Alternatives to teaching concept maps

[Denubis]

Forked from: https://github.com/carpentries/instructor-training/issues/1226

When @sarasrking and I taught instructor training in March 2021, we decided that concept maps didn't speak to task deconstruction (and teaching foundational components) the way we wanted to explain / were willing to spend our time-budget on. Instead, we (I) experimented with an exercise in task deconstruction. This is a term I borrowed from my digital humanities class when we were trying to persuade humanities folks that they could indeed think about automation. (I'm not sure where my colleague and I found the term Task Deconstruction when teaching, but https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/17294608.pdf page 99 has a good discussion of task analysis in the context of teaching surgery.)

I proposed the following exercise in the former discussion:

Exercise 3: Decomposition ("un-chunking")

In your groups, discuss for 15 minutes:
As a group, find one of the exercises in the episodes you have prepared and identify everything a complete novice attending your workshop needs to understand before being able to accomplish the exercise.

• What do they need to know?
• What do they already know from prior lessons?
• What do you need to teach for them to be able to achieve the exercise?

We will discuss at some length as a workshop.

The objective here is to get them thinking in reverse instructional design before I discussed reverse instructional. The other objective is for them to figure out what specific points they need to hit when teaching to the next exercise -- and to realise that that's a goal.

I was quite satisfied with using this exercise in lieu of the cognitive load of concept maps implying task analysis as a function of workshop planning. (We might want to focus concept maps during lesson-dev training instead, since that's far more important there)