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This poster shares our experience of engaging middle school teachers in a collaborative design of a computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum through a researcher and practitioner partnership (RPP) among two public universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA. The project used the co-design approach to facilitate curriculum development and foster professional learning. In this poster, we introduce the co-design process, the developed curriculum, and teachers' professional learning experiences. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-one-on coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for CS education.
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Teachers as curriculum co-designers: Supporting professional learning and curriculum implementation in a CSforAll RPP project
This paper examines the use of collaborative curriculum design (co-design) as a strategy for supporting teacher professional learning and the implementation of an inclusive middle school computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum in three urban school districts. The curriculum is focused on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. The second year of the project has been dedicated to developing and piloting curriculum resources that support remote learning and culturally relevant pedagogy while the partner districts switched to remote and hybrid instructions. This study explores teachers’ professional learning experiences in the collaborative design of curriculum materials and piloting the curriculum at their own classrooms. The paper includes analysis of three data sets: (1) co-design meeting notes and teacher reflections; (2) semi-structured interviews with teachers who co-designed and piloted the curriculum; (3) student pre- and post-survey responses on their attitude and interest in learning CSDL. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-on-one coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development process but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for implementing the project curriculum in the partner districts. Findings from student surveys show that students perceived their understanding of, and interest in computer science and creating apps were slightly improved, regardless of gender.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1923461
- PAR ID:
- 10351377
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2022 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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null (Ed.)This paper presents an experience report from an NSF-funded researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) project. Based on a collaboration among two public research universities and three urban school districts in the Northeast USA, the goal of the project is to establish an institutionalized middle school computer science curriculum in the districts. The CS curriculum incorporates digital literacy skills as an integral aspect of learning computer science, and is based on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. Here, we share our professional learning process during the project's first year, which had been developed iteratively and dynamically adjusted to a remote format in response to exigencies of Spring 2020. The paper includes analysis of three data sets from teacher-participants: (1) their questions about the nature of the project, which we categorized into three levels: project, district and teacher levels. These questions bridge the visions and knowledge among different groups of the project partners; (2) analysis of semi-structured interview conversations with more than half of the teacher-participants; and (3) teacher survey responses. Our findings include two recommendations: that RPP projects elicit teacher questions to illuminate the three levels identified, and use strategies that engage teachers in designing a professional learning process for teaching computer science.more » « less
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