One of the critical barriers to increasing pre-collegiate computer science course offerings in the U.S. is a lack of qualified computer science teachers. Programs such as TEALS, a teacher preparation program pairing high school teachers with computing professionals to offer CS courses, provide opportunities for in-service teachers to gain experience teaching computer science. However, it is not clear whether the high school teachers develop sufficient pedagogical expertise to sustain high-quality computer science course offerings at their schools. Furthermore, the field of computer science education lacks valid and reliable ways of measuring pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), a construct that describes the knowledge teachers need for effective instruction. In this poster, the authors present these results from the first year of a three-year NSF grant to study how TEALS participation influences novice computer science teachers' PCK: 1) a theoretical framework describing the critical components of CS PCK, 2) the results of the first field test of a CS PCK assessment, including the psychometric properties of the assessment, and 3) a comparison of how teachers performed on the assessment at the beginning and end of their first year of computer science teaching and how they performed relative to their computing professional mentors.
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Professional Learning in the Midst of Teaching Computer Science
The recent groundswell of interest in computer science education across many countries has created a pressing need for computing teachers at the secondary level. To satisfy this demand, some educational systems are drawing from their pool of in-service teachers
trained in other disciplines. While these transitioning teachers can learn about computing pedagogy and subject matter at professional learning workshops, daily teaching experiences will also be a source of their learning. We studied a co-teaching program
where instructional responsibilities were distributed between teachers and volunteers from the tech industry to explore how specific teaching practices supported teacher learning, with a focus on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Through qualitative analysis
of questionnaire and interview data gathered from three teachers during one school year, we identified the practices they engaged in and how their learning related to the enactment of those practices. Our results highlight several factors that influenced the ways in which teaching practices provided participants with opportunities to learn PCK: (a) active participation of students and volunteers; (b) teacher’s level of content knowledge; (c) interdependent practices; and (d) immediacy of the classroom environment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1348866
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10128096
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - ICER '18
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 86 to 94
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3230977.3230983
