Improving Professional Development in Computer Science Education
By: Benji Xie
Tags: Computer Science, Computing Education, Teacher Training, Professional Development, STEM

We need better PD for CS educators, and Dr. Sue Sentance guides us through the decades of PD research to make it happen!

Early this month, I got to serve as session chair for Dr. Sue Sentance’s keynote speech at the CSEdGrad Virtual Conference. This conference is part of a larger effort by the organization to grow and develop the community of computer science education researchers.

Dr. Sentance gave a talk on professional development for CS educators and her work with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, England’s National Centre for Computing Education, and King’s College London make her the perfect expert to speak about the topic. The gap in professional development for CS educators manifests through a shortage of CS teachers and trouble retaining qualified teachers in the US and all over the world. Thankfully, there are decades of research in professional development and Dr. Sentance dedicated her keynote to guiding us through them.

A model for teacher change from Clarke & Hollingsworth 2002.

PD is developing sustained communities dedicated to situated learning outcomes

For professional development to be successful, it must be sustained, collaborative, and relevant to learner outcomes. That is to say that PD is continuous (e.g. happens across multiple terms) and not one shot. It should be collaborative, with professional communities and peer-to-peer networks to enable domain experts (teachers, PD experts) to support each other. And we must align PD to real, learning outcomes in the classroom.

While the goals of PD sound straightforward, we often don’t commit to PD and instead settle for traditional in-service staff development that often misses the mark. In-service staff development focuses on activities at workshops or seminars, whereas PD must focus on building capacity to understand the subject matter and through longer duration connections. In-service staff development leaves the challenge of translating new knowledge to the classroom for the teacher to figure out on their own, whereas PD must address the challenge of scaffolding learning that is immediately relevant and builds into something more generalizable. In service staff-development often focuses on developing individual teachers in a context separate from where they teach, whereas PD must take place as a community that spans across contexts. PD takes an investment of time and resources, but can also pay dividends through long-term growth of communities of CS educators!

In contrast to in-service staff development, PD must be continuous, scaffold learning, occur across contexts, be collaborative. From Stein, Smith, & Silver 1999.

CS Ed research in PD is under-explored!

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we need to more PD research CS education to build onto what we have already discovered. Dr. Sentance highlighted some PD research in CS Ed.

An example of PD in CS is England’s National Centre for Computing Education which is a school-led model of PD with regional hubs, curriculum resources, online courses, local support, support for pedagogy and action-research, an online learning platform, and teacher certification, as summarized in the figure below.

The National Centre of Computing Education (NCEE) is a national effort with local and online support.

Conclusion and Discussion: How to make PD happen

“I help teachers with subject knowledge and help to ensure that they understand the concepts prior to teaching them. I give people confidence to go away and actually use the resources. I give them the confidence to give it a go.“

-Bea, Master Teacher

Dr. Sentance concluded her talk by reemphasizing how effective PD is sustained and collaborative, align to learning outcomes in the classroom, and must have professional communities to support each other.

She then raised open challenges related to implementing PD and had the audience break into small groups to discuss:

Six PD implementation challenges that the audience discussed.

My group discussed how so many of these implementation challenges were context-dependent. We also discussed what outcomes to look for in successful PD. We concluded that successful PD can look like improved teacher self-efficacy in instruction as well as deeper understanding of pedagogical content knowledge.

Notes that groups shared on how to implement PD. https://padlet.com/sue181/j93amet2kvqreguc

Coming into this talk, I knew that PD was important but under-explored. Dr. Sue Sentance provided me and other audience members an overview of what effective PD looks like and provided rich examples of how initiatives to improve PD in CS education. I look forward to more robust PD in CS education in the future, because more supported CS teachers is necessary for more supported CS students!

Learn more: Reports on PD

Dr. Sentance also pointed us to many reports and resources to better understand professional development:

Contemporary Approaches to Teacher Professional Development (2010): Synthesizes prior work to identify characteristics of effective PD, as shown in figure below:

CUREE report (2013): PD should be collaborative, supported by domain expertise, focused on aspirations for students, sustained over time, and exploring evidence from trying new things to connect practice to theory

Effective Teacher Professional Development (2017): effective PD is content focuses, incorporate active learning, supports collaboration, uses models of effective practice, provides coaching and expert support, offers feedback and reflection, is of sustained duration.