Scaling Professional Learning for Equitable and Inclusive Computer Science Teaching

In this episode I unpack Martin et al.’s (2022) publication titled “Scaling professional learning for equitable and inclusive computer science teaching,” which is an experience report that shares lessons learned from three iterations of scaling professional development around equitable and inclusive CS education.

  • Welcome back to another episode of the

    CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary

    each week of this podcast is either an

    interview with a guest or multiple

    guests or a solo episode where i unpack

    some scholarship in relation to computer

    science education in this week's episode

    i'm unpacking a paper titled scaling

    professional learning for equitable and

    inclusive computer science teaching

    which was written by nicole d martin

    edgar garza andrea wilson vasquez and

    carol l fletcher apologies if i

    mispronounced any names here's the

    abstract for this paper quote classroom

    environments that build a sense of

    belonging and identity in computer

    science cs for all students especially

    for those who have been historically

    excluded are critical for equitable cs

    education providing professional

    learning that supports more inclusive

    and culturally sustaining cs classrooms

    at the scale needed to ensure that all

    students have positive experiences in cs

    is a significant challenge this

    experience report discusses how the

    scaling inclusive pedagogy skip project

    has approached this problem skip aims to

    provide teachers with equity focused

    professional learning experiences and

    research-based tools so they are

    equipped to embrace diversity and focus

    on equity in their schools and

    classrooms we discuss key takeaways from

    teacher facilitator and organizational

    perspectives about developing a

    professional learning experience that

    balances the need for building community

    and safe spaces to converse about

    sensitive topics with the complexities

    of creating a large-scale effort that

    can reach thousands of teachers this

    report highlights lessons learned about

    designing professional learning that is

    substantive enough to enact change but

    realistic for the demands on teachers

    time nuanced and relevant to local

    context while also nationally scalable

    and specific to and actionable for k12cs

    teachers we reflect on persistent

    challenges and recommendations for

    taking an approach to cs teacher

    professional learning that is systemic

    enough to change what is happening in

    classrooms across the country end quote

    try to summarize this paper into a

    single sentence i would say that this

    experience report shares lessons learned

    from three iterations of scaling

    professional development around

    equitable and inclusive cs education now

    you can find a link to this paper in the

    show notes which is at jaredaleri.com or

    by clicking the link in the app that

    you're listening to this on on my

    website you'll find hundreds if not

    thousands of free computer science

    education resources as well as i think

    over 800 hours of drumming content and a

    bunch of gaming content because i like a

    lot of things you'll also find a link to

    boot up professional development which

    is the non-profit that i work for who

    also powers this podcast so check out

    the free curriculum i create there and

    if you want to learn more about the

    professional development or elementary

    cs educators just go to boot up pd.org

    so in the introduction the authors

    mention that there's often cs

    professional development targeted

    towards like a specific course like apcs

    principles but we need to focus on

    professional development for more than

    just one specific course at the high

    school level but there are some

    challenges that come with providing

    professional development at scale as

    somebody who has collaboratively

    developed professional development at

    scale i agree and so the authors

    mentioned in their intro that there are

    massive open online courses also known

    as moocs that have been used to like

    deliver content at scale but they often

    have like a single digit percentage of

    completion rate so millions of people

    participate but very small number of

    them actually go through the content and

    it doesn't really do a great job of

    building communities which was important

    for the authors so this paper will kind

    of talk about their different iterations

    of a course that they developed at scale

    to provide professional development

    learning experiences that focused on

    equity and inclusion in cs education so

    the next section is on evolution of

    course design and implementation and so

    it's broken down into three different

    sections one for each of the iterations

    so in iteration one they talk about how

    in 2016 they developed an online course

    that was completed in 2017. so this

    course focused mainly on gender

    inequalities in cs education largely in

    part to the backgrounds and expertise of

    the development team of the course it

    was fully asynchronous so it was

    self-paced and did not have an

    instructor so it allowed a broad range

    of teachers to participate now the

    authors in this section cite that moocs

    have a completion rate that is less than

    five percent so it was nice that their

    completion rate was 34

    significantly better but for the authors

    this was not good enough which is great

    i'm glad that they were trying to go

    beyond more than just like a six percent

    completion rate so they went back to the

    drawing board with their course and

    tried to redesign it based on some

    lessons that they learned in this

    process so in 2022 in iteration two it

    received some additional funding from

    nsf and so they changed it from a fully

    asynchronous course to a hybrid model

    which had both synchronous and

    asynchronous components so in the

    synchronous sections the educators who

    took the course were able to come

    together and engage in a discussion with

    each other with a course facilitator

    instructor the course took around six

    weeks to complete with asynchronous

    coursework in between each of the weekly

    hour-long discussions that were led by a

    facilitator who is a peer educator they

    also revised the course to make it so

    that it focused on more than just gender

    disparities mcs in csmcs education to

    also focus on race ethnicity

    intersectionality etc to try to make cs

    classrooms more equitable and inclusive

    for a variety of minoritized or

    oppressed or marginalized groups now in

    this section they talk about how the

    facilitators of those courses indicated

    that the

    training that was provided for them

    focused too much on the technical side

    of things like where to find stuff in

    the course and not enough on how to

    facilitate discussions around difficult

    topics and they also indicated that they

    wanted to kind of go through the course

    almost like as a student to learn how it

    might be facilitated before they

    actually started facilitating now here's

    a quote from page 76 quote while we

    experimented with creating a facilitator

    community of practice part way through

    the second iteration in response to

    feedback we realize that establishing

    this community needs to be an

    intentional focus moving forward we will

    ensure that future facilitator trainings

    model how teacher participants will

    learn in the course and prepare

    facilitators to lead challenging

    discussions establishing a community

    practice with facilitators to discuss

    challenging and sensitive topics with

    their colleagues will support the

    development of content expertise and

    self-efficacy to lead a group of

    teachers through difficult conversations

    end quote from page 76 another

    interesting challenge with facilitators

    is they realize that there is

    quite the inconsistency when it came to

    grading assignments so they were

    reflecting in this paper that they need

    to find some kind of a system to improve

    the consistency of the grades or rather

    how things were graded now in terms of

    teacher feedback they noted that the

    teachers struggled with the course

    workload which caused them to kind of

    reconsider

    how many resources

    they were providing in their

    asynchronous work and what they could do

    to make the most out of the synchronous

    discussions or time and then they kind

    of got mixed feedback on the synchronous

    time in terms of who was facilitating

    might have an impact on how teachers

    perceive that time because each person

    might facilitate in a different way or

    in a way that might be perceived as more

    or less beneficial for some educators

    and not others so the authors reflect on

    how this caused them to think about how

    they need to better prepare facilitators

    to be more effective with the

    synchronous time and then they also

    reflect in this section about how having

    a more diverse team helped them with

    creating more diverse projects and

    pointing towards resources that were

    beyond the expertise of the initial

    development team so those were the

    reflections for iteration two now in

    iteration three in the next section they

    discuss how they receive some more

    funding in 2021 and so quote the goals

    of iteration 3 included centering

    identity through the lens of race

    ethnicity gender disability and

    socioeconomic status in all course

    content updating and systematizing all

    course content establishing ongoing

    support for implementation and

    redesigning the facilitator training

    experience to include modeling of the

    synchronous session for potential

    facilitators end quote this from page 77

    so the paragraphs that follow this kind

    of unpack each of those they talk about

    how they are intentionally expanding to

    focus on other areas of equity and

    inclusion and to embed that throughout

    the entire course they also mentioned

    that they are intentionally trying to

    reduce the number of assignments that

    are in between each of the synchronous

    sections but i kind of wonder out loud

    that the second iteration of this

    happened during covid in 2020 and having

    actually participated in the course in

    too much work or effort in between the

    synchronous sessions but i know that

    many teachers were completely

    overwhelmed and overworked in 2020 and i

    wasn't working in the classroom at that

    time so i wonder if teachers would still

    consider it to be too much work or if it

    was simply because there was a lot going

    on in 2020 that it might not be going on

    five years from now or even this year

    but that's just me kind of thinking out

    loud but also thinking out loud i have

    seen some teachers kind of have a

    tendency to be resistant to having to

    put in the effort that is required to

    learn something and i would argue that

    in order to facilitate more equitable

    and inclusive environments you're gonna

    have to learn a lot about many different

    things and six weeks is not enough time

    to learn that even if you cram it full

    of content but one of the approaches

    that might be used that i've used in

    some grad courses that i previously

    facilitated so i'd provide a single

    reading that was a required reading and

    then provide a list of here are some

    optional readings if any of these sound

    interesting to you so it takes into

    account the busyness that teachers have

    allows people to focus on one particular

    area but then also gives them many more

    resources to dive deeper into if they

    want to learn more about a particular

    topic and then another approach that

    i've even used is like hey here's seven

    different articles pick one of them

    we'll engage in a discussion they're all

    related to the same theme or topic but

    pick the one that's most interesting to

    you and what you are doing in the

    classroom or wherever so those are some

    approaches that i've used to try and

    explore a breadth of materials in a

    limited amount of time while providing

    opportunities for depth now in iteration

    three the authors mentioned that they

    are focusing on content specifically for

    k-8 educators rather than just content

    geared towards high school which i

    appreciate having mainly taught in the

    elementary mk8 spaces and then they also

    mentioned that they have a new feature

    that is coming out that allows teachers

    to actually practice having

    uncomfortable or challenging

    conversations in a safe space so it's

    using mit's teaching systems lab teacher

    moments platform which basically

    simulates conversations and allows you

    to kind of practice facilitating or

    responding to challenging topics which

    reading through it sounded really

    interesting so i recommend checking out

    that section in particular and then the

    final section that they mention in here

    is how they are revising the facilitator

    training to be a seven week course that

    kind of will model what it's like to go

    through the course as a teacher and to

    provide more in-depth training and

    support alright so in section three of

    the paper it's the key takeaways so this

    is broken down into three different

    sections so the first one is on course

    design and so in this section one of the

    key takeaways is that the hybrid

    approach with both synchronous and

    asynchronous seems to be the best

    approach for what they were trying to do

    in the second section on facilitator

    training because it was a self-selected

    group who cared about these issues they

    would focus more on the logistics and

    structure but then they realized oh we

    need to actually provide more support

    modeling how to engage in these kind of

    discussions and then in section three

    they talk about the design team

    composition so they mentioned how the

    original group had a wealth of expertise

    and understanding related to gender

    disparities and then how they expanded

    the team to have more expertise outside

    of that and then the paper ends with

    some conclusions and next steps now i

    have to say as somebody who has designed

    professional development at scale and

    curriculum at scale i really appreciated

    reading their experiences and being

    vulnerable with the things that they

    felt did not go well and that they

    learned from and how they iterated on

    that it's very interesting for me to

    read that but at the end of these

    unpacking scholarship episodes i'd like

    to share some lingering questions and

    thoughts so one of them is what is lost

    when developing pd at scale but a

    follow-up is what is gained when

    developing pdf scale and then how might

    pd providers balance designing at scale

    while keeping pd local so for example

    when i was the cs mentor in a k-8 school

    district the pd that i provided was

    extremely local it was hey what do you

    want to learn today what should we work

    on for next time every single week was

    engaging in some kind of a pd experience

    that was customized to the several

    teachers who were in the room so if one

    teacher wanted to focus on one thing

    awesome we can do that another teacher

    wanted to focus on another thing cool we

    can do that next time but when designing

    pd at scale you kind of lose that

    ability when you're suddenly working

    with hundreds or thousands of teachers

    instead you start to create professional

    development for the mean either approach

    has different affordances and

    constraints you can't really scale the

    thing that i mentioned that i was doing

    in my former district but then when you

    do scale some things it makes some of

    the content less relevant less

    hyperlocal so it's important to think of

    when doing things at scale what is lost

    what is gained with that approach and

    just make sure that what is gained far

    outweighs what is lost and if not then

    perhaps we shouldn't do professional

    development at scale but the final

    question that i have when i was reading

    through this is if you were to write an

    experience report about your own journey

    through cs education what would you

    share so this was an experience report

    about developing

    professional development course at scale

    you might provide an experience report

    on catalysts for changes in your own

    pedagogical approaches over the years

    what might you learn from that kind of

    experience having gone through similar

    reflective practices sharing lessons

    learned in different projects or stages

    in life i think it's very important for

    us to do that so if you haven't sat down

    and reflected on your own experiences

    and what you might report on it might be

    interesting to do that i know this is a

    short episode but it's a short paper i

    do highly recommend taking a look at it

    refreshing reading these kinds of

    reflections at least for somebody like

    myself who's definitely a nerd if you

    enjoyed listening to this episode there

    are hundreds more but stay tuned next

    week for another episode and until then

    i hope you're all staying safe and are

    having a wonderful week

Article

Martin, N. D., Garza, E., Vazquez, A. W., & Fletcher, C. L. (2022). Scaling professional learning for equitable and inclusive computer science teaching. 2022 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 75–79.


Abstract

“Classroom environments that build a sense of belonging and identity in computer science (CS) for all students, especially those who have been historically excluded, are critical for equitable CS education. Providing professional learning that supports more inclusive and culturally sustaining CS classrooms at the scale needed to ensure that all students have positive experiences in CS is a significant challenge. This experience report discusses how the Scaling Inclusive Pedagogy (ScIP) project has approached this problem. ScIP aims to provide teachers with equity-focused professional learning experiences and research-based tools so they are equipped to embrace diversity and focus on equity in their schools and classrooms. We discuss key takeaways from teacher, facilitator, and organizational perspectives about developing a professional learning experience that balances the need for building community and safe spaces to converse about sensitive topics with the complexities of creating a large-scale effort that can reach thousands of teachers. This report highlights lessons learned about designing professional learning that is substantive enough to enact change but realistic for the demands on teachers’ time, nuanced and relevant to local contexts while also nationally scalable, and specific to and actionable for K-12 CS teachers. We reflect on persistent challenges and recommendations for taking an approach to CS teacher professional learning that is systemic enough to change what is happening in classrooms across the country.”


Author Keywords

Professional learning, computer science, K-12 teachers, equity, inclusion, culturally responsive, systemic change


My One Sentence Summary

This experience report shares lessons learned from three iterations of scaling professional development around equitable and inclusive CS education.


Some Of My Lingering Questions/Thoughts

  • What is lost when developing PD at scale?

    • What is gained?

      • How might PD providers balance designing at scale while keeping PD local?

  • If you were to write an experience report about your own journey through CS education, what would you share?


Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode

  • Other podcast episodes that were mentioned or are relevant to this episode

    • CS for All Teachers with Melissa Rasberry

      • In this interview with Melissa Rasberry, we discuss making educational lemonade out of lemons, using technology to collaborate in virtual learning communities, how people are learning differently through online communities, CS for All Teachers, suggestions for using different social media platforms to connect with other educators, and much more.

    • Designing Curricula at Scale with GT Wrobel

      • In this interview with GT Wrobel, we discuss the importance of understanding your “why” behind pedagogical approaches and curriculum design, the internal tensions that arise when designing curriculum used by people around the world, the potential for standards and assessment to be a form of oppression, how feedback impacts the evolution of a curriculum, considerations when designing culturally relevant curricula that is used around the world, aligning curriculum development with professional development, the importance of taking a break to prevent burnout, where we hope the field goes in the next few years, and much more.

    • Helping New-to-CS Educators with Ashley Waring

      • In this interview with Ashley Waring, we discuss Ashley’s experiences with integrating CS in the classroom, lessons learned providing professional development for new-to-CS educators, what Ashley learned helping write Alabama’s CS standards and providing support after the rollout, language and oppression in standards development, why focusing on a college degree as an end goal might not be as important as focusing on lifelong learning, and more.

    • How to Get Started with Computer Science Education

      • In this episode I provide a framework for how districts and educators can get started with computer science education for free.

    • Learning at Scale with Kristin Stephens-Martinez

      • In this interview with Kristin Stephens-Martinez, we discuss learning CS in large classes (e.g., 200+ students), the winding and challenging journey through education and research, recognizing the importance of representation and providing support for underrepresented identities, the benefits of peer instruction, Kristin’s podcast (CS-Ed Podcast), the disconnect between research on education and practice in the classroom, and much more.

    • Lessons Learned from CS Professional Development with McKay Perkins

      • In this interview with McKay Perkins, we discuss what McKay has learned over the years providing elementary CS/coding professional development, considerations for creating within constraints, teaching a sustainable way for integrating CS/coding in elementary schools, the importance of adapting PD to continuous feedback, advice for becoming a professional development facilitator, and much more.

    • Teaching Over One Million Students with CS50's Carter Zenke

      • In this interview with Carter Zenke, we discuss Carter’s pedagogical approach that centers playfulness, creativity, and purpose; lessons learned teaching CS50 to over one million students; balancing free exploration with learning content; designing opportunities for getting into CS; the benefits of watching recordings of your own teaching; helping educators find their “why”; and so much more.

    • More episodes related to equity

    • More episodes related to inclusion

    • More episodes related to professional development

    • All other episodes

  • Learn more about MIT Teaching Systems Lab’s Teacher Moments platform

  • Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter



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