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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. 

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is specialized knowledge necessary to teach a subject. PCK integrates subject-matter content knowledge with knowledge of students and of teaching strategies so that teachers can perform the daily tasks of teaching. Studies in mathematics education have found correlations between measures of PCK and student learning. Finding robust, scalable ways for developing and measuring computer science (CS) teachers’ PCK is particularly important in CS education in the United States, given the lack of formal CS teacher preparation programs and certifications. However, measuring pedagogical content knowledge is a challenge for all subject areas. It can be difficult to write assessment items that elicit the different aspects of PCK and there are often multiple appropriate pedagogical choices in any given teaching scenario. In this paper, we describe a framework and pilot data from a questionnaire intended to elicit PCK from teachers of high school introductory CS courses and we propose future directions for this work.