Transition from one language to another closely related language to help students develop understanding of key abstract ideas programming languages concepts.
Provide students with practice opportunities to develop the verbal communication skills needed for successful pair programming to ensure that students gain the most out of these activities.
Setup pair programming assignments intentionally using the following checklist so that students have the tools, environment, and space they need to succeed
Have a student write out detailed instructions for performing a basic task, then have another student try to follow these instructions exactly. Engaging, interactive classroom activities like this demonstrate that program instructions need to be explicit.
Reach out to current and former students with varied interests to find and suggest articles about CS current events for the class to read.
Incorporate the Computer Science Principles seven big ideas explicitly with every topic covered throughout the course, especially when having class discussions so students can clearly see course goals.
Assign students to add comments to code their peers wrote that is void of comments to test students ability to understand the code as well as their peer’s ability to write clear code.
Make reflections a part of every class project so that students have an opportunity to learn from their completed work and think critically about how they performed, what they learned, and mistakes they made.
Provide opportunities for students to write code, in addition to traditional multiple choice questions, when using Peer Instruction.
Use Practice-It as supplementary Java problems for an introductory programming course to give students more practice.
Let students debug their code alone for a few minutes before intervening because students might feel that they should be able to find bugs immediately, which isn’t the case.
Pick an article from the ACM TechNews newsletter for students to read, summarize, and write a reflection on to find relevant and appropriate CS articles for AP CSP social implications assignments.
Say black people/students/etc instead of blacks because using black as an adjective emphasizes the humanity of black people.
Use the words women and men (or boys and girls) instead of the words male and female when talking about things that are gender-specific to respect the difference between the sex and gender of your students.
Don’t express shock or “compliment” students for breaking stereotypes associated with their race or gender; these statements are microaggressions, they discriminate against these students, often unintentionally.
Make sure not to ask students of color questions that essentialize their entire race or racism, don’t make the assumption that students of color are experts on all things related to their culture or racism.
Use humor in class that does not rely on race, gender, ability, class, etc. because those jokes are made at the expense of a diverse set of students and create a very unwelcome classroom environment.