A first-year experience report on a model for statewide deployment of CS principles courses (abstract only)

Abstract

This poster describes our first-year experience in developing and evaluating a CS Principles professional development model for training a cohort of teachers across an entire state geography. The scalable deployment and sustainable persistence of the new CS Principles course adopts the successful practices of a national AP training program developed by the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). It applies those practices in a professional development program based on year-long in-person training and distance learning collaboration. A statewide "Teacher Leader" model is being explored where those already teaching more rigorous CS courses will assist in training new peer cohorts as they establish CS Principles in their schools. Teachers in these cohorts collaborate together on content and pedagogical learning experiences, fostered by peer leaders. The assessment is uncovering the facets of our model that are most suitable for building a sustainable network of CS Principles teachers. This poster is focused on a description of our first-year experiences and extensive evaluation results. The poster will describe the curriculum that is being developed by our teachers, a set of lessons learned from our PD experiences, and the details of our evaluation. The Teacher Leaders will be available near the poster to discuss their experience with anyone who has an interest in our professional development model for CS Principles.