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1. Implementing Standards-Focused Professional Development for Middle School CS Teachers: An Experience Report

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3641554.3701908  

   Tate, Carol; Basu, Satabdi; Rachmatullah, Arif; Yang, Hui; Rutstein, Daisy (February 2025, ACM)

   The "Computer Science for All" initiative advocates for universal access to computer science (CS) instruction. A key strategy toward this end has been to establish CS content standards outlining what all students should have the opportunity to learn. Standards can support curriculum quality and access to quality CS instruction, but only if they are used to inform curriculum design and instructional practice. Professional learning offered to teachers of CS has typically focused on learning to implement a specific curriculum, rather than deepening understanding of CS concepts. We set out to develop a set of educative resources, formative assessment tools and teacher professional development (PD) sessions to support middle school CS teachers' knowledge of CS standards and standards-aligned formative assessment literacy. Our PD and associated resources focus on five CS standards in the Algorithm and Programming strand and are meant to support teachers using any CS curriculum or programming language. In this experience report, we share what we learned from implementing our standards-based PD with four middle school CS teachers. Teachers initially perceived standards as irrelevant to their teaching but they came to appreciate how a deeper understanding of CS concepts could enhance their instructional practice. Analysis of PD observations and exit surveys, teacher interviews, and teacher responses to a survey assessing CS pedagogical content knowledge demonstrated the complexity of using content standards as a driver of high-quality CS instruction at the middle school level, and reinforced our position that more standards-focused PD is needed. 

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2. Online vs in-person professional learning communities: A qualitative comparison of teacher learning experiences.

   https://doi.org/10.22318/cscl2023.111030  

   Moore, K. S.; Zhang, H.; Gupta, P.; Kuhlken, Z.; Li, H.; Lee, I. (June 2023, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning - CSCL 2023)

   Teachers today have increasing access to professional learning communities (PLCs) through a rapidly expanding menu of online professional development offerings. While a valued opportunity for growth, online PLCs can limit opportunities for co-teaching, pedagogical practice, and experiential learning. This paper examines a teacher professional development program implemented in 2022, where 14 middle school teachers joined either an online or an in-person version of a summer practicum in which PLCs were fostered. In both versions of the PD, teachers worked in small teams of co-teachers to learn and practice teaching middle school students about Artificial Intelligence (AI), a topic in which teachers were non-experts. Findings from qualitative analysis of teacher interviews suggest affordances and barriers to teacher learning online as compared to in-person PLCs. The paper offers recommendations for online PLC structure and co-teaching to enhance teacher learning. 

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3. FIRST Principles to Design for Online, Synchronous High School CS Teacher Training and Curriculum Co-Design

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3428029.3428059  

   Grover, Shuchi; Cateté, Veronica; Barnes, Tiffany; Hill, Marnie; Ledeczi, Akos; Broll, Brian (January 2020, Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research)

   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. 

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4. Developing Resilient K-12 STEM Teachers

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422318814483  

   Wright, Diane S.; Balgopal, Meena M.; Sample McMeeking, Laura B.; Weinberg, Andrea E. (February 2019, Advances in Developing Human Resources)

   The Problem The US is currently experiencing a shortage of K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers, especially in high-poverty communities. The shortage can be explained by both low teacher recruitment and high teacher turnover; however, the reasons why teachers leave the profession are complex. The Solution We argue that teacher professional development programs are often focused on how teachers can meet the needs of their students but ignore how teachers can build their own professional resilience. We draw from research in both teacher self-efficacy and ecological adaptive capacity to propose a revised Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform Model that identifies adaptive capacity as an outcome goal for individuals and school systems. School environments are dynamic (e.g., new policies, student needs, and changing administrators), and as a result, teachers need skills to adapt, enabling them to be resilient while still meeting students’ needs. The Stakeholders Professional development, teacher educators, human resource development (HRD) practitioners, K-12 STEM teachers. 

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5. Code, Connect, Create: The 3C Professional Development Model to Support Computational Thinking Infusion

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3328778.3366797  

   Jocius, Robin; Joshi, Deepti; Dong, Yihuan; Robinson, Richard; Cateté, Veronica; Barnes, Tiffany; Albert, Jennifer; Andrews, Ashley; Lytle, Nicholas (February 2020, SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   Despite the increasing attention to infusing CT into middle and high school content area classrooms, there is a lack of information about the most effective practices and models to support teachers in their efforts to integrate disciplinary content and CT principles. To address this need, this paper proposes the Code, Connect and Create (3C) professional development (PD) model, which was designed to support middle and high school content area teachers in infusing computational thinking into their classrooms. To evaluate the model, we analyzed quantitative and qualitative data collected from Infusing Computing PD workshops designed for in-service science, math, English language arts, and social studies teachers located in two Southeastern states. Drawing on findings from our analysis of teacher-created learning segments, surveys, and interviews, we argue that the 3C professional development model supported shifts in teacher understandings of the role of computational thinking in content area classrooms, as well as their self-efficacy and beliefs regarding CT integration into disciplinary content. We conclude by offering implications for the use of this model to increase teacher and student access to computational thinking practices in middle and high school classrooms. 

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