Building Multi-level Alignment in Local Computer Science for All Implementations for Sustainability

The New York City Foundation For Computer Science Education, Armonk NY

Investigators

Abstract

Computer science (CS) education in the United States is a rapidly evolving exercise in educational change. Local initiatives to bring quality CS education to all students in cities and states are emerging as communities and school districts respond to the growing desire to include computer science in K-12 education settings. Successful initiatives are often supported by non-profit organizations or district leadership that possess an understanding of both CS content and education. The multi-pronged approach has positioned the CS for All movement to make rapid progress in the goal of broadening access to computing education for K-12 learners. However, this rapid expansion has also created significant difficulties, as the options available to schools and teachers have outpaced the supports necessary for a school district, without an expert in CS education, to thoughtfully select CS education partners to facilitate teacher professional development and curricular implementation. Selection of CS education partners requires an understanding of how to coordinate vision, implementation, and curriculum decisions. Thus, this project will create a research-practice partnership (RPP) to support K-8 schools in developing coordinated visions and multi-grade implementation plans that facilitate their development of sustainable CS programs that scale to broader participation. Through research and implementation, the project will contribute to an understanding of CS education implementation choices at the K-8 level. These implementation choices are key to sustainable CSforAll initiatives around the country. The project will contribute to the understanding of that decision making process, supports that can help schools and districts in the process, and measures for schools and districts to use to assess the alignment of their ongoing implementation to community visions. These outcomes will contribute fundamental insights about how to foster systemic educational change efforts as they relate to CS education. The research, a descriptive study, will focus on documenting and understanding the process of visioning, aligned decision making, and implementation moves that can facilitate broader participation in K-8 computing education. Four project goals guide the Researcher Practitioner Partnership (RPP) work: Goal 1: Establish an RPP between the CSforAll Consortium, New York University, and two Boards of Cooperative Educational Services in rural and suburban New York to support CS for All efforts, with an eye toward long-term partnership and future, iterative work. Goal 2: Design and pilot visioning, decision-making, and implementation routines that can provide an integrated toolkit for facilitating K-8 school and district decision making around CS for All implementation. Goal 3: Develop a set of practical measures that can provide fast, formative metrics for districts and schools to evaluate the alignment and implementation of their CS for All initiatives over time. Goal 4: Conduct research on the guided decision-making and implementation processes that the partnership undertakes that will result in scholarly insights about enabling more nuanced and robust CS for All implementation decisions that can be scalable, sustainable, and reach broader populations of learners.