Professional Development for In-Service Teachers of Programming: Evaluation of a University-Level Program

Abstract

Professional Development (PD) organizations provide training programs for computer science teachers through teacher PD. Programming as part of a teacher’s PD has grown in importance in K-12 education. As a result, an increasing number of teachers, often without sufficient training, are teaching programming in their schools. It’s challenging to learn to program, and it’s even more challenging to teach it. Teachers must be able to program and teach programming, which is usually done in the context of multiple disciplines. In this study, we take a closer look at a teacher’s perspective on teachers’ PD in programming. We focus on the PD program offered by our university, composed of two courses over one academic year, and define the following research questions: Which strengths and weaknesses of the PD program provided are suited for in-service teachers when learning to program? Learning programming takes time. How could this long learning process be supported? This is an interview study of sixteen in-service teachers who joined the program. The main findings seem to be that teachers are comfortable with how the program is set up. They prefer flexible courses so that they can adapt the implementation with their regular teaching. They also emphasize the need for a continuous learning process and a community of practice (CoP) to continue developing. The main contribution of this study is the evaluation of the PD program at the university.