Meredith Tamminga

As a linguist, I would never disparage the wonderful capabilities of human language. But in linguistics as in every field, there are contexts where showing really outstrips telling. When it comes to showing students what I’m doing, I can work on the board, or plug my laptop into the projector, and the whole class can see easily. But when I’m in the classroom, I want to move beyond this kind of one-directional showing: getting students to show their work to each other allows them to problem-solve together, learn from each other, and strike up engaging in-class discussions.

In my own teaching, a common context where I want students to show their work is in learning to program. If you’ve ever taught someone their first programming language, you might recognize this particular—and painful—type of word salad as a big neon sign that showing would be a lot easier than telling:

“...ok, so, type a plus sign, good…then you need the geom_histogram() function, so you type g-e-o-m, no, it has to all be lowercase, then the underscore character, yup, histogram…ok good, now open parenthesis…nope, no space…”

How can students show their work in class when they’re learning a skill that’s this hard to describe in words? I unexpectedly found one answer to this question when I agreed to try out a new discussion platform this fall: Ed Discussion. 

I’ll admit that when I agreed to check out Ed Discussion, I was mostly looking for an escape. It was late August and I’d been banging my head against a course Canvas site that just wouldn’t come together. As I pondered, despairingly, whether maybe I could just run the entire class through email, a colleague sent a perfectly-timed note: did I want to take a peek at the cool new discussion platform that Penn was piloting? At a different moment I might have looked around at the proliferation of Panoptos and Piazzas and Perusalls that already surround us and said, “No thanks!” But in that moment, wishing for a fresh start and intrigued by my colleague’s promise that the platform could embed runnable R code snippets, I said yes to a quick Zoom tour—and soon after, yes to joining the pilot. 

The course in question was LING 562, an applied quantitative analysis course aimed mainly at PhD students in linguistics. The first part of the course gets students up to speed using the statistical programming language R for data wrangling and visualization. While some students bring years of programming experience, for others it’s their first time trying out any kind of coding. Lots of worked examples, lots of practice problems, and lots of mutual support between classmates are key ingredients to getting everyone through this fast-paced first unit. 

For this class, I used Ed Discussion to post activity instructions, toy datasets, sample scripts, links to online tutorials, and more. I decided to keep the format simple: one “mega-thread” for each class meeting. I would put the primary materials and instructions for the day in the top post on the thread, and any amount of threaded discussion about those materials could unspool below it—a format not unlike a Facebook post. 

A week or two into the semester, the students were working in small groups on an exercise making different kinds of plots. I was projecting my laptop screen to show the day’s Ed Discussion thread, so students could glance up for easy reference to the activity instructions while they worked on their own laptops. As I circulated among the small groups, something caught my eye: a histogram had popped up on the screen behind me! A student had enterprisingly posted her group’s graph to the thread, where it materialized like magic. 

“Hey look, everybody—we’ve got a graph!” I exclaimed. “Let’s check it out.” While I was pointing out some strengths and weaknesses of the first graph, another appeared…then another…and another. This spontaneous parade of graphs, all showing the same data set in different ways, naturally invited the students to start making comparisons and asking questions. Why was there a bump in this group’s histogram that didn’t show up in that group’s density plot? Why did the quantiles on the violin plot not perfectly match the quantiles on the box plot? Given a familiar, frictionless way to show each other their work, the students jumped right in on their own.

Letting students share images this way turned out to be far from the only way Ed Discussion made it easier for students to show their work. Remember that programming word salad? With Ed Discussion, students could post chunks of their own code as comments in any thread – and that code could be executed right in the thread! This meant that whenever students ran into problems, they could just show the rest of us what was going wrong instead of trying to describe it in words. Likewise, their classmates could show them some possible fixes by posting their own code snippets—no word salad required. I was even able to have some course datasets installed so that those code snippets could make reference to the data that students were working on in class activities and problem sets. These possibilities are not limited to just R: Ed Discussion supports a wide selection of programming languages. Nor is the effectiveness of Ed Discussion limited to teaching programming! That parade of graphs could have been any kind of image – it was the effortlessly auto-updating threads that made it possible for students to share links, ask questions, and make suggestions in real-time without having to raise their hand and interrupt. The way my students used these threads in our in-person classes was similar to how the Zoom chat can be a handy side channel during virtual classes.

Of course, you might be thinking that it’s not that hard to get a group of highly-motivated PhD students to show their work. And I know that Ed Discussion is not, in fact, magic. But I can say that I’ve taught this class before, to similarly excellent students, without having the same kind of rich, spontaneous classroom exchanges that played out on our Ed Discussion threads this fall. What Ed Discussion added to the class was a way for us to communicate in real-time, as a group, about content that’s best shown, whether in pictures or in text. And because it did so in a familiar, intuitive, and modern way, it was easy for me to set up and even easier for students to start using. Without student motivation and interest, there’s no reason that a discussion platform on its own would generate the kind of engagement that it brought out in my class. But motivating and engaging students is my job! Ed Discussion just tore down some of the practical barriers that can stand in the way of students showing me exactly how engaged they really are.

Meredith Tamminga is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She directs the Language Variation and Cognition Lab and is a lead researcher on the Philadelphia Signs Project.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.