Establish local professional learning hubs for teachers to meet with their peers twice a semester and work together to test out CS lessons.
Goal:
- Strengthen teaching in CS classrooms by building a supportive and encouraging teacher community where teachers test out activities and lessons together.
- Consistent professional development gives computing teachers an opportunity to work together, share ideas, and communicate, which will help improve CS classrooms.
- Common issues for CS teachers are a lack of professional learning opportunities and a scarcity of resources from their school (there may only be one or two CS teachers at their school).
- Focus on learning hubs instead of one-day professional learning events or in-school one-to-one support. This has the benefits of personalised training and the support of the one-to-one model but is scalable and cost-effective.
- Create a CS Teachers Hub in your community or local district that holds professional development public meetings twice a semester.
- For each semester, choose a computer science content topic.
- These workshops are not meant to be application training.
- Topics should focus on core CS concepts.
- Sample topics include: algorithms and sequences; loops and iteration; and decision making and conditional statements.
- You can also have one of the two meetings be focused on "unplugged" activities and the other focus on activities that use a computer.
- Don’t assume! Ask the participants what they want to learn.
- Make sure meetings focus on working together and testing out ideas.
- For each semester, choose a computer science content topic.
- Join online professional learning communities to help recruit local teachers in the area and see what other learning hubs are doing.
- Current online CS teacher communities can be found at CS10K and Code.org Forums and Microsoft Educator Community.
- Look for inspiration from these communities by seeking out threads that cover common misconceptions, engaging activities, and helpful resources.