It would be great to have a course for teachers of grades 3-8!

Hi Sarah
We have not completely decided yet whether we will be able to have our one day workshop in person or if it will be by remote learning. Carl Anderberg, Helen Bosch and Neal Legler are coordinating the Utah course so I will alert them to your questions. I am sure they will welcome you helping them recruit. Kristi may want to weigh in on this as well.
Midge

Sarah,

Thank you for your question!

We are working on putting together a virtual workshop. The virtual workshop will allow our program to reach scales we did not think were possible.

Utah will be interesting because I think the workshop will probably be a blend of in person and virtual. As a team, we are discussing online pedagogy and trying to think about what is best for our teachers while keeping in mind the "virtual" comfort levels of our leadership team in Utah. If the team decides on in person only, then due to social distancing protocols and availability of space we may have to have two groups on different days instead of having all teachers participate in the workshop on the same day. We are looking forward to the upcoming workshops! 

 

Jennifer,

Thank you for your post. We do not have any official ongoing requirements for teachers to continue exchanging ideas once the program is over. However, we encourage our teachers to stay in touch with each other (and us) and to use our platform as a way to continue their dialogue as they have access to contact information and a lot of resources. We also emphasize working together and the importance of dialogue early in the program and I think teachers feel safe to discuss and be creative with their ideas. Our leaders work hard to validate our teachers in all aspects of the program and this type of feedback appears to motivate the teachers to stay in contact with one another, especially for teachers who are in small, rural locations who may not have anyone else at their site to work with or their access to authentic professional development is limited.

 

Hi Jennifer,

Project evaluator here :) 

The initial face-to-face one-day workshop as well as requirements for responding to others' discussions on the CTPD course itself are elements of community building that can help foster ongoing collegial communication beyond the CTPD course itself.  

Hi Marcia
It has been years since we saw each other. We have Kathy Haynie as evaluator and Suzane Wilson as director of research and they have set up assessments.

Hi Marcia,

On the project evaluation side of the research-evaluation equation, I developed and vetted a project logic model that supported our (CTPD development- facilitator team) collaboratively-defined success criteria for: (1) the CTPD course itself, (2) teacher professional development (via the CTPD course), and (3) classroom use of CT. The teacher PD success criteria (categories drawn from Guskey 2000) included participants’ engagement, participants’ reactions, participants’ learning, and participants’ use of new knowledge/skills. The main source of evidence for participants’ learning are analyses of the CTPD courses themselves (discussions, assignments, etc.) as well as facilitator interviews. A secondary source of evidence is a post-participation teacher survey focused on classroom use.

There are research efforts underway with more rigorous measures of teacher CT.

I’m happy to share more about the evaluation work.

Best,

Kathy Haynie

kchaynie@stanfordalumni.org  

 

Thanks Michael

Thanks Jan
We have many plans for the future. Already we are letting others use the course, for example, Michelle Homp is using it for a summer class for MAT students at the U of Nebraska, easy as they also use CANVAS

Hi Jan,

I hope that Midge can chime in to add to my response, but in partial response to your question, I'd say that the evaluation on our project has been extremely helpful. Kathy Haynie, our evaluator, has been deeply involved with all aspects of the project. She was embedded in the process to develop the course content, and has conducted detailed interviews with site leaders from our project who led the online courses and with teachers who have completed the course. I would not say that the evaluation has led to any wholesale changes in approach, but it has certainly led to significant adaptations of the course content to make it more accessible, digestible, and ultimately usable by the teachers in the course

Hi Jan,

Please start with my response (above) to Marcia Linn. To answer your question about evaluation impact, I believe there was value (e.g., salience, goals alignment, buy-in) in leading the team through collaboratively developing success criteria for the course itself, teacher PD with the course, and classroom use of CT. I have to say Midge, the course authors and facilitators, and our Canvas expert have been incredibly pro-active about scouring the online CTPD implementations for things that are not working and need to be tweaked, both in the course itself (modules, etc.) and in looking at teachers’ engagement with the course (relevance, difficulty level, etc.). They cast a wide net with the ranges of teacher participants, and have been very mindful and reflective as this has proceeded. I have to say, this is one of the most harmonious and productive teams I have ever worked with, and I think that speaks to Midge’s depth of history with all the members of our CTPD team.

I’m just now unpacking feedback on teachers’ use of CT with students based on four of the CTPD course implementations in 2019. And now with teachers forced into online teaching situations themselves, this adds more layers of complexity. I’m looking forward to sharing this information with the CTPD team (very soon) and providing results in the 2020 Annual Report.  

Please let me know how I can best keep you looped in as we move forward!

Best,

Kathy

Alan
There seems to be very little variation across states and their curriculum requirements. . The teachers think hard about how to implement the lessons in their classrooms in the context of what they are teaching. We notices a community of practice in Montana where the teachers were all from the same state. In most places so far the teachers have come from the same state for the most part, though we had a VT and a few MA teachers in the NY group.

Alan, 

In our early work on biomathematics modules (over 15 years ago) we were concerned about state standards and overwhelmed with the task of aligning our lessons to even a few states.  We have come to find that most teachers have grown so accustomed to aligning curriculum to standards, that if we provide a curriculum of value to the teachers, they will work out the standards alignment for their state.  And, as Midge mentioned, as time has gone on the standards from one state to the next are becoming more similar. 

Hi Alan,

Just to build on Jim's response a bit, we are finding that the science standards include notions of using computing, and several teachers have found that the content in this course really drive home how to include CT with only minor tweaks to what they might normally teach. The science standards allow teachers enough latitude to embed some of these ideas. The course content aims to aid in this process. For instance, we have a unit that compares electric and gas-powered cars in terms of both dollar cost and "carbon cost" and have included pointers to a number of external tools (such as from the EPA) and home-grown spreadsheets that they can use with their students. The topic is one covered in science classes, so the course provides ideas on how to enrich it with CT tools to assist in thinking and visualizing the issues. So, in the case of NGSS, I'd say the standards help set the stage, and teachers are delighted to get some ideas hooks for including CT.

Hi Andrew,

Many thanks for watching our video. We have had a few teachers in lower grades take the PD course, and we have been amazed at how receptive they are to including computational thinking (CT) ideas in their classrooms. (We have a little story on our project website talking about one particular third-grade teacher.) It seems like there would definitely be demand for PD on CT for lower grades. With respect to stereotypes, you raise a great point, though not one that we explicitly address in our project. Implicitly, though, we hope that by making CT more accessible and by illustrating computational thinking strategies that teachers may already be teaching and that students may already be using, we can reduce some of the barriers that may dissuade some students, particularly those who may not see themselves as a "typical" STEM student.