skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


This content will become publicly available on February 18, 2026

Title: What CS Teachers Want in a CS Professional Development Passport
Although there is extensive research on what makes teacher computer science (CS) professional development (PD) effective, little attention has been given to how PD providers prefer to collect and report data. A platform that met the needs of teachers while also simultaneously meeting the needs of funding bodies could be powerful in answering questions about participation and experiences in CS PD. Our research question for this study was: Which features and types of data do teachers find most important to include in a platform designed to record data related to their engagement with PD?We used an exploratory-sequential mixed methods approach that included focus groups and a survey created from an analysis of the data from the focus groups. The three most desired feature included adding information about the subject/topics targeted by the CS PD offerings for the CS PD they took, the grade levels targeted by the CS PD offering, and the number of training hours, points, and/or CEU credits earned or available to be earned by each CS PD offering taken. The three least desired features included have the capability for teachers to take notes about a CS PD, QR codes for signing up for CS PD, and capability to enter data about non-CS PDs you have completed. While we will use this data to inform the development of the platform, this study is significant as states can leverage this knowledge as they create their own systems for creating platforms for teachers within their own states.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2327863
PAR ID:
10635012
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
ACM
Date Published:
ISBN:
9798400705328
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1635 to 1636
Format(s):
Medium: X
Location:
Pittsburgh PA USA
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. 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
  2. There is a need for more K-12 computer science (CS) teachers. The need to scale teacher professional development (PD) points the CS education community towards virtual learning, and prior work shows that in-person PD with a diffuse schedule is more successful than condensed schedules. There is currently little research about virtual K-12 CS PD with a diffuse schedule. The pandemic served as a forced opportunity to explore the design and implementation of a diffuse-scheduled virtual PD for two small, equally-sized cohorts of middle school (grades 5-8) teachers; one from a metropolitan school district and another from across the United States. Our findings reveal several important post-pandemic design implications for future CS PD programs. First, the teachers’ CS knowledge and attitudes significantly increased in both cohorts. Second, there were no significant differences in attitudes or achievement between the cohorts. Third, the teachers in the virtual PD showed as good changes or better in attitude than those in a prior in-person PD. Finally, both cohorts were largely positive about the change from a few intensive PD days to a few hours a week for several weeks, even as they joined from vacations. 
    more » « less
  3. Teacher self-efficacy (SE) has been observed to be an 'important construct for Computer Science (CS) teachers' professional development because it can predict both teaching behaviors as well as student outcomes" [1]. The purpose of the present study was to investigate teacher CS SE during a two-year federally funded professional development (PD) and curriculum development project for middle school teachers incorporating game-design and the Unity development platform. The research question investigated is: How does teacher self-efficacy for teaching computer science via game design with the Unity game development platform change during a year-long PD program? Investigations of teacher SE for teaching CS have resulted in some surprising results. For example, it has been reported that - There were no differences in self-efficacy based on teachers' overall level of experience, despite previous findings that teacher self-efficacy is related to amount of experience" and "no differences in self-efficacy related to the teachers' own level of experience with CS" [2], thus further study of CS teacher SE is warranted. Participants in this study were six middle school teachers from four middle schools in the southeastern United States. They participated in a year-long PD program learning the Unity game development platform, elements of game design, and foundations of learner motivation. Guided reflective journaling was used to track the teachers' SE during the first year of the project. Teachers completed journal prompts at four intervals. Prompts consisted of questions like "How do you currently feel about your ability to facilitate student learning with Unity?" and "Are you confident that you can implement the materials the way the project team has planned for them to be implemented?" Prior to beginning the project participants expressed confidence in being able to facilitate student learning after participating in the planned professional development, but there was some uneasiness about learning and using Unity. From a SE perspective their responses make sense, as all of the participants are experienced teachers and should have confidence in their general ability to teach. However, since Unity is a new programming environment for all of the teachers, they did not have the prior experience necessary to have a high degree of confidence that they could successfully use it with their students. 
    more » « less
  4. This study investigated how Chicago Public Schools (CPS) computer science (CS) teachers and instructional coaches navigated remote professional development (PD) during the pandemic. Analyzing multiple sources of qualitative data, we explored how coaches adapted PD to address teachers’ unique needs and how teachers experienced remote PD. We found that the coaching team designed PD to help teachers translate key instructional strategies into the remote learning environment and increasingly centered their PD design efforts on improving teacher engagement and wellbeing. Teachers primarily valued the relational aspects of PD, including opportunities for collaboration and personalized support from instructional coaches. Leveraging an ecological framework, we found that the pandemic and remote learning contexts amplified preexisting PD challenges experienced by teachers and coaches. Findings suggest that PD researchers and designers should focus on teacher wellbeing and that districts should invest in flexible and adaptable PD structures to meet CS teachers’ varied needs. 
    more » « less
  5. Background: Researcher-practitioner partnerships (RPPs) have gained increasing prominence within education, since they are crucial for identifying partners’ problems of practice and seeking solutions for improving district (or school) problems. The CS Pathways RPP project brought together researchers and practitioners, including middle school teachers and administrators from three urban school districts, to build teachers’ capacity to implement an inclusive computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum for all students in their middle schools. Objective: This study explored the teachers’ self-efficacy development in teaching a middle school CSDL curriculum under the project’s RPP framework. The ultimate goal was to gain insights into how the project’s RPP framework and its professional development (PD) program supported teachers’ self-efficacy development, in particular its challenges and success of the partnership. Method: Teacher participants attended the first-year PD program and were surveyed and/or interviewed about their self-efficacy in teaching CSDL curriculum, spanning topics ranging from digital literacy skills to app creation ability and curriculum implementation. Both survey and interview data were collected and analyzed using mixed methods 1) to examine the reach of the RPP PD program in terms of teachers’ self-efficacy; 2) to produce insightful understandings of the PD program impact on the project’s goal of building teachers’ self-efficacy. Results and Discussion: We reported the teachers’ self-efficacy profiles based on the survey data. A post-survey indicated that a majority of the teachers have high self-efficacy in teaching the CSDL curriculum addressed by the RPP PD program. Our analysis identified five critical benefits the project’s RPP PD program provided, namely collaborative efforts on resource and infrastructure building, content and pedagogical knowledge growth, collaboration and communication, and building teacher identity. All five features have shown direct impacts on teachers' self-efficacy. The study also reported teachers’ perceptions on the challenges they faced and potential areas for improvements. These findings indicate some important features of an effective PD program, informing the primary design of an RPP CS PD program. 
    more » « less