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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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Industry partnerships to support computer science high school teachers' pedagogical content knowledge
There is a critical need for computer scientists in the new digital age, a need that is not being met largely due to a lack of qualified computing teachers in K-12. In this project, we explore a three- year, on-the-job teacher preparation program (TEALS) that pairs high school educators with computing professionals to teach introductory computing courses. We are currently conducting a mixed-methods study to explore the change in teachers' pedagogical content knowledge within this professional development model.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1348866
- PAR ID:
- 10353798
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGITE '14: Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 89 to 90
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/2656450.2656481
