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.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
in this week's discussion i am chatting
with gt roble
gt is somebody that i've known for a
couple of years and have a lot of
respect for in the field of computer
science education especially when it
comes to curriculum development
in this episode we're going to discuss
the importance of understanding your why
behind pedagogical approaches
as well as curriculum design the
internal tensions that can actually
arise when you are designing curriculum
used by people all around the world
reference gt has helped developed
curriculum for code.org
we also discussed the potential for
standards and assessments to be a form
of oppression which builds off of
previous episodes on
paulo freddy's book pedagogy of the
oppressed
we discuss how feedback impacts the
evolution of curriculum
as well as considerations when designing
culturally relevant curriculum that is
used around the world
we also discuss aligning curriculum
development with professional
development
importance of taking a break to prevent
burnout and where we hope the field will
go in the next few years
as well as many other topics that are
relevant to cs educators
there are a lot of references in this
particular episode in terms of
prior podcast episodes and other
resources outside of
this podcast so make sure you check out
those show notes to get links to all of
those
you can find those by going to
jaredlery.com or simply clicking the
link in the app that you're listening to
this on
no ads nothing for sale on my website
all free content
and with that being said i do want to
say that this interview is a little bit
different gt specifically asked me to
make sure that i shared my thoughts on
topics
so rather than spending the majority of
the time listening to the guests
i was also including some of my own
thoughts on some of the topics we were
discussing
so that was definitely intentional and
is one of the reasons why this is a
longer episode than usual
however it's got a lot of great content
from gt but i highly recommend people
listen to
all right so i ramble too much so let's
start with an introduction by gt
hey my name is gt roble i am a
former high school educator i think i'm
here primarily because i worked at
code.org for several years
as a curriculum developer for our cs
principles course and cs discovery so
primarily middle and high school
and i currently work at microsoft
as a onboarding expert and continuing
learning expert for software engineers i
live in beautiful seattle washington and
for fun i love to go outdoors and hike
and play guitar and do innumerable
things but computer science education
seems to be the
kind of the nexus of my interests and
i'm very excited to be here today
can you tell me the story of how you got
into computer science education
this one is really interesting to me my
journey through cs education
i have a really hard time separating
from the place where i spent my most
time working on it which was at code.org
i was a curriculum developer there
for five years full time and as a
contractor for a year before that so a
pretty good stretch
but what most schools don't teach video
came out
i had no background in education and i
had taken one computer science course
my experience with it was all through
college i studied math and economics
and i was adjacent to the computer
science department and convinced myself
that even though i did math and econ
computer science was for
the real nerds and i could never go over
there and then my second semester senior
year
i had to take a computer science course
to
get the major the bachelor of science
for math and they made me take one
and i just fell in love i was like this
is awesome it's so cool and i had a
fantastic professor
and so at that point i went into the
professional world and i was an
economist for a couple of years i was
doing data analysis but
in the back of my mind i was thinking
like i'm gonna get back to computer
science
so i stayed in touch with that professor
and eventually decided to make
the leap to education and started
working in a school
in chicago which is my hometown as a
math tutor
and i started taking courses at night at
the university of chicago in a master's
program which was fantastic
in computer science and so i sort of
started my journeys into education
and computer science at the same time
that was the beginning of it
i'd say the first foray into what i'd
call formal cs education
was a talk that was given at my graduate
program given by
long-time colleague and friend baker
frankie about cs education
still at code.org and he gave that talk
having been a computer science teacher
for a really long time
and that's when i first said oh i can
take this passion i'm developing for
education and what i'm learning in my
master's program and
he'll be a computer science teacher and
so at first i applied for his job he was
leaving to go to
code.org so i said oh there will be an
open computer science teacher position
in the city that'll be great
didn't get that job but did get a
different one that was my first
full-time computer science teacher job
at a school in chicago and then got
involved as a piloter
for that course that baker was going to
go write with others and
very quickly afterwards they said we
really need people to be contract
writers because curriculum development
it's a lot of work they need a team
that was kind of my i call it big break
in terms of curriculum development i had
known that that was something that i was
looking for but
when they offered it i was really
excited and
after that ended up working full-time at
code.org there was a position open after
that and that was kind of the
i would say the end of the journey into
the field so kind of a long one and
not one i knew right away was exactly
what i wanted but kind of kept pulling
threads and
opportunities came up yeah it's
interesting how i tend to have be the
kind of person who has like a five and
ten year plan
but it almost never pans out the way
that i plan it it's like
always i look five years back at my plan
oh wow this is completely different than
i was anticipating
yeah well that's interesting for me to
hear because you do have a phd
right yeah so do you feel like even
going into your phd you didn't have like
this vision
well yeah i mean the vision was okay i
was going to be a professor of
music education and now here i am
full-time in computer science education
jared what are you doing you missed
that makes sense and that does resonate
i hope we get to talk more about that
because i do have a passion for music as
well
and it was something i was hoping to
when i was originally thinking well
where will i go next i was looking at
like the intersection of music
and computer science it wasn't a plan
and it did feel very
serendipitous those several years of
eventually becoming a curriculum
developer
so it's interesting that you say that
you were basically looking forward to
doing the curriculum development and
enjoyed it i also
obviously really enjoy it and have been
doing it full time at boot up but
a lot of people hate writing lesson
plans like with a passion just
can't stand doing it it's a waste of
time don't want to do it
so i'm curious like how did you know
going into
computer science that you really wanted
to do this curriculum side of things
let me give a side story which is
i don't know why i knew i liked it but
when i look back
i remember a talk that one of my
professors in college gave about a
statistics textbook
he was the first professor who would
ever explain to the class why he picked
that textbook and it was
very thoughtful it was like an
explanation of why he liked the way the
content was presented and ordered and
how he considered this book versus
others and i just had such a respect for
the thoughtfulness that went into course
design that was expressed just through
these few minutes
and i didn't know it at the time that
type of idea resonating with me might
lead to thinking curriculum development
was interesting but i think that
if anything i really just respect
teaching
and thoughtful teaching i've definitely
felt an awed by
people who have just had more teaching
experience than i have
and i think that it's a way to express
that respect for the discipline i don't
think it's an excitement about
frankly even computer science i have so
many different passions
i think it is really just sort of this
respect for thoughtful teaching
and yeah and i think also being able to
do it on a team of other people who
share that passion really helps so i'd
say that's the other thing i think if
you get locked alone
in a room to write curriculum it's very
different than if you're working
collaboratively but trying to bring a
vision together
yeah that makes sense how did you go
from
not having degrees in computer science
and not having degrees in education
to where you are now so how did you
iterate on your abilities over those
years
to get to the level of depth and
conversations you're able to have on
these subject areas like curriculum and
computer science
the easier answer there is going to be
for computer science which is i got a
master's degree in computer science
i'll quickly say that because i knew i
was so passionate about education
i took courses broadly with an idea that
i wanted to have a really
i didn't want to spread myself too thin
but i wanted to take courses and lots of
topics
especially because i was involved with
cs principles i had this very holistic
understanding of computer science and i
wanted to be able to
have a view at least of what the field
was like and i think what was cool about
this program at the university of
chicago is that while i was designed for
professionals
the school has a bit of a reputation for
being theoretical
and so i kind of got to split that
difference between the more theoretical
sides of computer science and the
professional sides of computer science
or the applied sides
so that's the first part of your
question going to a graduate program
i would say a little bit reading just
trying to keep up with the field that's
easier than the other part of your
question
i would say that a lot of my
understanding of pedagogy and curriculum
is through experience
and it's very applied i'm far from being
an expert on
what research there is in cs education i
try to keep up with
blogs i would go to conferences i would
talk to people but a lot of it really
was
working with people who had more
experience than i did and trying to
listen and learn from them
and a lot of it was talking directly
with teachers or visiting classrooms and
just sort of saying like what works
if i'm being totally honest i certainly
don't feel like an authority on
education at this point i definitely
feel like i can share what i know
from going through that learning process
but i would never say i know
what's best for learning it feels so it
feels so big
the computer science stuff despite the
field being so big and rapidly
developing i feel so much more
comfortable
claiming a small modicum of expertise
there yeah that really resonates when
i'm engaging with conversations
with our like pd facilitators at boot up
like several of them have decades worth
of experience in the classroom
like very well known and good at what
they do and when they ask a question
like i'll answer well
here's what we're doing and why we're
doing it based on like experience and
research
however here's like four or five more
other options that you could also do
that also resonate with like experience
and research but we're doing this one
because of a b and c
there's so many ways that you can do
education or pedagogy that there's
really
not one better or worse way to do it so
i understand
that like not wanting to claim that
expertise what you said really does
resonate which is that i think
in pd and one working with colleagues
clarifying the why
did feel really important to me and i
don't know if that's just because of
maybe that feeling of discomfort
is what i'm saying really correct and so
saying well at least here's why we're
doing it
was really important but i found in pd
you're designing curriculum
you're working with teachers who have to
bring things to the classroom they're
going to make choices
but if they at least know why you made
choices they can
pivot from there if something you made
doesn't work you should know that
but at least you can say i know why we
did this we communicated it to teachers
and so they can make decisions to adjust
from there as well
yeah when i did my student teaching i
was in an elementary
band in general music position and then
a high school position or split between
the two
times when i was in elementary school
the
music teacher would vocalize why he was
doing
what he was doing as he was in the
middle of teaching it to me
and so like he'd be in the middle of
like teaching a song to kids and like
turn to me i'm like blah blah blah
i'm doing this because of a b and c and
i'm like oh that makes sense and like
suddenly it wasn't just
modeling what he was doing but it was
understanding oh the reason why he's
doing this as opposed to these other
things is because
of what he just explained and that was
an invaluable experience
i'm wondering as two curriculum nerds
if we respond extra well to those sorts
of
we'll call them teacher moves my first
story was about exactly what you're
talking about i think everybody responds
well to knowing the why
but as you were talking and i was just
nodding like yep that works for me
pretty well
like if somebody tells me that you get a
lot of buy-in from me i do think that
that's a good practice in general but
i'm just reflecting is that something
that
make their way into the world of
curriculum really resonate with is that
why
yeah so i talked about this in the
interview with
kristen stevens martinez in teacher
education research there's this idea of
apprenticeship of observation
and so the idea is like even if you
don't get degrees in education
you are essentially being an
apprenticeship with teachers
you're going through your decade plus in
school you're learning how to teach
through it
but the thing that is missing the
crucial thing is you don't know why
they're making those decisions
so if people go and try and replicate it
like politicians like
oh well i had this teacher who did this
really great thing that worked really
well for me
they don't understand why they did that
and how the teacher may have shifted
things in different contexts so they try
and apply it without
having that understanding and it just
creates more problems than it should
i believe that i think it is true maybe
we have an early theme to this
discussion but i do think knowing why
is super important but it's also very
hard to communicate especially in text
developing curriculum you really want
teachers to know the why
not just the what yeah because you know
it's not going to go the way that you're
developing it
it's never going to look the way that
you have this picture in your head so
you need to empower the teacher with
kind of the ethos of the course as much
as the
step-by-step that you may have written
out you know do this do that
but if they don't understand why it's
going to be really hard to make
decisions on the ground
yeah i like that and connecting it to
like scholarship on
curriculum there's like these different
avenues or layers of curriculum
and one of them being the intended
curriculum and that's so like well i
really want the teachers to teach a b
and c
in this way but the top curriculum is
often different like
for boot up the resources that i create
like i want to go with rhizomatic
interest driven
you can pick any one of these 40
projects and work on it at your own pace
but then when teachers actually teach it
they might pick one of the project
everybody going at the same pace as
everybody else and like that's not at
all how i intend people to work on it
but that's just how it was taught so
it's weird like designing for
all use cases with it and knowing that
just because you intend for something
to happen is not going to happen unless
you clearly communicate the why behind
that
something that you just said really
reminds me of my
experience this year which is that i
spent the last two years leading up to
the school year
updating code.org cs principles
curriculum with a really intentional
focus on making it
more hands-on more collaborative take
advantage of that classroom space those
would have been phrases that the team i
was on was saying of course now in this
world of remote learning
it's very different you know when we
spent two years developing it so
team over there since i left i know
they've made modifications but i'm a
teals volunteer and if you don't know
what teals is it places volunteers in
high school classrooms along with
teachers and i'm a teals volunteer for
the course i wrote
i think the team is doing a great job
we're working really hard but it's so
funny seeing exactly what you were just
talking about the difference between how
the course was designed
then the realities on the ground change
because we're all virtual
things would have been implemented
different than i was imagining in my
head anyway and i always knew that but
seeing it in person or virtually is
pretty interesting yeah it's certainly
shifts some perspectives or provides new
perspectives on it i'm curious about
like one of the things that i really
like
discussing is like development or
evolution of ideas over time
or even just abilities i'm curious about
when you first began working in
education what was something that really
resonated with you that you
bought into but now you're like no i
don't buy into that anymore or i don't
do that anymore
this is a really good question i had a
relatively short time in the classroom
and so i think i
feel more comfortable answering this
about curriculum development
and i would say attention i don't know
that i'm going to give you a black and
white answer like it used to be this and
now it's that
right but attention that has been in my
mind for a long time is how to go about
the curriculum design process
a lot of people say in particular
understanding by design you should do
ubd
you know start backwards from your goals
determine how you're going to evaluate
them or assess them and then go and do
your lesson development
the group that i was originally a part
of i think tended a little bit more
towards
building stories which i wouldn't say is
exactly activity focused but it was more
let's build a story up through this
concept let's string things together in
a way that makes conceptual sense
and sometimes that would be at odds with
what i'll call
a more ubd style approach and
you might find gaps later and have to
staple them on to the story that you had
created
and i will say that i am still torn
on in practical reality which leads to a
curriculum that i'm more happy with
at the end which maybe is just a matter
of taste and not a matter of how things
work
so i'll fully admit that but i think
that i've built good
courses in both mindsets but i think
that at least in the world of curriculum
development ubd
is something that anybody who has spent
time in the weeds on it knows that it
never goes exactly the way that you
planned it it's a good framework to have
in the back your mind
essentially boiled down to does it lead
to i hate to say like fun curriculum but
like coherent curriculum or do you feel
more like you're checking off boxes
for what your goals were and it's maybe
it's taboo to say that in this weird
narrow field that we're in but at least
that's been my experience there's a
tension between those two i think it's
important to acknowledge it and that's
definitely like a
question that i've pulled one way or the
other on over the like
six years that i spent doing curriculum
development yeah i'm told the game to
talk about taboo stuff
so what do you think have you tried to
write in both ways does this resonate
with you
yeah it's difficult i have chosen an
approach to curriculum that has a lot of
compromises in it
it is not like the curriculum that i
write for boot up is not what i would
write for myself it has a bunch of stuff
in it that
quite frankly i don't care about and
the connections to standards and whatnot
honestly i don't care
like i just want kids to create
something that's interesting to them
and what standards they learn are the
standards that they learn now one of the
guiding things that kind of has informed
that this hasn't come out yet but
the chapter four discussion on
paolo freire's book pedagogy of the
oppressed
i would argue that the standards and
even like the backwards design model
is a form of epistemological oppression
on students
in that you are saying that certain ways
of knowing and doing and experience
education are the correct ways of doing
it and it is designed by the knower for
the unknowing
individual the student and that is
basically a form of oppression
so that being on one in the continuum of
a response
and having that in the back of my mind i
also know yeah but you need to create
something that kids
and teachers can use so there's that
conflict that goes on in my head in the
resources that i create
so yeah that's something that i'm
personally kind of struggling with
and always thinking through when i
create this stuff yeah but
how can we make it so that even if you
are using an understanding by design
approach where it's backwards design and
you
have these standards and whatnot is
there a way that you can design it
that still makes it so that kids can
express themselves
and be creative with it and are not
limited to a narrow scope of
understanding
within that approach that's fascinating
i appreciate you saying that
and i think it speaks to something i've
felt and
i was going to add i spent a lot of my
time working on cs principles in
particular which is a
college board ap course and so there's a
high stakes test at the end there's like
a very robust framework
so high stakes test they have to submit
a project with very specific
requirements
but i was involved through the early
life of that course
not as something that was in development
that happened for a decade before i
showed up
but i was there for like the early
implementation of this course
actually in the classroom and i think
there is this tension just even in the
spirit of that course between
this bold vision of what computer
science could be with the fact that
kind of underlying this gamble that i
think the whole cs education community
made was
scaling out computer science broadening
access we're going to
partner with the college board we're
going to partner with an ap program
and i think that it speaks to exactly
the tension you're talking about and i
think maybe was part of my tension as a
curriculum developer was
i knew i had to hit these standards i
knew that the teachers that i was
supporting
really were going to be held to account
for them and maybe the reason that they
were able to offer this course at all
was
because they existed yeah and that's
something that
i have the privilege of the resources
i'm designing i don't have to worry
about those high-stakes standards
so i can focus on making things
interesting rather than making sure
oh i introduced variables at the correct
time or conditionals at the correct time
whatever
yeah and then one of the other things
that has really heavily influenced my
own approach
is again i think that like standards can
be
a form of oppression when you are
forcing everybody to learn only one
way of understanding and engaging with
computer science
what i tend to prefer is individualized
expertise and cultivating that
rather than having it so that everybody
knows the same thing so like if
computer science constantly talks about
jobs jobs jobs it's all about career and
what you can do with it okay well if a
bunch of people are applying for a job
and they all have the exact same
understanding who's going to stand out
it's going to be the person who doesn't
have that same understanding and can
bring something new to the table they're
likely the one who's going to be hired
over everybody else who knows the same
standards and whatnot
so for me like if we're going to treat
teachers as professionals
and have their own expertise and treat
the communities that we
serve like the students as having their
own expertise then we need to cultivate
the expertise
among kids and adults and make it so
that they can express themselves through
that
but having like a unified set of
standards makes that a little bit more
difficult to do
not impossible but it at least guides
well these are the things that we
consider to be
worth knowing whereas the things that
are not considered standards are things
that are
unsaid as not being as valuable for
understanding
but that's my little standard rant and i
know we could go deeper on it
and i think it's worth acknowledging
that clarifying what we think
is important at least going through the
exercise
is valuable in some ways i think
clarifying what is the field
so the difference between what's in the
csa course
and what's in csp is really different
there's all these new topics that are
being included and i could make an
argument that there is a different
vision for what
computer science could look like in that
course and so i think that the process
of trying to
go through that i will say that that
feels like an improvement
i don't know if it's still built on a
shaky foundation
i'll give an example let's even go
beyond standards assessment
you can have the standards and then if
only half of them are being assessed
those are secretly the only standards
that matter even within that so you have
a subset of knowledge that is
deemed worthy of a standard and then
there's a smaller subset that's actually
deemed worthy of assessment
and in a national scale that will lead
to
i think eventually that's where gravity
is pulling and if things aren't pushing
away
against gravity then yes i do really
think that there are some
undesirable patterns that arise i'll
give a really concrete example i don't
know that i blame anybody for this
i want to be careful i think there are a
lot of people trying very hard in
computer science education but a very
concrete example that i think is true
in cs principles the way that the
framework
talked about data which is a field that
if you remember i used to be an
economist i had like a data background
the way they talked about data and the
way they assessed it felt really
different
and then the amount that it showed up on
the test
was even narrower the vision for data
that was in the standards versus what
really actually got taught or
eventually because teachers became wise
to this pattern
really really different and i think that
maybe something that could play out and
we'll have to see especially because
it's such a strange year but the explore
pt no longer being part of your grade it
is a curricular requirement for
cs principles now but because it is no
longer submitted to the college board
and part of your final score my
prediction is we'll see fewer classrooms
doing that activity even if it's in
curriculums even if it's
deemed to be important so this is me
kind of going back and forth on your
statement but i'm agreeing with you i
think that like some things are deemed
worthy of
being the standards at all and then if
they're not assessed
i think that it's naive to think that
teachers will become wise to that
there's a lot of pressures on them right
districts will districts will become
wise
well and how specific the wording is of
the standards one of the things that
we got into a discussion about when i
was helping with the wyoming standards
is
i wasn't a fan of the
it was described as represent data
visually like that was one of the
standards from csta something along
those lines
and my argument was there are many ways
that you can represent data and it
doesn't just have to be visually so for
example there's sonification
where you can represent data through
sound so why
do we need to say represent data
visually when we can just say
represent data through visuals sound
whatever
and broadening it so that way it wasn't
just now a narrow slice of how you can
represent something so that's something
that
some people might think is thinking a
bit too much about it but the
type of wording that you use narrows
down the types of engagement
and then like you're saying with the
assessments if that's not on the
assessment then all right i don't need
to teach it
my sort of cynical but hopefully joking
answer is if there's not a question
about sonic representation of data on
the test jared
people aren't going to do that right
maybe some will and i think you and i
probably would in our own classrooms
because we'd say this is cool this is
interesting important or maybe from an
accessibility standpoint because i have
seen some really interesting work for
blind or visually impaired students like
how can we use sonification
to still allow people to interact with
data in a way that
they can understand patterns but yeah i
think there's a very real tendency that
if it's not on the test
it slowly may fizzle as you mentioned
i think that's something i experienced a
lot in the land of ap
and preparing ap courses yeah which
they have their place and their benefits
like i benefited from
entering college as a sophomore because
of the dual enrollment and ap courses
that i took so like
that helped me out it set me up for
certain advantages
so i was able to focus on music specific
courses and then
take other classes outside of my
discipline because i had
open elective time to do that and that
really benefited me
i'm curious like looking instead of
broadly
looking more at individual experiences
what comes to mind when you think of
what an engaging learning experience
looks like or sounds like
i would talk about this in pd that the
classroom we were writing for had a
little bit of a low
rumble of noise so not chaos
not things flying through the air though
there are some lessons where things are
moving around and there's manipulatives
but there's a low rumble of
collaboration between students
and between students and their teacher
and that is something that
we really tried to invest in for the
most recent update that we were working
on for cs principles
in particular for our most recent update
for cs principles
we were trying to take on a really big
challenge which was
programming pedagogy and how do our
classrooms look
what do those learning experiences look
like and when we wrote the first
version of cs principles
at code.org we were really in a tough
spot because we knew that
we were asking so much of teachers
already we didn't want them to have to
lecture we wanted it to be these
collaborative experiences but how do you
support that how do you support that at
scale
and so i would say that people who have
interacted with the code.org platform
you know there's a lot of bubbles
some of those lessons have too many the
old ones had way too many bubbles and
you would kind of slowly but surely see
students would get to different points
in the course because they could work
independently
and the teacher might not know where
they were at and
collaboration maybe would happen but it
would be hard to facilitate exactly and
so it just started to feel like
the types of classroom community that we
wanted to develop or sort of that
cohesive sense that we're moving through
this learning process together
weren't there and so i'd say that it was
a hard balance because i think
a lot of students i think did benefit
from moving individually through
progressions and being able to move at a
pace that worked for them and the
teacher could be a facilitator to that
learning or a support or more like a
guide
but the updates we made we were adding
more hands-on activities
we were adding more discussions where
students would read code
talk about it i think the collaborative
aspect of it
is the ideal that we had in our head it
doesn't mean that there aren't moments
when you're working on puzzles or
sitting down and chewing on a problem on
your own or maybe with a partner
but we really were envisioning that this
more like a learning journey you go on
with a class
that being one of the most valuable
assets you have in the classroom
i would say that that's part of the
vision and i just talked a lot about
programming
early courses that we developed so many
of them don't start with programming
they start with digital information we
build like widgets that let kids explore
ideas do
invent concepts on their own discover
the way things work try things out
there's this
awesome tool that we have called the
internet simulator where students are
forced to communicate with one another
using like a bit sending device that
slowly builds up the layers of the
internet so
they get you know they add like ip
addresses and then they add like sort of
tcp and then they add http and there's
this wonderful sequence and videos that
go along with it i think it's a little
tricky to implement but
the vision really is sort of this
combination of creating
and collaborating which i know are words
that get used so much in our field but
how do you actually make that happen at
scale was the question that haunted me
let's say but it's tough it's really
tough to do when it's not your classroom
or even your district
so you mentioned learning at scale and
for anybody who just happens to not
be familiar with it code.org curriculum
is used around the world
so you're getting feedback and data
points from
everywhere just implementation and so
many different contexts and whatnot
you mentioned the educational journey
i'm wondering what about the journey of
curriculum over time so for example the
cs principles course
how did that develop over time through
the different feedback and
experiences that teachers and students
were having around the world
so i would say that there are probably
three phases of that course that i can
speak to
and the first one was everything that
went into the original piloting of it
up through maybe the first year of
running it as a
ap course then there was a set of i'll
call them
heavily targeted tweaks to turn it into
something that a well-established system
and then
the ap framework got updated and so we
went through a major overhaul
so three phases phase one was really
heavily influenced by
the experiences of the teachers who were
part of the different writing teams so
there were a few
different iterations but i would say in
total it ended up being
six to seven people getting in a room
together talking about their vision for
the course
and then piloting with teachers around
the country and
part of that meant that pd and
curriculum were always really tightly
coupled
and so we're developing the course but
we're also really thinking about how do
we
share through pd the vision for how this
course
is supposed to be taught it's that why
that we were talking about this first
phase also really parallels the early
csp framework which
is very aspirational it's recently
gotten updated the first version
is very aspirational in the vision of cs
classrooms and
field of cs that it describes it's more
of a web
of concepts that are all intersecting
which i think
reflects the reality of knowledge in
general it usually doesn't fit into
these neat buckets
but sometimes it's hard to do coherent
curriculum development around it because
little
standards are all reaching out to one
another and things are not exactly where
you thought they would be
so i would say that there was a lot of
creative freedom and i would say because
there was this small group that
was involved that group got to express a
lot of creative freedom people were just
really excited about the
interest that computer science education
was getting and i didn't realize this
because i was fairly new but it was more
than it had been getting for some time i
think we were seeing change it felt like
we were part of that change it felt like
the focus on
broadening what the field looked like
broadly who was part of it meant that we
had the power to envision
creative lesson types creative unit
types creative
we're growing really hard on what we
consider like discovery based learning
or we'd say like inquiry based learning
really focused on that in that first
phase i would say that the second phase
was really defined by
the realities of running an ap class at
a national scale so we developed
the pt guides the performance task
guides because people basically realize
that these performance tasks and if
you're unaware there are two projects
students work on them during class time
they got 20 combined hours of class time
to work on a
research project and a programming
project and they're tough
i think this was an experiment for the
college board as well some of our
updates were focused on
updating our assessments after that
first phase was so focused on what is
this aspirational classroom environment
what are these
pedagogies that we want to introduce
saying hey if we want this program to
continue to
operate we're going to need to make sure
that we support teachers in terms of
just running assessments preparing
people for the pts
i want to say like fundamentals because
that's not exactly right i hope pedagogy
is the fundamentals but
that was definitely a phase was just
realizing like we need to take care of
this part of
our product our teachers and our
classroom experiences too and then the
third phase was this major update and i
think we had a chance to be
informed from previous experiences
and there were some targeted tweaks we
made across the board so we got to
develop some really cool new
tools i was really proud that we
implemented some
work from researchers actually like in
the field of cs education
and i would say the most important part
of it was trying to take another crack
at
programming pedagogy and do some of what
we were talking about before
trying to make our classroom activities
less like uh
independent study go through the bubbles
every now and then talk to your teacher
your classmate and more like this shared
classroom experience but again
doing that at scale doing that with
teachers who might not feel comfortable
around programming them i know they
don't feel comfortable around
programming themselves
so how do we try to empower them to
and the worst case like put the kids on
code.org and come back in an hour and
instead say i can do this
i can run a classroom that looks more
like what we want it's really hard to
say whether or not we accomplished that
because i think in piloting we found it
went pretty well but
it was designed to go live this year a
lot of it we had to keep secret because
of
the changes to the test not being public
yet and
yeah this was going to be the year we
found out how it went in the classrooms
around the country and of course it was
designed to be in person and so i think
in the virtual world we'll see some of
it the data for so many educational
initiatives this year is going to be a
little bit odd
yeah to say the least might not be
representative i assume that we will see
more in-person schooling in the future
and we may
learn more accurately how this course
actually serves classrooms at scale at
that point
i'm curious when considering how to
serve classrooms at scale
how do you account for something like
culturally responsive
or culturally relevant curriculum and
pedagogy when
culture is ill-defined so it's literally
anywhere
in terms of where it's being implemented
around the world so like when i was
designing lesson plans
for kids in my school i had different
factors to consider for that than when
i'm in designing something that i know
is being used around the world
so what did you do for that particular
area
well jared i came here because i thought
you were going to know the answer that
question
and that's the big question easiest
answer first
don't try to be funny with something
that i discovered
pretty quickly sounds like there's a
story behind that
not exactly but i think when i was
talking about the phases of
writing i think early in the course it
really felt like the personalities of
the individual writers like i could read
a lesson and know who wrote it
i think humor is maybe an example of
something that is probably not going to
translate so i don't think
that doesn't mean don't be fun or like
try to make it
have a little bit of a shimmer of whimsy
or
excitement or something like that yeah
but i think
that's my easiest first answer don't try
to be funny if you're like this will be
funny
i don't think it will be certainly not
for everybody but i think
beyond that a really tough thing for me
and i think for a lot of people is just
remembering that once you enter this
field of writing at scale
it may not help that much to have spent
you know
five years 10 years 15 years with one
group of students
because you're writing for such a
breadth of people and i think you really
have to open yourself up to
feedback and piloting and yeah it's
disorienting practice you can't always
be there so i would try to visit
classrooms i live in seattle i used to
live in chicago
it was a little harder to find
classrooms here well and it was a little
harder to find classrooms that weren't
at first at least that weren't i'll call
it privileged or wealthy schools
basically i worked in one of the schools
everyone's fantastic but it wasn't who
we were targeting
and i think knowing you really need to
be getting feedback
from teachers and students in classrooms
that the ones you're saying you actually
want to target
if you're saying you want to support
black students are there black students
in your pilot classrooms and what is the
feedback you're getting from them
and i give that just by way of example
i'm being like very narrow sometimes you
use terms like underrepresented
minorities or whatever
you see they think it gets back to your
why like this our goal is we want to do
you need to make sure that's part of
your
piloting did you get your question of
how do you design culturally responsive
curriculum at scale
i think it's a combination of piloting
pushing yourself really hard about what
your assumptions are
over and over and over again and being
very open to hearing that they're
wrong and then i would say that i do
think there is a little bit of a tension
with
writing for hundreds of thousands of
people and the concept of culturally
responsive curriculum design
i don't want to say that to give
curriculum writers everywhere free pass
but i think what it does mean like oh
you don't have to do it like
write for yourself i don't think that's
the point it's not just a burden we got
in this field because we want to do it
it may not make sense
i don't want to make people do things
that don't make sense so i think
empowering teachers to understand where
the space is
to make curriculum culturally responsive
and
explaining to them how they might do
that or creating spaces for them to talk
about how they're doing that
is important i think it is possible but
i am a little bit suspicious as to
whether a class that is taught by a
teacher
can be culturally responsive if that is
not a priority of the teacher
there were things we did we really tried
to be intentional who was in videos
who was in examples who do we feature
try to spread that out
but i still think the classrooms where i
think it landed
it was because the teacher thought this
is a priority and i think i'm going to
try to
call out those parts of the curriculum
emphasize them and
make sure this is a part of the
experience in my room so if you were to
be able to wave a magic wand and get it
so that like new to cs teachers
understood something what would you wish
they understood or
knew more about we really focused and i
think this was the right focus
on a combination of pedagogy and equity
and so i would say
i do believe that computer science is
something that every student
should learn and i have at times
wondered about that if i'm being honest
sometimes there's so many other
priorities there's so many things and so
i say why what is the lie but i really
do believe it
and i think that the question for
teachers is what is that actually going
to look like in their school
and in their classroom and i think that
the fastest route there
typically is pedagogy and classroom
environment
and we would really emphasize what is
that going to look like
and that is in part because we knew that
we designed materials to help
a classroom designed in that way so we
could take care of relatively more of
the content support
because of the way that we design
materials and i think that part of that
means
assuming you've built a program in that
way
freeing up teachers from a mindset of
having to be the experts
on everything i think there's a ton of
pressure to be the expert when you're a
teacher
and so i think moving that mindset
and often we would accomplish that in pd
by showing them what that might look
like running lessons talking through
what was that experience like
having them take the role of being the
learner i saw some pretty powerful
experiences that way
so i would say that was the ultimate
goal of kind of the combination of our
pd and curriculum
for csp and cs discoveries which i
worked on as well was
you don't have to be the expert we have
this equity goal we have this vision
that all students should learn computer
science
pedagogy and classroom environment
actually may be more important than
other considerations so how do we
empower teachers in that way and i think
that's a huge mindset shift for a lot of
teachers and i sometimes have to remind
myself
you know if you say that every day for
years and a new teacher walks in the
room reminding yourself like this
teacher might still be in that
you know i need to lecture about the
content on an expert in mindset
right you know because you've said so
many times like you don't need to do
that it's okay and realizing like
structural change like this it takes a
long time
generations i think so i mean going back
to the
apprenticeship of observation like what
people
seen modeled for potentially i don't
know
day one of a pd which one are they more
likely to go with
probably the thing that they see modeled
one way for their entire tenure in the
classroom and whatnot
it has a huge impact and i agree with
you like one of the things we focus on
with boot up is pedagogy like
we could teach you how to use scratch in
a day and you know the majority of the
ins and outs but it's not just how you
use it it's the ways that you teach it
and introduce things
and the approaches from a pedagogical
standpoint that really have a huge
impact on
whether or not kids will actually be
creative with the tools that you're
teaching them how to use
one of the things you mentioned earlier
was aligning the
pd with the curriculum i'm curious if
the curriculum
is evolving how do you ensure that the
pd is in
alignment with it and complements the
curriculum
usually the way that we would accomplish
this is those teams coordinate pretty
closely throughout the process of
curriculum development
i think if you have two teams let me
give that example let's say you work
somewhere there's a curriculum team and
a professional learning team or
professional development team it's
really important for those teams to be
really clear on
what the high level vision or goal is
for moving forward
i think if the curriculum comes off the
line it's a surprise and it's totally
different it's not just the problem that
the pd might look different but i think
that that's a challenge especially if
we've been telling people
this one thing's important and we're
going to start maybe either shifting or
updating
in terms of how you accomplish that some
of what we were doing
a lot of people moved back and forth
between teams
some people had been facilitators for
years when then they became curriculum
developers i
sort of had a path like that and so i
think that
in some instances though not all
instances i think they were more like a
tribal understanding a shared vision
and in other instances it did mean being
really explicit about
these are the goals for the next six
months these are the goals for the next
year here's how we're going to do them
do teams need to be having conversations
with one another make sure that we stay
in sync
it goes both ways basically curriculum
could do something and then professional
learning
doesn't line up with it anymore it
doesn't really make sense with the
courses it's been written but i've seen
the other where we say
there's a practice we really want to
introduce in classrooms it's not
really there in curriculum to the degree
we'd want it to be but maybe we can fake
it with a pl
session focused on that and but we could
emphasize it in pl
and i don't think there's anything wrong
with saying we're going to emphasize it
but you sort of have this feeling in
your stomach like
if we really really valued it it would
show up in all the lessons or at least
some of them there you know more
frequently and i think that
bring that up more as an example of like
where this can go awry
is if you're say too much like oh we'll
just fix it with pd or
it'll just be in the curriculum and it's
not emphasized in pl i think both of
those create issues
so it really does take close
collaboration if you want to be happy in
the long run
and if you don't want to confuse
teachers you tell them something in pd
and they don't see it in the course it's
going to be strange if you
put something in the course and you
never talk about it it might not get
used or
the mystery so yeah yeah that makes
sense definitely having to have that
collaboration
when i took over in my previous role as
director of curriculum and professional
development like
the reason why it was a combined
position is because we were initially
looking at me just continuing to do the
curriculum
and then hiring somebody else to do the
pd and what we realized is
it make a lot more sense if i was kind
of overseeing both
then there was that continuity between
the two because i wrote all the lesson
plans i know the professional
development is going to align with that
because
i know the lesson plans since i wrote
every word of it it does help
but you can't always do that forever now
we're talking more about like how do you
run teams it's less about you know teams
for anything like if it's one person
doing something
it's easier to keep things coherent and
it definitely has
stretched and not in a negative way but
it's stretched teams i've been on if you
need to start broadening that vision out
so yeah it's easy to say like
collaboration and like everybody has to
collaborate but i think
writing down what your goals are saying
what it would look like to actually
do them and even little things we did
like we had somebody on our professional
learning team
essentially managing the pilot and we
would attend those calls and so we're
all kind of hearing the same feedback
together but
you could imagine having the curriculum
team running that for example and saying
the curriculum is getting all the
knowledge about how things are actually
going the curriculum is the team that's
sort of like driving the development of
the product
and then they'll just drop it off at the
end of the day and say here's the
curriculum
write pd for it you're not going to be
happy with the results there and it
really puts your professional learning
team in tough spot because
they've got to wait until you're done to
get started so yeah
one of the areas that you mentioned was
developing widgets that's an area that
i'm not familiar with what have you
learned
while developing these like tools and
platforms that teachers and students
have
used in the classroom settings yes i
have a lot of thoughts on widgets
especially
i think when i visit classrooms for
people who don't know
widgets are part of some of our
code or courses there's a lot of them in
cs principles they're little tools that
let you play with a concept
a fairly popular one i was just using it
today with students is the pixelation
widget you like type zeros and ones to
actually draw
images on a screen they translate them
into the pixels of the screen so
there's gonna be clear this was not my
idea most of these i didn't come up with
it's very cool
but i have been like in the room when
we're talking about building and
developing them
part of it is that spirit of playing
with ideas letting students come to
their own understanding of how things
work
and a lot of times you know on pd we
would say if there's a widget and a
lesson
get out of the way teachers like you
have a warm-up prompt you have a bell
ringer
you know do now whatever you call it
sure spend a couple minutes
great here's what we're going to do
today but then we really wanted to get
students
interacting with concepts themselves
because
both for engagement and for their
understanding we thought that these
tools would allow them
to do that so we had other ones for
cryptography
the internet simulator i was talking
about before we sometimes talked about
like a
widget that grew up and became its own
tool or something but the same core idea
you're playing with
you're getting hands-on with a concept
and getting to experience for yourself
how things work and deepening your
understanding in that way
and i would say that another way it's
been presented to me a lot of times we
talk in computer science about like
unplugged activities
sometimes those unplugged activities
have rules and if you don't enforce the
rules
you don't see the concept that's being
displayed so sometimes these widgets
were just a way to
enforce the rules and maybe make it a
little more fun a little more
professional looking
but of what might have otherwise been
unplugged activities
sort of the same spirit can i play
around with the idea and understand
the relationships that are trying to be
demonstrated so
recently you've shifted over to working
with microsoft and so
you have this experience working with
professionals within
the cs community within the field how
has that experience kind of
informed like by reinforcing
or changed your understanding of the
k-12
and k-higher education cs pipeline
that's a great question
and to clarify yes i am at microsoft and
i'm doing
onboarding and continuous learning for
software engineers
and i think that right away i
immediately had a lot of thoughts most
of my career in
computer science education has been k-12
and i think
some people they studied it in college
you know they had jobs and they switched
out and i never really was in that
i'll call it pipeline and so i think i
have a really clear view
on one reason why we want people to take
computer science courses
because we want them to study in college
and then we want them to either go
become
you know researchers or we want them to
go get jobs and there are these jobs
that pay six figures and they sort of
set you up for this
this idealized lifestyle you have a
stable career you make certain amount of
money you get to do something kind of
interesting
so i would say that one thing that's
just been interesting for me is i had
never seen that part of the
pipeline quite in this way one thing i
really hadn't experienced
and hadn't thought about it as much is
internships
and how important they are for landing
professional opportunities when we
talked in k12 about
creating opportunities and i run a cs
principles course
i didn't really have an appreciation for
the fact that maybe
were
in an internship that very likely could
just be a stepping stone to a career
i don't know if i had a sense for that
how close in time those two things were
i would say that there's a really
interesting tension that
is not new at microsoft but so many
people talk about how the things that
you learn
in college may not be particularly
relevant for what you do as a
professional in the tech world
it's not even a dirty secret at this
point
it's sort of like i think if anybody's
paying attention in this field it's just
sort of something that i think people
say
yeah i think many people who are tech
professionals
engineers in particular yes those
courses that they took in the university
setting matter
but i think so much more is about a
different set of skills
and that's something that i've been
thinking about a little bit which is how
do you figure stuff out
you know when you're working in a large
company there's probably a huge system
that you're interacting with
and so you're never going to know the
whole thing how do you learn the skills
of
navigating a system where you're not
going to see it all it's not this little
project you're collaborating with lots
of people
many of whom you'll never meet so how do
you find experts how do you figure out
how things work
i figure out how to be helpful here
vibing on my ability to bring that
perspective i think from the world of
education where
when i was helping develop a middle
school course it really helped wide my
eyes to really emphasizing process
like clarifying process and skills as
opposed to like concepts
it's a different context but i see those
opportunities
in order to help people because i don't
think it's a course called like
compilers too
or the technical component so much of it
really does seem to be about
figuring out how to find information
unravel the way a system works or find
the right contact i think some of it
honestly
especially remotely it's just how do you
maintain
i think part of any large engineering
system is people it's relationships
and and certainly the knowledge is
contained in people it's not in the code
it's not the documentation
it's in people those are at least a
couple areas where
i feel like things are cross-pollinating
i think
my third and final one is tech companies
are thinking
very hard about at least the ones that i
observe are thinking really hard about
the diversity of their staff in much the
same way that i see
k-12 and i think to some degree at some
places universities thinking about it
i don't want to disparage universities i
definitely see like a very focused force
in k-12
i think universities have this really
hard problem right now i don't have
space in classes
i see the pressures in the other
direction so
yeah i can't help but think about those
diversity equity inclusion there's a
million words for it but
it's a field that remains fairly
monolithic in terms of gender
though it's getting a little better and
racially and i think these are things
that we need to be able to talk about
urgently and comfortably but i feel like
i see the same problem talked about
across the pipeline
as well i see the same challenges if
anything i do feel like
schools and teachers that i worked with
at code.org maybe people like you in the
fields like there's a broader
willingness and understanding that kind
of get to the core of the issues
quickly i see them working on the same
problems
i can't help but think about the whole
pipeline that led up to it as well
do you have any recommendations for
educators to kind of assist with
that pipeline in terms of the equity and
inclusion
yes i think some awareness of what it
looks like
for k-12 educators if this is a goal
that they have for their students and i
think some of them
absolutely should i want to be clear i
don't think everybody should be a
software engineer i don't think
everybody
they get a good crack at it they like it
they don't like it but
i think an awareness of what those
opportunities look
like in the university setting in the
professional setting
and i don't think it's just internships
but certainly that's a part of it
i think understanding how to maybe just
help clarify that pipeline
for students especially like a cs
principal student i think is a perfect
example
and saying you're about to leave maybe
you're really excited about this yeah
i'm here in seattle i i
super competitive to get into the
computer science major at the university
of washington
probably lots of places however if you
went and got a degree if you think you
want to do this and you study it at any
other university you'll probably get a
very good
education you just might not get it from
one of the top
five or ten departments in the country
or something like that and i'm around
people who feel pressure to do that kind
of thing
i think understanding the hurdles to get
to that
tech job and how professional experience
is probably important
some amount of navigating a enrollment
crisis
at the university level i think that
that could be useful information to give
people if they say this is my dream
because i think they could have the
dream
i guess is what i'm saying if a student
loves that computer science course and
they want to do it i think they could
have it
but the hurdles look really different
than they do in high school and so even
just having somebody who's like an
advocate at the high school level to
share that i do think that that could be
helpful and just a source of
encouragement because i think it can be
intimidating at times and maybe a little
bit impersonal
so yeah i would offer that i think
there's still things you can do after
students graduate from high school
to help with that part of the pipeline
yeah that podcast episode that i
mentioned earlier about the
chapter four of pedagogy of the
oppressed a
discuss how it's interesting
what is and is not discussed in terms of
representation diversity inclusion and
whatnot so as an example in a lot of
tech fields stem
cs there's a huge discussion on race and
gender
but what's missing from that discussion
one is like non-binary individuals like
myself like aren't even included in a
lot of those organizations but two
we don't talk about the issues in the
elementary space
so being a former elementary teacher the
stats are in the us at least like over
so why is it that we talk about like
those huge disparities
in some fields but we don't talk about
it in other fields
and to me it's just weird jared i have a
weird relationship with the field of
computer science
in general and in part i think it's
because i think
the reason we care is because we realize
how much social power
is connected to the field of computer
science right now or at least for me
an economic power frankly and maybe even
just social
like influence are we all interacting
with one another right now especially
this year
i always say i think computers are
pretty cool i also play music
i like to run i like to hike i like to
do so many things
and some people i think really really
love computer science and they want to
share like
this top love of their life with other
people and i get that
but i don't expect that to be true for
everybody we're not all the same
yeah my own reflections on it there is a
serious concentration of
power and wealth in this field and i
think it's naive to pretend that that
doesn't impact the lives that our
students are going to live
and so i think that is not like here's
why you know so you're wrong about
bringing that up and i think there's
lots of types of diversity
that are important and matter and i
think it's also cool
to say money and social power affect the
way that many people live their lives
whether it is the way that they're
making money or the way that their
products impact the world
and technology is having a massive
impact
on our society and you know in the city
that i live in seattle i think it's
having a massive impact on the
literally the landscape what does the
place look like who lives here what do
the buildings look like
and that may not be true everywhere but
i think that a little bit
it does come down to power and i
sometimes i'm like am i suiting kids up
for battle
you know like an economic landscape that
has some conflicts built under at the
very least
i don't think that the barriers that
exist to being able to participate in
that
and i also don't think that every
student needs to spend time doing
computer science if they can find
another way to
make their way through life if that
makes sense it's an opportunity but
i don't think everyone will love
computer science just like i don't think
everyone will love any subject but i
think there's opportunities and i think
it is
i think power i don't know any other
word to call it i think
power is connected with tech right now
it is part of the
fascination with it as well as the field
yeah that makes sense
given that this is 2020 and life has
been interesting to say the least
and then also take into account the fact
that many educators and people in
education
tend to leave within three to five years
of being in the field
how have you over time and in this year
in particular kind of
stayed off that burnout or that
frustration that is inherent with the
field i think this
is a challenge for educators no matter
what
and my initial answer is community i
felt
so much solace with people frankly like
you
i think with collaborators at code.org
and just
feeling like there's somebody else who
understands
sometimes it's just the pressure
especially the contrast between the
vision you have for how
you want things to be and how things are
so sometimes i get tired because i have
a lot to
do be like i gotta make an activity
guide then a vocab list and then a
video script and then whatever but i
think it was more exhausting if it felt
like my aspirations for
you know what we wanted to achieve for
students or you do think systemically
you think big it can sometimes feel
overwhelming like are we going to get
there
so i was going to say that i think
community helps i think
something i'm finding this year i'm
volunteering at teals
you and i are doing a project at csta
and i think
i feel reinvigorated picking things that
put me in touch with individuals again
and making it specific
and i think having about 50 kids and
working with them and they won't turn on
their cameras but it's okay because i'm
slowly getting to know everybody and i
think they're getting to know me
i'm excited i want to do it and i do
think i reached a point
as a curriculum developer where i said i
don't know if i can write
another lesson right now about
introductory computer science topics or
at least not this year
i don't know if i can do it and part of
that i think is
you know when you've written a few
hundred of them
right i don't know if i have anything to
say anymore you know or maybe i need to
do something else but i think that
people will say things all the time like
give yourself grace
or take a break or find a community but
i've really i don't know
they're doing yoga i often was the
people would say like do yoga and i'd
say
what are you talking about like this is
just papering over like an unsustainable
other
circumstance education is not going to
get fixed by me doing yoga
right and if i give myself grace that's
not going to write that activity guide
[Laughter]
right you know or i could even say the
words but i don't know if i could feel
them
so maybe for people who think like me
like go do some stretches if i were
going to summarize
community focusing on specifics and the
big picture can sometimes be
overwhelming so saying i'm working with
these 50 kids and i'm trusting that
it'll influence the work i do
and then i'd say if you're like me and
people have said things about
burnout and they say things like give
yourself grace or like do some yoga or
like set up a schedule or whatever
it's easy to ignore and i think i
actually did
if i'm being honest i don't want to
pretend to be an expert at this i think
if i were to be truly honest i think i
hit
a tough spot earlier this year i think a
lot of educators did that feeling of
man this vision we had is falling apart
and so i think
leaning back towards just sort of like
the
things people often say to you but like
give it a shot
all right what do you do does any of
that resonate with you oh definitely
like a plus one to yoga
for sure when i first went in to see a
therapist this was when i was like
at the point where i was either going to
commit suicide or do something
to get better and so i decided okay i
might as well give therapy a shot see if
there are things that i haven't tried
that could help and one of the things
that she recommended was doing yoga and
i ended up doing it
twice a day hour in the morning hour in
the evening and
like between that and then like working
on breathing some more mindfulness
stuff like it really helped me to just
chill out and actually take time for
myself to just
breathe and be as opposed to like myself
being a
go go 24 7 if i didn't have to sleep i
wouldn't
kind of a thing it really helped out so
that was a big thing and then i
eventually found just
getting consistent sleep was a big thing
for me eating healthier
i started learning more about nutrition
and diet and eventually
became vegan over time just like by
learning more about that
exercising every day like all these
little things that i do
that make me seem regimented in terms of
like my diet and my lifestyle like
all of that is about trying to not be
depressed and not have those suicidal
thoughts
and like it helped me to get off the
antidepressants that i was on
they were having all these like adverse
side effects and whatnot that i was like
okay
it's making so i don't want to kill
myself but i have all these other things
that i now have to worry about so what
can i do to
make it so i don't have to be on
antidepressants and i'm not depressed
if that makes sense yeah it really does
i was curious your thoughts on whether
cs education in particular demands some
of that go go go
i wonder a little bit if like the
current moment we're in for the field
and i'm sort of saying this because i
imagine a lot of the listeners to this
podcast
are watching the people on twitter
they're going to the conferences they
realize that's such an important moment
but i think that may contribute to the
problem you're asking about
and i think it also attracts people who
want to make an impact it is something
i've been reflecting on
but i'm curious your thoughts on it like
do you think there's something
it's true for all of education i think
in many ways but do you think
specifically just the moment we're in
for cs education like is that is there
an additional layer of pressure right
now
certainly and especially with all the
remote learning but even before
covid was a thing like programming in
particular
software development you could learn a
language and then in five years that
language is obsolete like nobody uses it
anymore so you're just constantly having
to learn new things
and just everything that you knew the
week prior okay now
there's this new way to do it or this
better way to do it and on one hand
that's great
because it's like if you want to learn
cool tech cs like
this is a field for you i happen to
thrive in that environment
but that being said it can also be
overwhelming if you don't take a break
from it so one of the things that i've
been having to remind myself is like
rest is to the mind as sharpening is to
the axe like you have to take
a break from something and i say this to
somebody who literally taught seven days
a week
i teach a full-time gig during the day i
teach part-time at night and then i
teach
all day saturday and sunday like private
lessons or drumline and things like that
so
having done that and experienced it i
also see the value in taking
a break from it so that when you come
back to it you can have a clear and
focused mind to be able to focus on that
learning and whatnot
yeah i think it's important i don't
expect the dream vision of work
that i think maybe my generation in
particular was sold but sort of just
like yo if you love your work you'll
never work a day in your life and like
that's not true like
you're gonna work a lot of days of your
life right but there should be some core
excitement and i think if you feel like
it's getting dulled i like the metaphor
of a dull acts like
and not everybody has the freedom to
make choices to
step away or recharge or something like
that that definitely resonates for me i
told you i really appreciated you doing
a show like this because i think a lot
of passionate educators
are feeling really deflated this year
yeah
the one thing i was going to say about
that i actually see it my new role as
well
i think letting go of how it used to be
is so important right now and i'm
actually being in a new space is giving
me the ability to see that
which is that if you knew how you wanted
it to be
or how it used to be right now hurts
because it's not like that
that can be a needless distractor from
how good could we make it
given the realities and i don't say that
to be naive
i i know there's a lot of challenges but
i do think that there's this extra layer
of
kind of like mourning every time
something doesn't look the way it did
pre-covered
and i want to validate that's real
and then also say if we can put it aside
and say like all right here's the new
reality how good could we make it
i think there's space to rediscover that
motivation
and excitement i don't say this to foot
like extra pressure but if you're aiming
to help people
and that's i think what motivates a lot
help them learn help them teach whatever
it happens to be
i think the morning process or the
sadness is real you want to make sure
you're listening to people when they're
talking but if you can kind of bring a
more excited
or a calm version of yourself to
whatever it is you're doing
you'll be happier i think you'll help
people more and i think that does mean
letting go a little bit
and i've struggled with that so i don't
want to pretend it's easy but it is
something that i think being in a new
space
people will tell me it used to be this
way but we can't do it anymore and the
halfway virtual version like you know
wouldn't even be close
and i think if somebody knew i think
it'd be pretty good i'd rather
do the halfway virtual version than
nothing at all like so let's give it a
shot
yeah i like that it really resonates
with why i went into education in
particular
before i decided to go into it for my
degrees and whatnot i
had worked some like office jobs and
even worked as
like a professional stainer and finisher
for closet doors that cost like more
than i paid for my house
so like this like range of experiences
where
either was interacting with people like
as a manager at blockbuster or
interacting with closet doors that
wouldn't talk to you so like
having that experience and knowing what
it's like to go in every day and be able
to expect the same thing
i didn't like that one of the things
that i loved about the volunteer
teaching that i was doing
was every day it was something new there
was some new
challenge or problem solve or some new
thing that i had to learn and so i guess
if you
are able to frame 2020 in that way then
there can be at least a positive framing
of that
that being said there's a lot of things
going on in the world that we still need
to acknowledge
that are problematic and that are
troubling a lot of people but if you are
able to at least reframe some things as
a positive
then hopefully that's beneficial for you
i think finding community to help you do
that
is really useful too both to say hey
let's do five minutes or we all say
all the things that are really hard and
then here's the candles that were
we're holding on to of the shining
lights of
optimism or hope and yeah i think that
finding people who are willing to do
both with you
can be helpful especially if you
acknowledge that they're tied to one
another
in my opinion like i'm hopeful because i
want this thing
to happen i want to do it together i
want it to be good
i'm saddened because i see all of these
obstacles and challenges and they're
very real
right but the other thing it's not like
education used to be
this easy field where everything was
working exactly how
everybody wanted it to work which is not
i don't want to be glib i'm just saying
like
if you're working side by side with
educators this is a tough group
there's a group that has had to look in
the eye a lot of difficult situations
i would say by and large when i get
together with educators i'm really
i see the optimism i see that that's why
they're there and i think that
being able to continue to kindle that
with one another
possible i think it's possible to do in
communal settings yeah i like that
especially the framing of is we've
always had challenges now it's just
different challenges
i think it's true and i can also fully
say that i feel like a manager said that
to me
i know that a little part of me would
say oh but come on like we all know this
is rough like this is
way different like it is worse and
that's what i'm saying i think you need
to be able to do both
i think you need to be able to have like
five minutes of like
and then say and say yeah but
this is pretty good we made it better
than it was we're getting closer
it was always tough you know there might
be two steps forward and one step back
so yeah i want to be real i know this is
a difficult year it's a particularly
difficult year for education
but i think that we all serve ourselves
better if we try to find that
communal hope what do you wish there was
more research on that could inform
your own practices research is an
interesting question for me
i was thinking about this question a lot
so i'm admitting you shared it with me
before and i sat and i thought about it
i said what did i want to know
i think in my new role i am really
interested in
longitudinal studies we were doing one
at code.org but it's ongoing
and part of it is there are these
aspirations that are really big
in computer science education right now
it's like what will the life outcomes
broadly speaking be for people
and so i'm really interested in the
degree
to which we can parse that out in a
meaningful way long term in terms of
professionally
is a very narrow version i think that
that's one angle that i feel like
we have a lot of theories about right
now like we're doing all these
interventions they're happening at the
elementary level or the middle school
it takes a very long time to see those
happening but i do think that that is
the
scope of the vision that a lot of states
have when they're introducing policies
i think that's the scope of the vision
that a lot of curriculum teams have
that's a huge investment that needs like
the national science foundation probably
to do something on that scale
and make sure that a research study is
maintained i think
something that is very hard to do in
social science research but
disentangling socioeconomic status
is something that i often ran into when
looking at research results on like the
impacts of computer science programs
i don't think that this is always the
case
i think part of the promise of cs
education is sort of this like
opportunity to enter the middle class or
the upper middle class
again i think programmatically like big
picture long term
what are these goals i will say that
some of the discussion seems to sway
back and forth between pedagogy and i
was focused primarily on high school
though i worked on
middle school so i think a question that
i was running into
and i'd love to have been more informed
on
this push and pull between direct
instruction
and more inquiry-based pedagogy or more
active learning
i think that i was starting to see a
little bit of a movement towards like
i think the field of cs education was
very
gung-ho about increased learning 100 of
the time and there was starting to be
this trickle of like well direct
instruction sometimes makes sense or
like we should be clear about
what we think happened and i think that
balance is something that i would have
loved to explore a little bit more
i think those are the main ones i was
going to say that an important thing for
me
and again because my work was framed at
code.org the scale was so big
and a lot of times research studies were
small and i would go to
conferences and i would say what do you
do when you know a hundred thousand kids
everywhere are going to take your class
next year
and i think often when we say research
what we're saying is somebody tell me
what to do
right please tell me that i'm doing the
right thing
you know there are there just aren't
that many programs at that scale
and so there were different questions
that arise when you're working in one
school or a district
or maybe even a state and when you're
looking internationally it doesn't mean
that you can't be informed by it but
sometimes i think the decisions that i
was trying to make
if not unique they had a sharper edge on
them just because i knew
the scale and also to some degree the
distance between me
and the people that were going to be
using the course so i don't know if it
makes sense for researchers to
research that exactly and i don't think
it means that
in a role where you're working at that
scale you can't use research but i am
saying i think
that often was the question that plagued
me i would say yeah but
this can be so many different places so
many different situations
i don't know if that answers your final
question but i think it's getting to the
core of the question sometimes you want
research because you're saying what
should i do
that's why you would want to read a
research paper what should i do
sometimes it was hard to find answers
that resonated for the specific problems
i was often looking at
which were building programs that were
going to be used in such a diverse set
of circumstances
yeah all three of those main areas
really resonate the idea of
scale is really resonating because
like this year alone we're going to be
working with about a million more
students
with boot up so that's a million
students who are going to be using
resources
that i developed that teachers are going
to go through et cetera
and to think through that range of
implementation
i'm having a look at a bunch of
different research in a bunch of
different contexts and apply well in
this scenario it might make sense to do
this but in this scenario might make
sense of this
so trying to design for that open-ended
implementation
it is difficult but it's also kind of
like an exciting thing for me or it's
like well how do i figure out how to
make this thing work because
this is no longer just my school of like
a thousand kids
now it's quite a few more than that your
discussion on the
direct instruction versus inquiry-based
learning it reminds me of the
conversation that i had with
john stapleton one of the earlier
interviews that i did he's also a fellow
music educator who's gone into cs
education
and when we were talking about it one of
the things that i
brought up was that when i worked with
pre-service music educators
they would often think that direct
instruction was like
to be avoided at all costs and i had to
like come in and just politely be like
it's okay to lean more towards
one area than another but you need to
understand that you're not just
only going to do that so if you want to
do inquiry based cool
at some point you're likely going to do
direct instruction
and you don't need to go confess your
sins
for having done that it's okay to engage
in other approaches
and for my own philosophy it's
preferable to have multi-perspectival
approaches
and engage in multiple ways of learning
and understanding within the classroom
but that's my own rant on that and then
your first point about the longitudinal
side of things it reminds me of the
interview that i did with andreas stefik
who
brought up that it is not rewarded in
higher education
especially as a junior faculty member to
do longitudinal stuff
because you're not going to get as many
publications out of it it might take
several years before you actually get
data to write publications on it
therefore you're not going to get tenure
doing it so it's just
interesting that the design of how
people go through the tenure process
within higher education
is basically preventing a lot of the
longitudinal studies that would honestly
beneficial because multiple guests have
brought that up as i wish there was more
longitudinal data
but it's not going to happen unless
you're a tenured professor and have the
ability to do that
that is fascinating i didn't know about
that incentive structure
but yeah i can see how that would be the
case and it is just to be fair
a large undertaking keeping track of
people over years
and just an organization keeping a focus
on a single problem for
the amount of time that it takes but
that is really interesting
it's this mentality of publisher parish
which is like
often discussed about for junior faculty
members so
there are some people who will lean
towards some methods that allow you to
publish more frequently
and this is not to demonize any method
or anything but like survey
research is a whole lot easier to send
out get data back within a week
cool now i can publish on this thing
compared to like ethnographic research
where you spend
a year multiple years within a
particular
culture embedded within it writing all
this rich data and then
you eventually write something several
years later like one of those is
rewarded more than another in terms of
being able to publish more frequently
and whatnot so
people who are going through that
department you're in they may or may not
reward different kinds of methods
by the design of how you get tenure i
have one more
wrench to throw into the works of our
discussion here which is that once we
have all of this research
what we were just talking about is that
the distance between
an idea that's discussed in research and
what actually eventually will happen in
classrooms is not automatic you don't
say oh we read this paper
it's perfect now we know we were talking
about it before even if you have
really good ideas or you think you have
a better way to do it
there are so many other systems that
play between
that feeling of confidence about what
should happen and actually making sure
that that's what does happen
in classrooms and i think it's kind of a
conversation
i'm not deeply involved with it but i
think the research practice partnerships
that i'm seeing more of
in cs education i think that
practitioners and researchers
should be working closely in this moment
that makes a lot of sense
right because things are developing so
rapidly
i've sort of lived right at that
intersection probably a little bit more
on the practice side
i am excited at least on a high abstract
level about those types of initiatives
because i think that we can't just be
like doing research in the abstract like
we need to be thinking about
what's actually going to happen when we
go to implement right yeah one of the
reasons why i do
every other week as an unpacking
scholarship episode is because there is
that huge disconnect between
theory and practice and trying to like
bridge that with here's this research
study what does this potentially mean in
terms of implications
and because there isn't that dialogue
like if you go to six c
which is mainly professors with some
k-12 people
that is a very different audience than
if you go to csta which is mainly
practitioners k-12 individuals and some
professors
and again going back to the 10-year
review process
you typically get rewarded for
publishing in
peer-reviewed journals that are for
other professors you don't really get
rewarded for communicating your results
to
practitioners the fact that there is
that disconnect
is fascinating and then there's also the
disconnect not just between
practitioners and researchers but
researchers and policy makers
so we have policy makers like lawyers or
politicians or whatever who are crafting
all this stuff
but is not based on actual research or
practice
so we get all this like wonky stuff in
the u.s where it's like
why are we doing this and then we look
at other countries that are scoring
higher on some of the tests well
why are they doing that well part of the
reason is they're actually applying
the research into their classroom and
going oh the research says we should do
this how about we do it
we don't really do that here that's my
little rant it's a good rant
that part of the world always felt so
big to me and i think partly because of
my
introduction into the world of education
and computer science sometimes i feel
like
i've spent most of my time as a computer
science curriculum developer
which is a very niche specific role not
as an educator not as a researcher
not even as a computer scientist i
actually spent most of my time as kind
of this like in-between role
right yeah i think that is where it
becomes
you're like a boat on the ocean you kind
of know which direction you're going
with the waves hit you know there's a
new policy here's some research oh
there's like a new
we're going to slightly change course or
something but i actually like that
metaphor a lot because
as a curriculum developer you kind of
know your boat you know how you can kind
of like adjust the things in your course
you know how you can kind of adjust
the things in your pl but yeah it is
such a big system and i sometimes have
to fight against having to
feel like i understand the whole thing
before i can do something you're like
well i think we're headed in this
direction
about a weakness of mine a growth
opportunity but it's so big
and the influences are coming from
everywhere
you know fighting back saying like oh
policymakers don't get it
you say like well i still kind of think
i know which direction we're headed
i try to work with it and i try to
design something that fits this
changing landscape i'm curious do you
have any questions
for myself or questions for the field at
large
what are you excited about in the next
five years i think there has been a ton
of energy around
computer science being a subject that
maybe it's reasonable to expect schools
teach
i'm seeing a huge shift on that do you
think that momentum continues are there
other things you're excited about should
we be nervous
that you know kovid sets us back like
how are you feeling about that
what's going to happen next jared what
makes you excited so
having my feet in two different
disciplines simultaneously
it's interesting seeing the reactions of
music educators who are like
legitimately freaking out
like what do you mean we can't sing what
do you mean we can't play instruments
like
you're not allowed to make music in the
ways that we've been doing it for
over 100 years and then seeing what's
going on in computer science where it's
like oh well
we just got to figure out how to make
this work remotely
and focus on the individual thing i am
optimistic that computer science will be
fine
i am also optimistic that even like the
field of music education will be fine
it's just going to look differently than
what people expect
it's going to be more of the kinds of
music making that
i've been exploring in the last decade
where it's technology enhanced
individualized
like instead of the large ensemble 150
people on the same space
blowing into an instrument or whatever
now that being said
one of the things that i think is going
to be a big
discussion in the field of cs is okay
now that everybody's doing it
now we need to actually talk about well
how are we going to do computer science
if we get the majority of the country
doing this thing
on the continuum of fixed
and one right answer to creative and
open
and many different answers to many
different questions
where as a field that we're more going
to align
and i'm personally hoping it leans more
towards let's create let's apply our
understandings
let's do more than just solve a given
problem the same way that's already been
solved let's actually get at
these unsolved things that can have an
impact on
the world because we've talked about it
for multiple years like
well with computer science you can do
this cool thing to help out with your
rural community or your farm or
your local urban community or whatever
but that's not the norm that's just like
an example
of what could be and what i'm hoping is
five years from now
everybody's doing this there's actually
creative applications of being able to
help
others outside of the classroom but
maybe that's a pipe dream i don't know
don't cut yourself off at the end i
share that vision
i share it i think it's fairly real i
think computer science education as it
scales
is running into this all over the place
we talked about it with the cs
principles course
i think just the existence of the create
pt there's things i like and don't like
about the course but i have to remind
myself like
they turn in a project and i want them
to feel like that project
can be unique and creative and that was
a huge focus of the updates
that's really interesting i'm glad that
that's how you're thinking about it
because
there's a little bit of hope in there
and then i think the tension you're
sharing is
the right one to be feeling like let's
say we win
do we win by turning this into a
different version of math or something
for you and you know what i think people
are working on this in math education as
well but
i have one other question for you which
we didn't get a chance to talk about but
i wanted your impression from another
curriculum developer
have you observed the pattern of
creating
acronyms for your pedagogy in order to
kind of
process size it is this a thing that
you're familiar with
and what are your thoughts on it and in
particular i want to acknowledge
i have been a part of doing this too
i've created acronyms or i'll create
kind of like
buzzwords and i was curious your own
reflections on
creating systems to help scale out good
ideas with them sort of developing a
life of their own
and so i'm wondering if you've
encountered this i certainly see it and
sometimes i find myself doing it because
it
feels in the moment like i should but
then it can kind of become
jargon or anyway i'm telling you my
answer i want to know yours have you
experienced this what are your thoughts
on it
it's funny you say that earlier today i
interviewed chris woods
who does dailystem.com a bunch of
resources and whatnot and so one of the
questions that i asked was
what are the affordances and constraints
of the acronym
stem and what i was getting at is
stem we have a very narrow set
of disciplines within that and during
the interview with chris we talked a lot
about
well you're not just engaging with
science on its own or technology on its
own engineering
math all separate silos you need to find
these connections within
them but also outside of that acronym
so in the arts making it steam or in
computer science making it stem plus c
or any other discipline but if that's
the case
why do we even need the acronym to begin
with and
one thing that like resonates with me
being somebody who's non-binary
pansexual etc like the lgbtqia plus
has grown over time to acknowledge the
fact that
the acronym was limiting when it was
just
a few letters now it's several letters
but now it's getting to the point where
it's like
why don't we just have a term that is
all encompassing or are we just going to
get to a point where it's the entire
alphabet
with some characters and stuff to
actually acknowledge the diversity of
gender and sexuality and whatnot
so going back to the original question
when it comes to acronyms
i typically tend to try and ignore them
because it narrows the focus and it
doesn't take into account
being able to usually adapt to
application
so you have this great idea and it works
great in your context
but when you apply that acronym or that
concept outside of your context
then you're taking in new bits of data
new feedback and you need to iterate on
it
so what do you do then do you change the
acronym to add more to it
like lgbtqia plus or do you just
maintain
the acronym stem but then talk about in
a way that's not just stem it's
connecting everything to it
so i don't know if that answers your
question i think it does
and it's something that i run into maybe
you do too as somebody who might be in a
position to create the acronym stem
because you'll say in boot ups materials
we're going to use
i'm making it up you know the xyz method
and you might decide to do that
because you think it helps communicate
an idea this tension between simplifying
ideas to try to make them easier to
communicate with knowing that you're
never really capturing all of it
i think you did speak to it but his
attention i felt as a curriculum
developer because you're trying to
communicate with
many people you never meet you kind of
have to boil things down
into digestible bits so it feels like
you need to
and maybe stem the acronym the example
we just gave that was successful because
it was a rallying cry for people
to say let's focus on kind of this set
of things we want people to learn
but i think there's always a cost you
haven't fully communicated the idea
there's always a deeper level
but not everybody is in a position to
create the acronym i guess is what i'm
saying and so
being aware of it as a curriculum
developer or you know the phrases or the
values or the chance
you go to pd and you're like what's the
most important thing like you might do
that
because you want people to learn it but
you know it's more than just that
and i think that's a tension that i see
in roles that
you know we've shared so i appreciate
your reflection i hadn't thought of stem
it was a great example thanks i had
thought about it in the context of
lgbtqia plus
either i love expanding it there i think
it's the same thing
everybody everybody's making the acronym
yeah and it's important to acknowledge
like the power that you have when you
are creating these lessons
the things that you are explicitly and
implicitly teaching
through resources like you have to be
aware of that
and one of the things that informs my
response to you
was this chapter that i read by an
author last name rygelsky
it's called like on methodology or
something and so methodology for this
author is
you take a method and it becomes an
ideology that you do not question
you only adhere to that and you do not
follow any other ideology
and that's when it becomes a problem so
again going back to our discussion on
well direct instruction versus inquiry
based learning or project based or
whatever approach you want to go with if
you're only like i'm 100 inquiry based
learning
well then what are you going to do in
the moment where direct instruction will
be really beneficial
in that two minutes that you have with a
kid who could really benefit from it are
you just gonna sit there and keep asking
questions for two minutes and then they
don't get to an answer
that actually helps them move forward or
are you gonna take two minutes to do a
different approach
and so for me that multi-perspectival
approach is important
and so if we're going to do
multi-perspectival we can't necessarily
have acronyms because the acronyms are
going to need to change
one please send me that that sounds
fascinating and i'd love to read it
and two i was going to say man did i
agree with everything you just said when
it turns into sort of an ideology or you
know unquestionable
you know what it's hard to do when
you're i mean you're sort of in a
leadership position
so if you're like okay the boot up
course this is the things that they
think are important number one two three
that's the most important thing
being able to balance saying that's true
with also you jared saying
but it's not always true right because
people are looking to you for that
confidence
right and they're looking to you for
that stability or simplicity
and so right i think it's really hard to
push back against that sometimes
and say i have made it simple for you so
i can welcome you in
so you don't have to understand
everything but i'm going to teach you
some concepts that are not
perfect they don't apply in every
setting so i think that's an interesting
balance there's a place for those
conversation starters like as an example
outliers by malcolm gladwell it is a
good book
for getting you to understand the idea
of deliberate practice and its long-term
payoff things like that
but a lot of people miss a tribute to
malcolm gladwell
the idea of the 10 000 hour rule that
well all you got to do is just 10 000
hours and then all of a sudden you're
going to be a genius at this thing well
if you actually read the research that
malcolm gladwell is citing
by kay anders erickson there's a lot
more nuances to it than that
and anderson is not this like
fixed every single domain is ten
thousand hours like
wrestling is like eight thousand music
is like 21 000
like all of these are all different and
they all have different scenarios and
cases that you need to point to
it's fine for some people to latch on to
something and like get a broader concept
but we also then need to dive deeper
into it and go but there's all these
specific cases where that doesn't apply
it's not generally applicable
outside in every single domain etc i
think something that i
end up doing subconsciously
to avoid this is
at least when i'm talking about ideas i
end up making them
very conversational in the way that i
talk about it because i think
acronyms or academia
language and saying and trying to turn
it into
approachable words that sound more
conversational so it's less about
the term and more about the idea that is
being expressed
but it's a challenge it's one that again
i think there's pressure
i think there is pressure towards terms
i think there's pressure towards
trying to come up with something
essential or an acronym or whatever it
is
i think in the end it actually gets in
the way of communication being honest
there's certainly a danger of it if you
don't maintain the practice of saying
this is trying to make it quick to
communicate about something that we
should already have a shared
understanding through discussion about
what this term actually means otherwise
we could be talking past each other but
just know how to use the same term
i mean i heard a professor once say that
there's a lot of benefit in creating
your own term because then you're the
one who gets cited for
creating that term even if it's very
similar to other things so that gets
into one of the problems
but one of the things that you said
about like the simplicity of language
there's an interview i did with brian
brown
who's a associate professor at stanford
in the school of education
and hasn't been released yet but he
talks about his research on
comparing using expert domain
language in like science and then using
simplified version
of the discourse in the same
lesson same everything's just you're
changing the way that the words are
consistently the simpler the language
you use the better kids are going to
understand it and be able to actually
not feel overwhelmed and whatnot
so that lines up with research and i can
sit here and
and use lots of big words that like a
lot of academics would understand but
like what's the point in that if
all of a sudden gonna obfuscate what i'm
trying to say
so like why not just say it simply oh
this is going to make things confusing
so a lot of the way that i talk i
intentionally engage in a dialogue that
is trying to
simplify things even though i can engage
in those conversations i choose not to
generally speaking at least i'm curious
having listened to some of the
episodes do you have suggestions on how
i could better serve the cs community
with this podcast yeah i think that if
you were able to bring in
multiple guests at the same time i've
always wanted to get a lot of people in
the room
something i did a few years ago and we
were trying to do is a provider's
component to csta just people who are in
kind of this role of developing
materials
or thinking at the district level or it
could be teachers too but
multiple perspectives at the same time
and i think that what you were doing
with
recent episodes where you went back
through
multiple people speaking about the same
topic in a row
i think that clicked for me i really
liked that and i think if you were able
to do some of that live
that would be fascinating and i think
there might be an opportunity to do it
when you're talking about creating
dialogue between
policy and a researcher or you know a
teacher and a researcher or something
like that or you know any combination
they're in
i think it'd be really interesting i
could see this being a space for that
yeah i like that i do have one upcoming
panel on the topic of rhizomatic
learning with like three other people
but it would be good to get more
different panels and whatnot i
especially like the idea of research and
policymaker
that we can actually get some change
that is actually informed
i would be fascinated by that i'd love
to listen where my people go to connect
with you in the organizations that you
work with
you can find me probably most easily on
linkedin
if you want to reach out it's gt roble
should be easy to find or john thomas
roble my name is italian so to spell
g-i-a-n
space t-h-o-m-a-s you probably won't
find that written most places on the
internet but
when i i'm in professional circles
that's where you'll find me i actually
don't maintain much of a twitter
or social media presence professionally
so i think if you want to
contact me professionally you can reach
me there if you happen to be listening
to this podcast and you really want to
reach out to me on email
it is gtroble gmail.com and i'm more
than happy to talk to you about
anything related to this education and
with that
that concludes this week's episode with
csk8 podcast
i hope you enjoyed this interview with
gt i know i learned a lot from him
and always continue to learn more the
more we discuss cs education pedagogy
curriculum development et cetera
if you'd be so kind please consider
sharing this with somebody else sure you
can think of somebody who would benefit
from hearing
any of the topics that we discussed in
this particular episode
stay tuned next week for another
unpacking scholarship episode and two
weeks from now for another interview
hope you're having a wonderful week and
staying safe
Guest Bio
GT Wrobel is an educator and curriculum designer fascinated by the challenges of designing high quality learning experiences to meet the varied needs of learners. GT began his educational career at Little Village High School on the southwest side of Chicago where he tutored 9th and 10th grade boys in Algebra I, Algebra II, and Geometry as part of the Match Education program. He continued on to the Latin School of Chicago where he was the founding teacher for their computer science department and taught CS Principles and independent studies in computer science topics. He subsequently joined the curriculum team at Code.org and helped develop their AP CS Principles and CS Discoveries courses. He has facilitated professional learning opportunities for thousands of teachers around the country and worked closely with CSTA, CS education researchers, and other curriculum developers to ensure a healthy ecosystem of CS education curricula and PD options are available to K - 12 teachers and students. GT recently began a position at Microsoft where he designs onboarding experiences for new software engineers with a focus on bringing his passion for high quality and equitable learning experiences into the professional sphere. GT is a proud Chicago native and currently lives in beautiful Seattle where he loves to get outside whether it's our notoriously rainy winters or our gloriously beautiful summers. You can reach him at gtwrobel@gmail.com or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gt-wrobel/ to talk about any and everything at the exciting intersection of education and computer science.
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Learn more about Code.org’s CS Principles course that GT worked on
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Connect with GT
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter