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