to scale PCAS when we don’t have an undergraduate major nor a graduate program. For us to hire undergrad or graduate teaching assistants means we have to recruit from other majors and departments. CS and Information majors often don’t work out, in part because it’s a foreign idea for them to learn about computing and programming for a purpose other than getting a Tech job.

Last Fall, we discovered that the Math Department had PhD students who are former K-12 math teachers. They care about teaching, they’re trained as teachers, and the Math Department can’t employ them all. They are amazingly motivated graduate students. They gave up paying gigs to become students. When we lose them as teaching assistants, we typically lose them to research positions.

Katie Waddel was the first math PhD student with whom I worked. She worked with me on “Digital Media with Python.” She was much more a co-teacher than a teaching assistant. She came to every lecture. She had great ideas for improving the course structure. Like coming up a with a classroom seating rotation sure that the quiet kids would get the chance to sit near the more talkative kids for better discussions.

And sometimes — ever so kindly — she gave me notes on my teaching. She’d point out where some group of students wasn’t getting something, and we’d talk about how to change what I was teaching. Or she’d tell me when I was getting too geeky, and we’d talk about better ways of explaining the technical content.

I’ve been teaching a long time — it’s been 45 years since I taught my first programming course. I have team-taught maybe a dozen times. have rarely had someone try to make me teach better. It was a great experience that I heartily recommend.

Watching a master teacher

From February to May of 2025, my wife, Barbara Ericson, and I taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. We were on sabbatical (my first!). It was an amazing experience. I got to team-teach with Tim Bell. Tim is the inventor of CS Unplugged, ACM Karlstrom Award winner, and SIGCSE Outstanding Contributions award winner — and a keyboardist (we heard him perform several times while we were there).

Probably a surprise to no one, Tim is a master teacher. He’s inventive, funny, and deeply interested in the students and their learning. I co-taught with him in a course he’s taught for 30 years, an introductory course on programming and data literacy. We had about 100 students. I sat in on all his lectures during the three months we were there.

How often have you watched someone teach? Especially someone whose expertise is education and who has been honing this course for decades? It’s different than watching a TED talk, or a keynote, or a recorded one hour lecture. I saw Tim plan the course, connect the pieces across multiple weeks, and invent new things — in a course that he’d taught dozens of times. That’s hard to do. We all develop inertia in what and how we teach.

It was such a privilege to watch Tim at work. My notes on the class are filled with bits and pieces that stuck with me. Tim made the Internet real by showing pictures of where the undersea Internet cables came ashore in New Zealand. I learned a new way to explain the Nyquist Theorem. I have always kind of ignored floating point notation as being too complicated, but Tim had this terrific binary simulator that helped me to understand what “1.101” means in binary.

Why don’t we watch each other teach more?

I don’t think I’m saying anything here that anyone would disagree with. Of course, we would be better teachers if we had an experienced teacher watch us teach and give us tips. Of course, we would learn a lot about teaching if we could co-teach with a master teacher.

So why don’t we this?

One big reason is economic —- it’s more expensive to pay for two teachers to be in the classroom than to pay for just one. So, we only assign one teacher to a classroom, and that teacher teaches alone.

We could work around the cost problem. We find ways to pay for things that are important for us. At my University, there is a huge staff to promote research, to manage grants, and even to help write grants. All of that research infrastructure costs far more than adding another teacher to a classroom.

But here’s a bigger reason. When was the last time that you did something to improve how you teach? K-12 teachers can probably give concrete answers to that question. It’s part of their practice to continually improve. University teachers are less likely to engage in professional teaching development —- and that’s a shame. We can always get better at any practice. I’m at this for 45 years now, and I’m still working at getting better at it. We show value for the practice by taking our development in that practice seriously.

It’s hard to make professional teaching development happen. But in my experience, it’s worth making happen. I recommend that you find ways to get excellent teachers to watch you teach. I recommend finding ways to team-teach with excellent teachers — and actually watch one another teacher, and try to make each other better. Find ways to make your teaching better, and a great way to do that is by working with other teachers.