Teaching other teachers how to teach CS better
As a university lecturer in a non-STEM subject who is currently self-learning both &#x27;hard CS&#x27; and the more practical side of development, I have often thought about what an effective CS curriculum would be, and the thing I keep coming back to is something along the lines of guided self-learning. Nothing is as effective as curiosity, but having someone with broad knowledge and experience in the field can help guide students to not get caught up in dead ends.<p>In my own academic studies the teachers that were the most valuable to me were ones who nudged me in the right direction, and then mostly stayed out of the way and let my hunger for knowledge and results do its thing. But now I perceive a fundamental shift in higher education, one towards spoon-feeding in order to satisfy a strict curriculum, and I worry strongly that this sort of model is very dishonest and doesn&#x27;t produce good graduates.<p>The biggest problem that I see in present-day academia is the bureaucratic desire to quantify and measure things, which might be reasonable if you see universities as trade schools, but is in my opinion doing irreparable damage. I&#x27;m sure there are some bad teachers out there, but the bigger problem I see is institutions that prevent good teachers from doing their thing, until only the bad ones remain.