Computer Science for All Teachers

American Institutes For Research In The Behavioral Sciences, Arlington VA

Investigators

Abstract

The American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences (AIR) proposes a one year effort to continue to grow the CS for All Teachers community of practice (CoP) while building a research agenda for the community going forward. The CS for All Teachers project will enrich and deepen the teacher support provided by the virtual CoP that was originally developed by AIR in 2013, redesigned in 2015, and rebranded (from the CS10K Community) in 2016. According to the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology (2014), there are four features which most strongly associate with value received by online community participants: distributed leadership, structured activities, tangible products, and resource repositories and robust tools. AIR will focus on these key features during this year to cultivate a sustainable teacher-led community of practice. With this new funding, AIR has three goals: 1. Cultivate a sustainable teacher-led community of practice, which is driven by member needs and interests. AIR will pilot a corps of teacher leaders, who will help to sustain and deepen engagement as community ambassadors. The pilot findings will inform the future development of a teacher leadership toolkit. In addition, AIR will work with the Computer Science Teachers Association to explore microcredentialing and/or badging of teachers for participation in professional development activities in the CoP. 2. Expand and improve a user-friendly, secure website. AIR will work with their web developer to implement updates to the website, including upgrades to Drupal 8 and responsive design features. Additional data will be collected on recruitment and communications strategies, on members who respond to specific content within the community, and from the implementation of the Drupal recommendations module (similar to Amazon's "if you liked X, you may like Y" offerings). When combined with analytics updates, these new data will facilitate planning for better professional learning and content curation activities. 3. Implement more robust evaluation activities to guide community programming and to develop a long-term agenda for research. AIR will tap into the expertise--both content and research-based--of CS education advisors to review and provide feedback on pilot activities for this year and evaluation plans for subsequent years. An initial needs assessment will be completed, along with the implementation of new site surveys and other feedback mechanisms. In addition, AIR will conduct an outreach plan to identify and contact inactive members of the community (i.e., those who have not logged in for at least 6-12 months) to determine their interests, needs, and concerns. The analysis of these data will provide a clearer sense of what will be needed to increase engagement of all community members, and subsequently contribute to planning for future years. CS for All Teachers will continue its efforts to better understand how teachers are putting their community engagement to use in their own classrooms and how valuable it is for their daily work in order to better tailor community activities.