NSF Awards: 2031362, 2031361
With the large number of teachers and schools that have offered the Computer Science Principles course, many are now interested in offering the other Advanced Placement CS course, Computer Science A (CSA). AP CSA focuses almost entirely on programming, uses Java, a text-based programming language, and introduces object-oriented programming. Transitioning from learning CSP to CSA can be difficult for many students and teachers as they are faced with issues not present in blocks-based language including debugging syntax errors. The CSAwesome curriculum and professional development were designed to support teachers and students in this transition from CSP to CSA. In addition to what is normally a challenging process, teachers are learning in the middle of a pandemic which has exponentially increased demands of teachers -- cognitive, emotional, and time demands among many others.
Given this context, a research-practice partnership of CSAwesome facilitators and researchers reviewed teacher data about the professional development and redesigned it to better set teachers up for success in completing the PD and for teaching the course. In the video, we share our process for redesigning the PD and the strategies we incorporated to support teachers both on the cognitive and social-emotional side. Researchers, PD facilitators, and participating teachers discuss this process and its impact on teachers.
We are interested in learning more about what challenges others are seeing teachers encounter in professional development and strategies that are working for your teachers.
Rebekah Lang
PD Facilitator/Teacher
Welcome! I'm an AP CSA teacher and new practitioner for the CSAwesome RPP Project. Like many AP CSA teachers, I started out teaching AP CSP and then needed to learn to teach AP CSA too.
Our project, with researchers at the National Center for CS Education at the College of St. Scholastica and Elms College, focuses on transitioning teachers from teaching AP CSP to CSA with differentiated PD that starts in the summer and supports teachers throughout the school year. We welcome comments, questions, and feedback!
Chanda Jefferson
Sally Crissman
Senior Science Educator
PD during a pandemic was monumentally challenging! I hope there's a vigorous discussion in this forum around the question you ask: what are the challenges teachers encounter in PD and productive strategies - ones that work.
Perennial challenge: time! We've found teachers like and benefit from in-person PD with peers and leaders with content and pedagogical expertise. This isn't always possible as we saw during the pandemic. Another challenge was (given limited time) was finding a balance between introducing new content and modeling productive (often new) pedagogy. One strategy was the inclusion of video snapshots of classroom lessons that exemplified pedagogies in the context of specific content. Short overview videos such as you describe have also been well-received by teachers.
PD, whether delivered in person or via technology, needs to model best practice in classrooms. At the same time, the pedagogy needs to be highlighted or called out.
A potent PD experience is actually teaching a new curriculum. Your strategy of supporting teachers not only prior to teaching but during is one that's worked well in our project.
How do you keep in touch and support participants throughout and determine cognitive, social emotional needs?
Chanda Jefferson
Beryl Hoffman
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Elms College
The CSAwesome PD supports teachers while they are teaching the curriculum during the academic year with monthly meetings with an experienced CS A teacher and facilitator. The PD cohort also support one another. There is also a teaching-csawesome google group with 2,800+ teachers who are very supportive!
Chanda Jefferson
Rebekah Lang
PD Facilitator/Teacher
The monthly meetings include time for personal check-ins and discussion based around the needs of the participants. Each meeting has an "exit ticket" that gives the facilitators feedback to support the participants even more.
Chanda Jefferson
Daniel Damelin
Senior Scientist
I was insightful of you to include SEL as a component of the PD. This past couple of years has been especially trying for teachers we have been working with. It sounds like part of what they are learning is both the technical aspects of the new course, but also pedagogical approaches. How do the pedagogical approaches differ for the CSA vs. CSP course, or are they similar but just a different context?
Chanda Jefferson
Beryl Hoffman
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Elms College
I think many of the equity-based pedagogical approaches are similar, see https://www.inclusivecsteaching.org/, but sometimes more difficult in CSA because the subject matter is more prescribed. I think this makes inclusive teaching strategies even more important though.
Chanda Jefferson
Daniel Damelin
Rebekah Lang
Daniel Damelin
Senior Scientist
This is a nice set of resources. Thanks for the link.
Chanda Jefferson
Mark DeLoura
Just want to say, I love this idea and look forward to checking out CSAwesome further. The distance between CSP and CSA was a concern for me during CSP development, this seems like this could be great way to bridge the gap for teachers! Also, some of my teacher friends keep complaining that they don't REALLY know how to code, and honestly, I might just point them to CSAwesome :) Thanks!
Chanda Jefferson
Rebekah Lang
Beryl Hoffman
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Elms College
Hi, I'm part of CSAwesome team. We welcome you to check out CSAwesome at https://www.csawesome.org/ and the free ebook at course.csawesome.org. We try to scaffold the curriculum and build on CSP knowledge, for example comparing for loops in block based and text based coding or introducing objects with turtles. The teaching-csawesome community of teachers are awesome in providing resources and supporting one another.
-Beryl
Chanda Jefferson
Chanda Jefferson
Educator/Education Policy Fellow
Hi my name is Chanda Jefferson and I am happy to join the conversation. I absolutely love that the CSAwesome project provides a google community to support teachers as they begin to teach CSA. As a former AP Biology teacher, the transition from teaching freshman Biology to AP biology was difficult and I relied on an AP Biology Facebook group for support. Can you share a success story from the CSAwesome google community and if you could add a new feature to the program, what would it be?
Rebekah Lang
PD Facilitator/Teacher
My background is in teaching English and then AP CSP. So adding on CSAwesome was challenging and I think of my experiences as part of the successes of the program. I think I appreciated the CSAwesome Google Groups because of the questions and answered that others asked throughout the year. I didn't always contribute actively, but teachers often asked questions that expanded my understanding and provided resources that I didn't even realize I needed!
As for new features--I can't think of any I'd want at the moment. However, we've been talking a lot recently about equity and access, and I'm sure there are some useful additional features that will be developed related to helping all students to have access to the material...
Chanda Jefferson
Marshall An
CSAwesome curriculum and professional development are amazing!!
One pronounced challenge for instructors to teach CS courses with online hands-on activities at scale is as follows: instructors must have a deep understanding of not only the course materials but also of how to support student learning when students are working on the online activities.
For example, students may have difficulty debugging syntax errors when working on coding tasks. When students ask questions, the instructors often need to examine and debug student solutions themselves and decide on proper feedback for the students in order to maximize the learning.
In the SAIL-CC project, we also provide faculty professional development to get community college faculty well prepared to teach online courses in CS/IT.
How does CSAwesome PD enable the instructors to develop the capacity to support student learning (i.e., how to troubleshoot student solutions and how to answer student questions)? For example, does CSAwesome PD provide faculty with practice activities such as troubleshooting example student solutions and answering example student questions?
Rebekah Lang
Rebekah Lang
PD Facilitator/Teacher
The summer PD included TLO (teacher-learner-observer) sessions which gave participants a chance to practice different lessons from the curriculum. That included answering students' questions throughout the lesson. I found those to be extremely helpful in preparing to teach the material in the fall.
Also, during the academic year meetings, instructor-participants answered and discussed classroom vignettes that had both pedagogical and CS-specific concerns to address. For example, a vignette could include an incomplete student solution related to a misunderstanding of code as well as a need to support pair-programming for a partnership that is struggling. I appreciated these in particular because it assumed that we teachers were coming to the meetings with prior knowledge and experience and could work together collaboratively to determine the best approach for the specific situations in the vignettes.
Oludare Owolabi
Excellent project
Rebekah Lang