Note to Faculty: Don’t Be Such a Know-It-All – Teaching – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
This isn’t news. I’ve been doing this for decades.
Not long after I started teaching, I came to realize that a good way to learn how to do something is by watching someone actually do it – NOT by watching someone show you the finished solution.*
I started doing programming assignments from scratch, that I had purposefully NOT worked out ahead of time. Then, after I’d been teaching for a decade or so, I had become pretty familiar with the kinds of problems the students would typically have and the usual blind alleys they would pursue – so sometimes I did problems where I was the one who followed those blind alleys and tried to implement those misconceptions.
*It has always bugged me that most instructors of math only show you the right way to do things – which is, of course, NOT how the problem was understood or solved the first time. Proofs didn’t appear right the first time – it is important for people to learn the thinking that goes on (especially the ideas that are discarded) when a proof is constructed.
I’ve been teaching this way for years. I called it “live-action math”.
See, for example, http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/teaching-statement-mar-04
You are in the minority when it comes to teaching math. I like the name.
I knew I wasn’t the only one.
I’ve tried that too – got similar complaints – it’s kind of sad that so many students seem to miss the point of learning.
It worked extremely well in my inquiry-based programming class – the class was by invitation only (top 2-4% of freshmen).