Individualized Learning Without Grades with Sofía De Jesús
In this interview with Sofía De Jesús, we discuss Sofía’s book (Applied Computational Thinking with Python: Design algorithmic solutions for complex and challenging real-world problems), the importance of bringing your full self into the classroom, designing for equity and inclusion, working with individuals one-on-one rather than teaching to group averages, problematizing grades in education, collaborating with educators, and much more.
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Welcome back to another episode of the
CSK8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
each week of this podcast alternates
between an episode where i unpack some
scholarship and
an interview this week's particular
episode is an interview with sophia
dejesus
and in this interview we discuss
sophia's book which is titled applied
computational thinking with python
design algorithmic solutions for complex
and challenging real world problems
we also discuss the importance of
bringing your full self into the
classroom
designing for equity and inclusion
working with individuals one-on-one
rather than teaching to group averages
problematizing grades in education
collaborating with educators and so much
more
as always you can find links to what we
talked about in the show notes which you
can find at jaredlery.com or by
clicking on the link in the show
description in the app that you're
listening to this on
and with that we will now begin with an
introduction by sophia
hi i'm sofia jesus i am currently a
middle school computational thinking
teacher
and that means that i teach everything
from web design
circuits game design python courses
and such for sixth seventh and eighth
grade and i do teach all three grades
currently teaching seven different
electives per trimester which is a lot
but i do
love to offer different kinds of things
to students so that's what i
do i've also been published in the last
year so i published a book applied
computational thinking with python with
pact publishing and my co-author
dairy martinez so we have that book out
and it's just a
book for anybody who's learning python
or has learned python but is having
difficulty with
applications so it's full of examples
and
what do we do when so it's mostly about
the process and then
what python language we would use to
solve that particular problem which is
an exciting thing
because it is written by two latinas i'm
puerto rican and irene is dominican so
we had a lot of fun getting to work on
that buck so that's me i also work in
curriculum i have a part-time gig where
i
am currently helping spread some
really amazing curriculum for carnegie
mellon in spanish
mostly that's my role and i will be
joining them
at the beginning of july as a full-time
employee there
i'm curious is your book is it for
students or is it for teachers and how
to teach students
or both it's kind of a little bit of
both one of the things that i say
often and i've had a couple interviews
about this is that
i had a lot of trouble learning
programming in general
and get stuck because i could go through
the courses and ace the courses
but when it came to now how do i apply
this
i always gave up because i was like i
don't understand any of this
i understand the loops i understand what
this means
i just don't know how to then create a
game or
solve a problem for a client or some
similar thing and
i realized that i started really loving
programming
when i had an emergency for example so i
would be working with a client in
educational publishing and they'd need
something
and you know our contractors were in
india and they were sleeping at the time
and we needed it in five minutes
i would have to like look at our coding
try to fix it myself
for some reason things started clicking
when it was really
when i was stressed first of all but
also when it was applied
and so i've always been really great
when
i'm in a really tight time frame but it
was one of those things where
things made sense when i had to apply it
so i had already learned quite a few
different languages
didn't use them too much and i realized
it's
important to not just say like hey this
is a loop and this is how it works and
let's talk about it using a couple
numbers which is pretty much every book
out there
it'll show you how to iterate while i is
less than 100 and then do something
so so i feel like that was what i wanted
to do and i think that's helpful for
anybody starting up
and i think that's helpful for anybody
who's already been in the industry
and it's also helpful for teachers you
can tell it was written by a teacher i
would say
so i think it's for everybody and it
does have samples from
let's write a program that will tell you
like how much a pizza would cost
based on the ingredients you have to
let's build a chat bot
or analyze a historical document or
there's machine learning and i'm not an
expert in machine learning dareen is
so she helped me out those two chapters
we wrote together
mostly because i don't know the code but
i do know how to write
so she taught me a lot about the code
and i
helped out with beefing up some of the
text in there
and of course now i know quite a bit
about it because
inevitably you learn something while
you're writing and then she and i also
wrote the two last chapters which are
applications only so there's 15 or 16
problems
there are just applications it's this is
the problem let's solve it now
using what we've learned in the book so
that was fun and yes it would be for
everybody
cool how did you get into computer
science education
by accident i was a math teacher
so i've been in industry too so i always
say
my first program was written on a ti
calculator when i was a senior in high
school and that was 1997.
so it had a programming button and i
wanted to know what it did so i wrote a
program to solve a system of equations
and that was my first program i did not
own a computer until after i graduated
college
so there's also that and we didn't have
a lot of computers
at the school where i used to attend it
was a really great college prep school
but this is prior to 2000 in puerto rico
we did not have a computer lab yet our
tech class was how to type
so it was a typing class not an actual
computer class but
i spent quite a bit of my time in
college going to the computer lab
because i just wanted to learn what was
out there and what's the internet and
what's going on so i learned to program
because of need i guess not because of
school or whatever
during my statistics course it was a mix
of programming and statistics in college
but that was
really not enough but as a math teacher
when a school needs a computer science
teacher and they don't have any and
they're just offering one
they grab a math teacher so when i went
back to teaching
which i did in 2012 a couple years later
somebody said like hey by the way you're
going to be teaching a computer science
course
you're saying uh what
so i started just looking at like what's
out there and learning it
and taking as many classes as i possibly
could of the free ones college offered
everything i started teaching and i
started falling in love with it i became
a
steam coordinator at that school that
particular school
and i started learning i don't know
everything i possibly could about
applications and as a math teacher
we're very married to a there's a
curriculum and a test you have to take
and therefore everything's like
super square right which i didn't
appreciate and i started shifting a
whole lot of how i did things
when i started teaching again and i
always say that
it's because teaching is like when you
gain weight you gain it slowly and you
don't necessarily notice it
until somebody takes a picture of you
and you're like oh wait that's me
and so a lot of teachers don't notice
the changes that are happening
while they're happening because it's
slowly but surely every year something
changes
and technology's been like that but i
left teaching in 2005 and came back in
i left a blackboard and chalk
classroom and i came back to a smart
board and
students having computers on them at all
times
so i was like what i used to do doesn't
fit so what do i do now
and i started noticing that students
needed more from me than
me teaching the content so when i
started teaching math and computer
science stuff
you know robotics and all that stuff i
realized ooh i could
take a lot of what i'm doing in the
steam classroom and we do steam because
it was science technology engineering
arts and math
so it's stem steam some people have
medicine at the end whatever
but everything i was doing and the
application seemed to
match what my students need more and so
i started changing the way that i taught
math as well
instead of focusing on what does my
class need it was what does that student
need
and that's a lot of where my
explorations into diversity inclusion
justice equity that work started
so yeah so i ended up having to change a
lot of what i did
and learning more about quite a few
different things
not just programming when i started in
the programming classroom
now feel free to answer the next
question like either as a student or as
a teacher
but can you tell me a story about an
experience in education that continues
to impact you today there's
two things to this so as a student
myself
one of the things that i remember was i
was a sophomore in high school and my
english teacher
was trying to get me to slow down and we
had to memorize
something shakespeare you know i was
saying my part and when i was done
she looks at me and she goes you realize
you skipped
like every three lines and i was like no
i didn't
i know the lines and she's like okay so
give me these but say it's lower and
when i did i wouldn't skip the lines and
she said you got to remember that your
brain moves faster than your mouth does
so slow down and that to this day
i still do i have to just slow myself
down to kind of
what am i thinking am i moving ahead too
fast and did i skip something i wanted
to say
happens a lot and i tell my students
that a lot
that they have to slow down that there's
no need to rush the process
for whatever that process is i don't
have to just
get that done it's how do i get to that
finish line
so as a student that probably the most
impactful thing a teacher ever told me
because i was that student that i wanted
to be the first to finish the test
the first to get whatever i was very
competitive
and i want to be the first to whatever
and i've stopped doing that a lot and
i've asked my students to not
focus on that because i don't want them
to focus
about their growth as compared to others
i want them to focus on their growth as
compared to their own growth
so if you were really good at whatever
how do i get better
right how do you the individual get
better
because if you compete against yourself
you're always going to get better
if you compete against others you're
selling yourself short
always because you're trying to focus on
the wrong things
you're not really tapping into your best
potential
in the areas that are best for you
you're just focusing on the wrong person
so those are things that i like to tell
my students but
in terms of impactful as a teacher in
the area of equity
if you're closed down you're not doing
the work
and one of the things that i remember a
student a senior
we had a professional development day we
were all in tables
and there was a student member and then
faculty right
and we were talking and one of the
things that i said was i'm a private
person i don't want to share
anything about my life i'm here to teach
that senior said to me
but that's not what we need from you and
i asked her i was like but why
and she said because if you don't bring
your full
self then i can't either and it's not
that we want to know about your private
life or your love life that's not it
it's about
who are you it's about the books that
you read it's about the music that you
listen to it's
and yes sometimes some personal stuff if
you're comfortable with that but she
said
that a lot of the teachers at that
school which was the truth
only ever shared about the content and i
remember just
taking that home i remember thinking
she's right but how do i open that up
and so i started doing a lot of work
reading a lot more about
what others were doing and following
more professional learning networks and
social media
and just exploring what that meant and
what that meant for me
and so the last i would say the last
decade has been spent
trying to build that so that i can be
better for my students
but also sharing that so that other
professionals can also say
that is important we can't just
be there for content regardless of what
age level you teach
you cannot be in the school and be the
best teacher you possibly can be if your
only focus is content
so i'm glad you brought up the student
shouldn't compare each other
one of the things that you mentioned in
your recent session at the
equity in action summit for csta is that
students shouldn't compare
themselves with other students i'm
curious what makes you say that
or even what led to that shift in your
own competitive nature to thinking that
students
shouldn't focus on that in mathematics
we
expect that students have all had the
same
material so if you're in eighth grade
algebra or ninth grade algebra
you should know these things which is a
lie nobody ever comes into the room with
the same things
teachers have the assumption that all my
students must have these things and if
you don't that's not my problem
that's a really bad take i guess i
wish i had explored that further sooner
but when i started teaching programming
i realized some of my students have been
programming for quite a bit
some of my students have been writing
lines of code or have explored scratch
for years and they're in sixth grade and
yet
some of my students may see their first
line of code in my classroom
they're all signed up for the same class
if i teach that class to the high level
i am not serving any other students if i
teach that student to the base level
those who are really excited about this
will get bored and
really start hating a topic that they
might have loved
before so i can't teach
to the course i can't teach the content
i can teach
to the kids i can teach creating
curriculum that addresses
their needs individually and it is
possible
not necessarily the easiest thing and
that's one of the reasons why
i mentioned the ill-defined problem
where you provide this
broad idea of what it is that you want
you know
what topics you're going to be touching
on so for example i have the alternate
history project where
students are going to explore something
in history it can be sports music
wars whatever they're going to choose
two topics and they're going to create
this game
that's a choose your own adventure kind
of game where they're going to explore
if the real thing happened this is what
goes next but what if it did it
then that is an alternate route right so
it's an alternate dystopian kind of
thing but they have to research who was
there who wasn't
and i mentioned the what if prince was
an actor
and not a singer what happens to music
and it's really interesting to think
about because
prince is somebody who's had quite a bit
of influence in what comes next
so if he's not there what happens to
music are the same people going to be in
music
are the same people going to be inspired
i don't know but that project
will look very different depending on
where my students came in
so if i have a student who is a coder
and has been doing it for years their
final product
might be a very polished game with many
games for decision making and all of
that
which is phenomenal because they're
going to have enough time
you know if i give them three weeks
they're going to use those three weeks
very differently
from the student who's just now writing
their first line of code
who's going to be teaching themselves
and i'm going to be doing some mini
tutorials
but they're learning like how do i use a
button and how do i add the backgrounds
and how do i add the characters
they're going to be focusing on
something else at the end of the day
they're all going to have practiced
about
statements conditionals they're all
going to be looking at
loops if they're using controllers so
how do i make sure that my arrow always
works or
something like that they're gonna be
looking at all of those things that i
wanted
even though the end result might be you
know the difference between a stick
figure drawing
and a picasso it's not the same but
they've met
the brief and that's where i want them
to be because
i don't want the student you know who's
just writing their first line of code to
compare themselves with somebody who's
been coding for four years
that's what i mean i don't need them to
be doing that they're gonna get there
but they can't expect to learn four
years of coding
that that other person has in this one
project
and some students really do learn quick
and they will be coding at that level
but some students will take the whole
entire year to create something that
looks more polished
but i don't want them to feel like less
than their experience has to be about
your next game is going to be better and
that's where you need to focus
and if you've already learned these
things then you need to focus more maybe
on character creation or whatever if
it's a game design class
so i work with my students individually
and as i don't want to be intense about
it either like this is what you are
doing and forget about everybody else
it's subtle it's the way that we give
feedback to them it's the way that we
prop them up when they're doing
something great
and it's continuous so i am looking at
their computers as they're working and i
call out something that's really cool on
their screens hey
this looks amazing great job on blah
and it's not about that end grade
because i
refuse to give grades at this point but
when i did give grades
i also never would give back graded
assignments even with math in my last
years
so the last years i taught math i would
refrain from giving back some of the
assignments because one of the things
that i think
affects students intensely is if i give
back a paper with a whole lot of red
marks
they're not going to want to learn that
again nor will they want to improve
psychologically and subconsciously it
kills a student
they might start thinking like i'm no
good at math or i'm not good at whatever
and instead what i would do is i would
look at my class as a whole
and say you know if there's a lot of red
marks for a lot of my students then
maybe i didn't teach it correctly
so i would talk to the kids and say hey
let's do this again
let's look at this again let's partner
up and i would partner students with
somebody who might have done better
but i wouldn't tell them who did well
and who didn't and we would talk more
about like let's look at the content
again and let's look at it a different
way
and and then at the very end i would say
you need to trust me about your grades
and if you have a question when the
grades do come out
then let me know i've only ever had two
students actually come to me and say
like i'm not sure about that grade
and we would discuss it and see if there
was a change and
i once changed it and the other i didn't
but it was very
interesting that the conversations were
a lot more about
the content rather than the grade so
instead of how can i get a grade is how
do i understand this better i'm having
trouble with
so i try to teach my students to focus
on the
what am i learning rather than what am i
getting
and that's all about the individual
process it's about where i
am and how's my growth so if everybody
is starting in a
different place and working at their own
pace to kind of
grapple with these concepts and
practices related to computer science
and if you're not teaching to a group
average or median
or whatever and focusing on the content
what does it look like
walking into a classroom like if
somebody were to step in there what
would they
see or hear or experience you know it's
interesting because
my classroom is active right now i'm
talking pre-covered
my classroom was a little loud but it
was loud in the sense that everybody was
always talking
sharing but always about content so
there's a lot of people who would stop
by and just observe i used to teach in
this room that felt
a little bit like a fishbowl because one
of the walls was
complete glass and people would stop and
just you know
kind of laugh about the amount of
activity in a small room
and that's really what i wanted because
my students will
ask each other questions my students
will go like oh i'm stuck on
whatever and they'll say it out loud and
either i'll help them or if i'm helping
somebody else a classmate will
in robotics there's no way to have a
quiet robotics classroom so that was
messy but my rooms are active
and even now where mostly they're
working
by themselves instead of in groups
unless
you know they're working on
collaborative tasks where they can code
together etc
i provide them with ways that they can
chat so it doesn't get really crazy
with the microphones and people being
home and not etc
it's still a very lively room and
they're always on task and i can say
that
because i do have a system where i can
see what they're doing on their
computers
and we do have a system where they have
microphones because i'm teaching
remotely they're in the classroom
for the most part some of them are home
the kind of hybrid
really crazy covered world right now but
it is a continuous kind of conversation
and the way that i run a classroom is if
there's a tutorial i have to give
my students are not required to listen
unless it's something that i know
everybody needs so i might say like for
the next
minutes i'm going to be talking about
these things
if you need that content feel free to
just tune in
watch me follow along if you are
completely sure you're okay with this
and you just want to ignore me put your
headphones on
do whatever you need to because they're
working ahead and they're working on
something else or they've already
learned that content so my room kind of
just looks like that there's
students talking to each other even
while i'm teaching at class so that
might look a little odd to some teachers
but that's what it is i don't want
students to have to be married to the
idea of the teacher is talking
because not everything i say is
important to that particular student
right and that understanding is there
where i say
ignore me but i'm also a flexible
teacher i have a class for example that
just started this trimester which was
game design
with scratch but some of my students in
that class had just been taking game
design with python
and i had three or four of those
students who said but i want to keep
going with python
so i have two options i can say no
you must take game design with scratch
or i can say like keep exploring python
and we'll figure out
alternate assignments which is what i
did so now i'm basically running two
classes in one classroom
i made sure that my administrator was
okay with that but that's
the thing that i feel is different is
that i listen to my kids and i
ask for their feedback quite constantly
and
they'll give feedback on every project
that we do
i hated that one or i love that one they
won't all agree
and i will always say you know you have
to give everything a chance
and it's okay to hate something later
but we won't all love the same projects
so that one that you hate it is probably
somebody else's favorite
so we have to give things a chance to
develop as we go because i won't make
everybody happy every time of the day
it just can't happen but those are the
things that i think
are different in my classroom is that
because it is computer science and
because there is
such a variety of opinions about what
that should look like
i get to explore what my ideal classroom
would have been like
and i think that that's what i'm trying
to give my students is an option to
explore the things that they're
interested in in as many ways as i
possibly can
and that's why the program that i built
at this school
one of the things that i've explained
quite a bit to my administrators but
also
to other teachers is that i want a
program that's flexible so that
when i leave whoever comes in can change
what classes are teaching
but the philosophy is still there it's
computational thinking it's how do i
approach these problems
but those classes don't need to be
looking the same so if somebody comes in
and they're like oh but i am
so in love with like ai for middle
school well then teach ai for middle
school
if you love cyber security then offer
some electives in cyber security they
don't need to teach the classes i taught
at all it's a program that should fit
with changing technologies programs
curriculums
and then people can just adjust and
adapt as they come in
and as the program grows and adds more
teachers
they can keep adding and changing it's
more of a
puzzle pieces to be put together rather
than this is the curriculum and you must
follow it because i don't believe in
that
yeah that all really resonates with like
my own approach like in the fourth
through eighth grade classes in
particular that i previously worked with
like
if there were 30 kids in the class they
could be working on 30 different
projects
they could work on ruby swift scratch
javascript like several languages and
platforms
kids could go at their own pace they'd
spend two weeks or two years on
the same project totally up to them etc
a lot of those rationales behind those
design and pedagogical decisions i was
making were
centered around equity and knowing that
that is something that is a huge part of
what you do i'm curious could you like
tease some of those out and
maybe explain how some of those
decisions were related to equity in your
eyes
the biggest one is that kids are
individuals so that's where i start
if my kid is an individual and i have to
meet their needs
i need to know that student so learning
to know
what they know where they're coming from
what
makes them tick is a big piece of this
equity
work so that i try to approach in as
many different ways as i possibly can
without making it
so that they don't want to ever hear the
word diversity again
and i say that because it's not just
students but teachers alike
and i try to keep it as equity focused
and as individual
focused as i possibly can so some of my
assignments will be like
in this unit we've learned about
loops and whatever now that you've
taken all that in here is a creative
task for you which
the wording created task is from the
carnegie mellon assignments but i use
the same philosophy when i'm teaching
other classes too
where i will then say now you have to
build something
that centers around your favorite place
to visit
your favorite food or something about
your culture or something about your
favorite music
something that talks to me about who you
are and in that way
i get to learn a little bit more about
my students while they're also learning
content in my room
it also makes them think more about who
am i
actually and a lot of my students in
some of the
projects that i've done where for
example they've created some
art piece that is coded that is
inspired by an artifact so something
from history
related to their own culture they have
to do some research and they have to
talk to their parents and they have to
talk to their family members and they
have to talk about
you know this crazy assignment that my
teacher gave me like i have to think
about how i feel about
all of that stuff and there's a lot of
information that you can
get from how the student approaches
those projects where they're
thinking about you know all to use in
the kitchen
may have been based on this i don't know
african ceramic
thing and i found that out now or
you know the drums that i love from
puerto rico well me personally
that's something that comes from you
know slavery and the slaves that were
brought to puerto rico
and how they were able to celebrate
their own cultures
to survive and we still use that music
and those drums that were created
so we all learn when we're exploring
these types of assignments
and in the end all they're doing is
really coding it is not just coding so
it's that whole piece of
as i'm exploring this coded thing that
i'm creating
i got to explore my own history my
culture
and how that culture affects centuries
of art and music and
evolution from all of these things and
so
that's where i think we have so much
we can do in our classrooms our
curriculum doesn't have to be so
square it can't be about those little
loops of you know
print hello world it's that whole thing
that
every book every programming language
starts with that print
or statement you know and why do we do
that and why can't we
teach content that explores things
deeper
that can be about the individual culture
but it's also about your community
so there's also projects that we can do
in the community and understanding what
the needs of
my building my community my
groups are who is part of my community
what's the demographic breakdown of
where i
am is that represented how do i explore
that in a project
that's where i want my students to be
and that's where i think we need to go
because
this equity work in computer science
specifically
we can't ignore the fact that there is
no representation
our students fall through the cracks and
there
those who make it and study it don't
necessarily get the option
of working in the jobs that are
available how do we fix that if we don't
teach
differently if we don't show them
what a female coder looks like or black
teachers or black ceos who are working
in tech companies we cannot
expect them to see themselves as
that if there is nobody like that and
right now
i think that part of what i need to do
and part of what i want to be able to do
is
make sure that when i'm in the classroom
i'm having the most impact i can
and how they feel in these areas and how
much of themselves they need to bring
into the classroom to be able to do that
and i do want my students to bring
themselves fully i don't want them to be
filtering out parts of their
personalities just
to fit into that classroom in any way it
sounds like
coding in your class is almost like a
medium for
introspection and self-expression so
kids are able to
explore themselves and their cultures
and understandings
and then use code to express that
understanding through some kind of a
project i'm curious you had mentioned
that
you refused to give grades so what do
you recommend
for teachers when it comes to assessment
which is different from evaluation so if
anyone's listening those are
two different things but then what led
to your refusal to give grades because i
had a very similar approach
so my dissertation which will not be
published because i gave up on it for
financial reasons
my dissertation was on grading practices
and i will say i started my doctorate in
and then i got extensions i actually
could graduate up until
but i started in 2007 having
not been in the classroom now for two
years not having gone back
so i still very much felt that my
dissertation was gonna demonstrate that
grading was important i was wrong and
why i was wrong was because i started
researching
and the little that existed at that time
so we're talking 2007 through 2009
when i first started my dissertation
what little existed talked about
the role of the teacher and having to
judge the student
and also offering feedback and how that
doesn't
really match so i talked about that a
lot
what i ended up having to study later
and i did
quite a bit of research on the schools
that did publish like what their
philosophies were and such
i found that nobody agrees on what
grading is
that even in my school there were three
algebra teachers
in my previous school and none of us had
the same grading philosophies
so an a in my class had nothing to do
with an a in somebody else's class
so if we had a student graduated from
that school
with all a's depending on the teachers
they had
their preparation was different so what
exactly does a grade give you
except an artificial sense of mastery
and so i started shifting from
well if grades don't matter because they
don't because people make up
whatever they want to about what grades
are and grading inflation was a thing
then because after no child left behind
something started happening where you
couldn't give grades
less than 50 in a lot of schools
especially private schools
so every time a student got a zero or
didn't take an assessment you had to put
a 50 in there
and gpas in the 90s
the graduating or entering college gpa i
don't remember which one it was because
it's been a while and my data is
a little jumbled but it was something
like 3.84 and now it's like 3.95
so what everybody's a straight a student
those are the kinds of things where i'm
like
sure everybody could be a straight a
student but it doesn't mean
anything and that's where i got to the
point where
grades don't mean anything i want you to
show me what that
looks like for you what were you focused
on i want my students if i ask my
students
what did you learn in my classes i want
them to say like oh
in your class for this game design with
scratch i was trying to focus
on character creation because i'm
interested in creating
role-playing games and so what i learned
was this
that is a better answer than i got an a
and so i don't believe in grades grades
tell me absolutely nothing about the
individual that's learning
whereas i want my students to have a
narrative behind what they do and their
assessment of themselves
i want them to be able to explain what
it is that they did in my classroom not
just say like oh i did great i got an a
they mean nothing at all they literally
just are there
to make somebody happy sometimes it's
parents sometimes it's students
and i remember telling a student when i
was moving from one school to another
where i said
i'm going to a school that's going great
less than the next five years
and she said then how am i supposed to
know what my worth is
and i felt we had missed it what was it
that made you think that your worth was
based on a grade that broke me in a lot
of ways and i remember going to the head
of that division
i was in a different division there but
i said i just got this comment from a
student
and i think it's important that you know
because we're failing
our students if they think their worth
is based on a grade
a really good school where they're very
very competitive and
yet elementary school gives no grades at
all middle school is going grade less
and actually the upper school some
classes are already grade less
and we're still competitive so what's
the point why is it that we need to
continue to work
on saying but grades are important
they're not
so if somebody is listening to either
going grade less or just like
your general approach or philosophy to
education
and they're like yes this sounds great
but i have a question about
blank what's some of the typical
questions that teachers have
so i've had quite a bit of questions in
a lot of different circles and
recently i had a conversation with a
parent not from my school
and he said but a's were my thing like i
wanted to get an a and that's how i
became so successful
you know they're in medicine and top of
their game
and i said but what if you could have
focused
on your growth would that have made it
less competitive because you're
competing against yourself anyway
if you're a competitive person you're
going to want to be better i
still want to beat my top scorer in
every game
i'm just not trying to beat somebody
else's score right and
typically that makes me a lot better
than if i was focusing on somebody else
because my height score might actually
be better than trying to beat somebody
else's
it's just a way to refocus
what we are thinking about as success
and i
also think grades are empty
we are dismissing a whole lot of people
because of their average performance and
i say that in quotations
because you're listening and not seeing
me but average
performance is actually average
to you because you haven't explored what
makes that
particular person excellent it tells me
that you haven't taken the time to work
with that student
to be their best self and i do not care
about what your c
or a or b means i care about what does
that student
see as their success and i want
everybody to understand their successes
because in the real world sure there's
some who were academically gifted who
are doing phenomenal things but there
are some who have been labeled as
average who are doing amazing things
it does not matter your grades do not
matter you can be amazing with a c
and i do not care or enough who cares if
you failed something
in my class you wouldn't have failed
because i don't have that you fail if
you don't do things
and none of my students just not do
things we have to change the focus
so that everybody can learn to express
themselves individually
so that i can express who i am as a
human being
rather than who you want me to be so one
of the counter arguments that i've heard
from
other people when i talk about grades
similar to what you're just talking
about
they've said stuff like yeah well i want
to make sure that my
pilot got an a on landing a plane or
that my surgeon
is really good at understanding anatomy
et cetera et cetera
so i'm curious like how do you respond
to people like that who pose
those responses there's a ton of
research that shows that the people who
got the a's are not the actual people
who
have done exceptional work to figure out
different methodologies
part of the problem and part of the
research and and i don't have the
quotations with me right now
and this is easily found if you do some
research somebody who's gotten an a
doesn't usually go beyond that a
somebody who's struggling
usually goes way beyond what they need
to in order to succeed
so if you're looking for somebody who's
gonna cure cancer
a lot of those people are not your a
people
some of them are but a lot of those
people are the people that can see
beyond
that can look at problems different ways
which is something that you learn when
you struggle
so no i don't care if my surgeon is
the a student i care that my surgeon is
the person that's
qualified to perform that surgery and if
they are board certified
they are qualified i care that they have
learned my case
they know me as an individual and
specifically because i've had
so many instances where i've had
difficulty with a doctor
actually following what i'm saying
rather than what it's showing
on the screen i'll give myself as an
example here when i break things
my joints and my bones and whatever i
don't swell
which means that when you do x-rays you
don't get the typical
oh yes there's a fracture because the
swelling and the fluid and all that
stuff
matters when they're doing those kinds
of diagnosis
so i actually ended up having to wait
over six months
for my tendon and my elbow to be
repaired i knew i couldn't hold on to a
purse
but i wasn't displaying what others
display when they've torn a tendon
because my pain threshold is high so i
was just like hey it hurts i can't
actually
like even hold my purse and they're like
oh it's not broken let's do pt and i was
like it's not working there's no change
so it took six months for them to even
let me get into an mri machine just to
find out i had torn a tendon
in my elbow which is now attached with
metal clips
that's happened multiple times i want
the surgeon and the doctor who's going
to listen
who's going to say oh let me look at
your history which then happened with
another doctor who i said can you just
look at my notes just look at
these last three surgeries and then we
can talk
i want the people who will do that
rather than the ones who go like
but you're not that case because they're
looking at average cases they're looking
at
what those rules they have to follow are
to be able to make a diagnosis
right that's not the doctor i want i
want the doctor who's going to
look at me as the patient the individual
my history and then make recommendation
i mean
obviously i want a pilot who can land a
plane but if they have a license they
can land a plane again
those are non-arguments in my book
because
there's so much and so much
discrimination in the medical world too
that people aren't really aware of you
know it's the same thing as like
the thing that reads your pulse can read
yours and mine because i am lighter
skinned even though i'm not
white but a black person's pulse might
not be read correctly because it doesn't
see the black skin the brown skin like
that's all discrimination because those
are the only ones available in the
market and that's what every hospital
uses
i want the doctor who's going to say
that doesn't work because
these things i want the people who can
think through i want the people who can
navigate the other and that means
somebody who can say that didn't work so
let me try this other thing
and that comes with struggle and that's
one of the reasons why i think
computer science is important there is
no computer scientist
programmer in the world who will say
like i am an expert
i still haven't met anybody and maybe
there are some who say i'm an expert in
coding well everybody i've met
will say i'm just okay or i'm still
learning or
my code is always broken they'll say
like
nothing has ever worked on the first try
yeah
because nothing ever does you forget the
comma there or the semicolon or whatever
and it doesn't work and you forget to
test your code and write 300 lines of
code which i've done
and it's a bad idea yeah
because then how do you find your error
it's one of those things where
computer science is a really safe place
to make mistakes
and it teaches our students so much more
than
this is a loop because it teaches our
students that
it might not have worked on the first
try but maybe on the 10th try it did
and i think that that's important
because those are the students who are
going to be excellent doctors and
lawyers and
accountants and physicians and whatever
because they're going to look at things
in a broader sense and they're going to
look at the people
individually if we teach our students as
individuals they're going to look at us
as individuals when we go to their
offices
and when we ask them for help yeah like
that i hope
listeners who are trying to make similar
arguments against grades will also
listen to those examples
and be able to use that with
administrators who might be reluctant
with removing grades or whatever or
grading based on participation rather
than product
etc so yeah thank you for giving those
i'm curious like
how do you practice or iterate on your
abilities
either as an educator in computer
science in general i'm a bit of a
practice nerd it's
a topic that i'm fascinated with so i'm
curious like what do you personally do
to try and improve
so there's quite a few different things
first of all i study so i like to study
i've been a nerd my whole life and i'm
proud of that
well i've been teaching i choose three
textbooks before the summer
and i purchase those three textbooks in
whatever areas it is that i'm trying to
study that summer and i
spend some time not just studying the
textbooks but finding
videos about the topics finding experts
in the field to like just
explore and that's one of the reasons
why i
love neuroscience and child development
i spent the summer
studying that i spent the summer
studying psychology
last summer was not a one that i studied
because it was a coveted summer and i
was trying to survive
which meant preparing for a year i
didn't understand
but the year before i had brought some
books on machine learning and such
because i was interested in ai
i understood none of it but it was fun
trying but that's the kind of thing
where i
study but that's the same thing i do for
diversity i don't know everything
and i still try to learn from other
people one of the most recent
conversations on a twitter
learning network we were talking about
pronouns for example
and it came up because one of my
students had mentioned something
and we ended up having a conversation
about what questions are we asking
is the right question what's your
preferred pronoun or is the question
what pronouns do you use and not only
that but subdividing it and we come up
with three questions i believe and it
was
what pronouns do you want to use with
me when we're talking one-on-one what
pronouns do you want me to use
when your parents or guardians are here
and what pronouns do you want to use in
the classroom in this classroom
because those three things might
actually not be the same especially in a
middle school or
upper school high school scenario and it
gave me a lot of pause
to think i hadn't gotten to that point
on my own
that i wouldn't have gotten to that
point on my own and that this is still
something that i
very much need to learn about and most
of us in that group had used a variation
but never those
kinds of three things together and one
of the things that i think is important
here is
there are so many people doing this work
who are still learning
based on what our students feedback has
been because those three questions
didn't come from us the teachers they
came from
a student saying when my mom's here
please don't use that
so when i say that we're still learning
it's not because you know that's not an
excuse
our students teach us so much about what
it is that they need
that we have to be works in progress so
that we can address what those needs are
and because society changes and because
we have to adapt
we can't just stop and say like oh i'm
great i am an equity expert and i'm done
again have not heard another equity
expert who says like i'm done learning
we can't be done learning
right i think that my whole point in
philosophy is that
i have to listen to others in order for
me to grow and that also
means that i ask my students for
feedback on
how they felt treated as well as how
they liked my programs and
i will say i've been at my current job
for three years and my first year that
was
shocking to a lot of students and they
felt uncomfortable because they hadn't
had a lot of teachers
explore some of these things but by my
third year now
when i tell my students to be honest
they're kind of brutal and that's
amazing
and they'll say like no that project
felt kind of jumbled or
unorganized or i do tell my students
from the get-go
my deadlines have to be flexible because
some projects might take longer than
others and some might take like a lot
less
and when we have ill-defined problems
that is the case
so they have to be okay with hey we're
gonna cut this short a little bit or
we're gonna give you
three more weeks because i messed up
because i want them to be able to finish
something
so their feedback is important and
having them
be able to express that in a very safe
way
and i hope that they agree with me on
this but it makes it
a much better classroom to be part of
because
they don't have to worry that i'm going
to get insulted if they say they hated
something or that they
didn't really feel comfortable when i
brought something up
that needs to be something that they can
address because when we're doing the
equity work
we also don't want to make it so that
our students are uncomfortable
so we have to provide safe spaces and
the only way to know if that is a safe
space is to ask them
if it is yeah i really appreciate that
uh resonates
so i identified non-binary and was
hosting
a panel discussion at the equity in
action summit and
everybody on the panel existed outside
of the male female binary
and one of the things they did bring up
was the thing that you just said so like
the pronoun may be different one-on-one
versus in the class versus at home
and that was something that i hadn't
even considered because i had parents
who would support that like they
wouldn't question that and i didn't need
to worry about that
and the students that i've worked with
who have shifted pronouns
in the class or asked for a different
pronoun were college students so i
haven't had k-12 students ask for that
so in my own experiences i didn't even
think about that and i
exist as a non-binary individual so like
i'm still learning through that as well
a really good point that you had with
that one of the things that you
mentioned with covid
and this last summer like preparing for
the unknown essentially for what this
year was going to look like i'm curious
how have you not just in this last year
but also
broadly speaking in the field of
education what have you done to kind of
take care of yourself and to try and
prevent that burnout that is often
pervasive
within the field so i didn't avoid the
burnout completely
as i am stepping out of the classroom
for a bit but i did take a job that was
educational in nature
because i still want to coach and i
still want to teach and i am an educator
and that's who i am so i didn't avoid
the burnout
as much as i wish i would have but i
will say that
i am lucky in that i think that the
classrooms that i had built
were a lot easier to exist in a coveted
world than if i had to redo everything
what i mean by that is yes my robotics
classes are difficult
one of my classes we could do because we
have robots for each child and we kept
it at under 10
because we very generously revolution
robotics
donated those robots so we were able to
do that we couldn't do
all trimesters because between trimester
and one and two for example there was
only one day
we couldn't clean everything get
everything ready for the next group
so trimester two we adapted the class
trimester three we're back at the robots
because
three months have gone by and now we can
use the robust again but one of the
things is
my seventh and eighth grade classes we
didn't have enough robots to kind of run
that
and we have a lot more students who
wanted the class so
i can't have 18 individual robots for
example
or 24. so those classes were adjusted to
be something more computational and so
we do some simulations but we also do
other things
i created something where we are always
working around
problems so we address some problems you
know and that
might be an ill-defined game based
problem or it can be something else
that's easily adaptable or a lot easier
than
if i am married to i have to have my
smart board in front of me a projector
and a whatever and the materials that i
have in the room or
because i adapt my classes to be
very individualistic i feel like i
didn't make as many changes or
concessions as i would have had
if i was 10 years ago me in that respect
i think i got lucky i think my students
are still having fun
they're still getting in trouble for you
doing stuff for my class in other
classes which
i always find fun it's interesting
because when i get a complaint from a
teacher like
i caught your student working on their
minecraft project
i have to respond i'm so sorry i'll talk
to him and
inside i'm like yes they were interested
i am very proud of the fact that my
students continue to work even though
they don't have homework so those kinds
of things i think my
classes are easier to adapt to whatever
it is that's
thrown at them because of the way that
they are
set up but at the same time it takes a
toll
to have to teach as many classes
i'm also helping with the instructional
piece a lot
how do i use technology in the classroom
i've run quite a bit of pd in
my school this year helping with some of
the deij stuff with with our director of
the eij and some of the counseling
pieces
with our counselor with our learning
specialist i
partner with a lot of people in the
school just to make sure that we have
what we need and i do you know i've been
lucky because again my administration is
super supportive of what it is that i do
and so we've been sharing as much as
possible with others
so that it can maybe hopefully help them
adjust and adapt in an easier way but
what i want to do this whole year again
not in a million years not as an
educator it's been too much and it's
somebody will inevitably fall through
the cracks because we have students
on screen we have students in the room i
said this
recently you know i got to a point with
a student where
they finally shared you know their
passion for anime etc
and i had such a fun conversation with
the student and i was so excited and we
were talking
a couple of us teachers were talking and
i said i finally got
through to this kid and we had this
amazing conversation
and then i said but yet i know that the
six months it took me to get here it
would have taken me a month if we were
in person
right that's the piece that i miss the
most
is i want that connection with my
students i have a really good connection
with some of them because
some of my students are in multiple
classes with me so i have had students
who have seen
every single trimester for the last
three years but there's others who are
new and i still don't know them as well
right and that's the part that's
difficult as an educator because our
connections to our students are so
important
and for me to know them as individuals
in this setting
is hard what do you wish there was more
research on that could
inform your own practices either for
this past year this upcoming year or
just in general
i don't know because we had never been
faced with this so
i don't know that there is a right
answer to this
i wish teachers were involved in the
decisions
much more than they were and i think
that that's the piece where i
am most disappointed with it's that it
felt we had no voice
and it felt like decisions were being
made outside of
any consideration for how that would
affect teachers
again i'm very lucky i am working from
home even though my students are
in school for medical reasons but the
teachers who are in school
they basically have no planning periods
they're working
non-stop to cover each other when
there's somebody sick when there's
somebody gone when a family member
is sick and they have to go take care of
them when all those little things that
used to happen
before coved are a thousand times harder
now because
it's also harder to find substitutes
right to go into
a classroom and take that risk and it's
also
not ideal my kids are stuck
sitting in a room and i'm in a
progressive school where
students always moved around and it was
a very lively
happy place and i don't see that as much
this year
and that's so crushing for me
because students you know they're
exhausted by the end of the day
when there's so many protocols to be
found and followed and
you know i'm wearing a mask all day i
have to keep my distance from my friends
and i have to
always be on which takes
physically a toll on students they get
tired
and that's not something that you can
control and it might not be the best
scenario and you know
i've heard every excuse in the book but
the truth is they're
tired and we made no changes so
if a student is it that exhausted where
they're falling asleep at two o'clock
then why are we going further than two
o'clock and could we have changed
some of that could we have given them a
day at home
throughout the week to recover could we
have made sure
that maybe classes were shorter so that
teachers could actually have some time
in the afternoons to prep and recover
should we have done that and my answer
to that would be absolutely yes we
should have done that we didn't
and so we have exhausted people and
exhausted students
and complaints about learning loss which
whatever that means because we've set up
these artificial
finish lines that we must complete but
every school has a different finish line
but everybody's talking about some sort
of learning loss and we live in a
society that
hasn't really acknowledged that we're an
epidemic
and things are going to be different and
different is not necessarily bad whether
or not
the students have a learning last look
they're going to catch up
whatever catching up means i don't want
to talk about catching up i want to say
their learning is going to be different
and that might actually be a good thing
if you were to
reach out to the like people who are
listening and say hey i could really use
help with
blank what would that blank be so like
if a listener might be able to assist
with something or help answer a question
or collaborate on something
you know i don't have a specific thing
that i would say that's my thing
i would say i am a huge proponent
of these like unofficial
learning networks you know there's a
group of us that follow each other on
twitter and there's groups of
i stay away from the facebook groups but
there are some that are great i hear
but part of this thing is we're doing
some really cool work in some very
spread out areas of this country for
example
and we do not have to do that alone and
we do not have to have these
conversations only with the people
around us
and so what i would say is if anybody
wants to have a conversation or
create a network or something that's
where i would like to be included i
am always looking for people who are
doing cool stuff in the classrooms
and using that to our advantage in terms
of
i learn from other people and i adapt
that to what my classroom is
you know because we are again spread out
and so something that worked really well
for me might not work for somebody else
but it is that whole idea of hey i loved
what you did
but i adapted it this way i want to hear
that
i want to hear what it is that worked
what didn't
how you're adapting what your students
say
that's the piece where i think you know
if anybody's willing to have those
conversations that's where i want to be
i want to
learn more from others because i am
nowhere near
perfect and so i'm not looking for
perfection that's a
no but just like i'm not trying to be
somebody as expert
i may have some expertise and i'm not a
great fan of
any of those kinds of words i am a
learner
and one of the things that i will tell
my students is i will learn with you if
i don't know the answer to something
i will look for help i am a proponent of
saying i don't know to students
i'm not google i don't have all the
answers so
those are the types of things where it's
like i don't know all the answers
so i want to have as many groups of
people who want to have these
conversations to get into a room and
have those conversations
and that room might look like a twitter
feed and it might look like a group in
facebook or it might look
something else but those are the things
that i think
helped me the most is having those
conversations with people who are doing
the work in different
areas different scenarios different
schools you know and we talk about that
these are artificial groups of friends
and
yet some of the people that are those
artificial friends that you know i've
never met in life are people who have
had some of the most impact in my
room and my practices it says something
about
what that can do for a teacher an
educator
regardless of how much they get put down
these are groups of people who can help
so much
and so that's what i want people to kind
of think about that we don't need to
stay within
our groups or our local
communities etc to learn because some of
the best
work might be two states down and how do
i find that out is by having
conversations
yeah and i don't know about for you but
in
most of the schools i've worked in in
the classes i was teaching was the only
teacher on that campus that taught that
class
so in order for me to find others who
knew anything about the content area
i had to actually go outside of that
bubble outside of that
physical space so that's a really good
point so
on that my boss my you know the director
of where i'm at
and she's amazing again i will say that
a thousand times
she partnered me because i'm a one-woman
show
with another one-woman show at the
school who was the art
teacher and emily joyce and i and i
presented some of this in the
acquitting action summit but we
developed what these competencies were
that we wanted our students to kind of
think through when they're creating
their goals for the trimesters
but emily and i had my favorite
collaboration
those two years that we worked together
she left to be an artist
full-time she was the art teacher and i
was the computational thinking teacher
and yet
our partnership was probably my favorite
of all time
we taught a class together that we had
to do
during covet times but it was art and
tech
and so how do we create art that has
some technology in it
we also taught a one-week what some
schools call
many masters and what others call you
know we call it insights and
it's a one week where students get to
choose one class and they take that
class all day every day for one week
emily and i had one that was cardboard
costume design which was fun
and then the next year we did cosplay
all day
which was very anime heavy but we got to
collaborate and things that most people
wouldn't say are your typical
partnerships
yeah she and i in most schools art and
tech don't communicate and yet when
others were having department meetings
emily and i were meeting and so i think
that that's the kind of stuff where
schools need to just break down that
whole like division of subjects and
stuff where people can talk about
more than just the content and
curriculum in their classrooms
i love to see what the science teachers
are doing there was a
humanities project that was really cool
because the kids could
choose how they presented their work so
some
created a playlist of songs that talked
about whatever book they were reading
others had essays that they submitted
others had a visual representation
so some art that they used to talk about
that book
when you create options like that your
students
show up more of who they are as
individuals and
i would never know that that project
even existed
unless we had a conversation about it as
a group
instead of you know the departments the
departments meet and that's the only
people that they talk to
and that's not the philosophy that i
want to follow as an educator i want to
learn from
everybody not just the cs teachers yeah
that's a really good point and
i like that reframing of it in hindsight
i should have reached out
especially to the two music teachers
that we had on campus because all my
degrees are music education
if anyone could have made those
connections between music and computer
science i could have done it
but i didn't do that i was reaching out
to the other computer science teachers
in the district
so yeah hindsight 2020.
yeah you know and now there's a i don't
know if you've
seen it ear sketch from georgia tech
yeah it's still a work in progress
i want to see more depth into the
teacher aspect of all things on that
but i love that they use python with the
library
to do some music composition and my kids
adore it so those kinds of
things that we can do in the classroom
but if i wanted to talk about
composition of music if this wasn't a
covid year we had already planned on
having the music teacher one of them
come in to talk about what makes a good
song
because he has a ton more knowledge
about that even though i studied a lot
of music so i stand for the san juan
philharmonic i sang with the handle
choir baltimore i've done
quite a bit of music myself but it's all
classical and it was all about the voice
where my co-worker he's a musician
like he knows composition
he knows how to create her students
that's a different perspective i don't
need to know everything in my classroom
i can bring somebody else
to teach the parts that i don't know but
those collaborations are only possible
when
we are provided the opportunities to
talk to each other
and my school does a pretty brilliant
job of that but there's others where
i've been where
faculty meetings we were not allowed to
speak it was
whoever was leading the meeting and it
was a quiet meeting and you sat there
for an hour and then you left
and then the other meetings were
department meetings so all the math
teachers talking together about
math that has not provided any
insight into other things
so i do think that at schools we need to
move into a different world
when i was a student because i'm older
we had to learn some things because
there was no computer there was no
google
there are some things that i absolutely
needed in order to succeed
that is not this world in this world the
information is there
what my students really really need is
how do i get the information that i need
and how do i digest and how do i
associate that information how do i take
what i need but not what i don't need
how do i
interpret analyze and get to those
conclusions
that is much more important in this
society
than memorizing a whole bunch of
historical data
the history is important the real
history is important
super important but the memorization of
it isn't
right so i can stop spending time doing
that
spend a lot more time talking about why
things happen
and how does that relate to what we're
seeing now
and what are the cycles history is very
cyclical
we have a pandemic now 100 years ago
there was another one and if you go 100
years before
there are things that happen in a cycle
it's like the 500 year floods
like there's things that happen and
that's just because of the
magnitude of it not necessarily that
happens every 500 years
but it is because it happens sort of
every 500 years or so
it's those cycles in history with nature
with the way that human beings behave
the war is the whatever you can look at
that and learn
about how those things repeat themselves
and the things that lead up to those
things
instead of in 1941 something happened
who cares those are the types of things
that i think need to change it's the
shift
from memorization and traditional
education to analysis
yeah snaps over here on my end
it resonates
and i love education if you can't tell i
love
to understand more about it and i love
to
explore things because again i'm not an
expert in all these areas i am
certainly not a historian i've always
loved patterns
and so that also means that i wasted a
lot of
years hating history because of the way
that it was taught
and as an adult i've started to love
learning more about history because i
now
focus differently on it but the only
reason that happened is because i ended
up observing a class where a teacher was
talking about history very differently
and that's the piece that i think i want
to keep repeating and i want
people to hear is that we may be doing
things that are working
but i guarantee you that there's
somebody out there that's doing it
better and so
how do we know that it by having those
conversations by
observing other people by talking to
other people
because we should just like i want my
students to better
themselves to be better than themselves
to compete against themselves i also
want to be better
i also want to continue to learn i also
want to know what others are doing
not because i want to beat them but
because i want to beat me
i want to be the best possible educator
i can be
not for me because the better i am as an
educator the better the experience of my
students
and that's the part that i think is
important yeah i'm trying not to say the
same thing over and over but it
definitely
resonates with me i i really appreciate
that
so where might people go to connect with
you or the organizations that you work
with
i'm easily found on twitter it's the
easiest way to find me
direct message on twitter will get you
all my other contact information
and i'm twitter um the nerdy geek with
underscores under each word
my personal email is smargarita99
gmail.com
but again if they need anything else i'm
more than happy to discuss and dms are
open and with that that concludes this
week's episode of the csk8 podcast
if you enjoyed this particular episode
please consider sharing this
and following sophia on twitter or even
providing a review on whatever platform
you're listening to this on
it just helps more people find this
content stay tuned next week for another
unpacking scholarship episode and two
weeks from now for another interview
i hope you're all staying safe and are
having a wonderful week
Guest Bio
Sofía De Jesús is the author of Applied Computational Thinking with Python: Design algorithmic solutions for complex and challenging real-world problems and an education professional with over 20 years of experience teaching mathematics and computational thinking subjects to students grades five through college. Sofía graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a Bachelor's degree in General Sciences with a focus on mathematics. She has a master's degree in Teacher Education and Allied Professions from the University of Dayton and completed the coursework for an EdD in Educational Leadership from the University of Phoenix. In her career, she has combined her love of development and curriculum design with her love for teaching. As a teacher, Sofía helps students incorporate the philosophy of computational thinking in courses like game design, circuits, Python, web design, and robotics. Sofía also currently works part time as an Associate Program Manager for Carnegie Mellon University's CS Academy team. She will join the team full time after the end of this school year. In that position, she hopes to help provide access to every community, especially in Spanish speaking countries, to expand representation of these communities in Computer Science and technology areas. Sofía has presented in multiple conferences about the importance of computational thinking and STEM in schools as well as the importance of diversity and equity in how we approach these topics in the classroom. Her most recent presentation was for CSTA's Equity in Action Summit, where she presented on Equity in Curriculum and Assessment Design in the CS Classroom.
In her spare time, Sofía likes to play video games and spend time with her 12 year old Yorkie, King Kong. Sofía also enjoys creating materials, small furniture, and jewelry using CNC machines and laser cutters. She enjoys spending as much time in Puerto Rico as work and life permits.
Resources/Links Relevant to This Episode
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In this episode I talk about how you can use Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to encourage feedback and dialogue among students around the projects they create.
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In this episode I unpack Scott’s (2012) publication titled “Rethinking the roles of assessment in music education,” which summarizes three roles of assessment (assessment of learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning) that I discuss in relation to computer science education.
Trans Voices Speak: Suggestions from Trans Educators about Working with Trans Students
In this episode I unpack Cayari et al.’s (2021) publication titled “Trans voices speak: Suggestions from trans educators about working with trans students,” which provides five suggestions from Trans educations on working with Trans students.
Vulnerability, Reflection, and CS Education with Amy Ko
In this interview with Amy Ko, we discuss the importance of mentorship in education, learning what not to do with teaching, the positive results of being vulnerable, understanding and exploring the limitations and consequences of CS, problematizing grades in education, practicing teaching through mental simulations, the importance of engaging in the CS community, and much more.
Check out EarSketch, the music platform that Sofía mentioned
Find other CS educators and resources by using the #CSK8 hashtag on Twitter