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Over the past year, our AI4GA team of university faculty and middle school teachers have co-designed a middle school AI curriculum. In this poster we share how we used co-design both as a tool for collaboratively developing engaging AI activities and as a mechanism for mutual professional development. We explain our co-design process, give examples of curriculum materials provided to teachers, and showcase several teacher-created activities. We believe this approach to curriculum development centers the lived experiences of teachers and leverages the knowledge and expertise of university researchers to create high quality and engaging AI learning experiences for K-12 students.
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Supporting Teacher Professional Learning and Curriculum Implementation Through Collaborative Curriculum Design
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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- PAR ID:
- 10351383
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGCSE 2022: Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1166 to 1166
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Over the past year, our AI4GA team of university faculty and middle school teachers have co-designed a middle school AI curriculum. In this poster we share how we used co-design both as a tool for collaboratively developing engaging AI activities and as a mechanism for mutual professional development. We explain our co-design process, give examples of curriculum materials provided to teachers, and showcase several teacher-created activities. We believe this approach to curriculum development centers the lived experiences of teachers and leverages the knowledge and expertise of university researchers to create high quality and engaging AI learning experiences for K-12 students.more » « less
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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.more » « less
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null (Ed.)The Covid-19 pandemic has offered new challenges and opportunities for teaching and research. It has forced constraints on in-person gathering of researchers, teachers, and students, and conversely, has also opened doors to creative instructional design. This paper describes a novel approach to designing an online, synchronous teacher professional development (PD) and curriculum co-design experience. It shares our work in bringing together high school teachers and researchers in four US states. The teachers participated in a 3-week summer PD on ideas of Distributed Computing and how to teach this advanced topic to high school students using NetsBlox, an extension of the Snap! block-based programming environment. The goal of the PD was to prepare teachers to engage in collaborative co-design of a 9-week curricular module for use in classrooms and schools. Between their own training and the co-design process, teachers co-taught a group of high school students enrolled in a remote summer internship at a university in North Carolina to pilot the learned units and leverage ideas from their teaching experience for subsequent curricular co-design. Formative and summative feedback from teachers suggest that this PD model was successful in meeting desired outcomes. Our generalizable FIRST principles—Flexibility, Innovativeness, Responsiveness (and Respect), Supports, and Teamwork (collaboration)—that helped make this unique PD successful, can help guide future CS teacher PD designs.more » « less
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A research-practice partnership (RPP) used a teacher co-design process, supported by equity-focused professional development, to create an elementary-level curriculum that integrates content, practices, and learning progressions from state computing standards with other standards-based curricula. Most district students are part of historically marginalized groups and the RPP chose to develop an equity and inclusion-focused curriculum that would be taught in all elementary classrooms to all students. Twelve teacher teams, supported by researchers and ELL and SPED specialists, designed, piloted, and documented 23 modules of 4-8, 45-minute lessons across K-5. Early adopter teachers followed the pilots and implemented the modules in their classrooms with the goal of facilitating adoption by all elementary classroom teachers. After being interrupted by the pandemic, the RPP developed a strategy where principals in cohorts of schools agreed to collaborate with RPP school-based lead teachers to establish professional learning communities (PLCs) to support classroom implementation of the modules. Eleven schools participated in a 2021-22 cohort and nine more schools joined in 2022-23. Centering equity, PLCs, and quality module documentation and materials are key to sustaining and evolving the CSforAll curriculum. The modules were revised based on feedback obtained from ELL and SPED specialists, early adopters, teacher coordinators, researchers, and district curriculum directors. Using a large data set of meeting and classroom observation records, interviews, field notes, focus groups, surveys, and module documentation, we track the evolution of the curriculum and provide a detailed analysis of one module as an example.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3478432.3499118
