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Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) @ CUNY

Computing Integrated Teacher Education is a four-year initiative to support CUNY faculty at all ranks to integrate state standards aligned computing content and pedagogy into required education courses, field work and student teaching. Supported by public funding from the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) Computer Science for All (CS4All) program and private funding from the Robin Hood Learning + Technology Fund, the initiative will focus on building on and complementing the success of NYCDOE CS4All and pilots to integrate computational thinking at Queens College, Hunter College and Hostos Community College.

The initiative focuses on:
– Supporting institutional change in teacher education programs
– Building faculty computing pedagogical content knowledge through the lens of culturally response-sustaining education
– Supporting faculty research in equitable computing education, inclusive STEM pedagogies, and effects on their students’ instructional practices

Community of Practice (CoP) 2023-2024

  • Posted by Anthony Wheeler (he/him) on October 5, 2023 at 10:43 am

    By now, folks are likely deep in artifact implementation. Things are likely going well, and also not so well (and that’s okay)!

    🖋️ Post your problems of practice on this forum – anything from tech issues to teaching issues – to help get some conversations about your challenges going.

    🗓️ The community will be invited to respond to your post and CUNY Central will find common issues and host meetups on Fridays 9:30-10:30am on the following Fridays:

    • 10/20/2023
    • 10/27/2023
    • 11/10/2023
    • 11/17/2023
    • Spring dates are pending!

    💡 Some ideas of things to post:

    • Getting ready to teach the use of a tool and you want some guidance/support? Share the tool, describe your course and your students, and your learning goals/activity around computing.
    • Have trouble with a specific aspect of a tool? Can’t figure out how to do something? Share the tool, briefly describe what you are trying to do, and where you are getting stuck – include screenshots if you can!
    • Tried something and it didn’t go well? Tell us what you tried and what your goals were, how your students reacted with some evidence of their reaction, and any reflections, questions, or concerns that are top of mind.

    If there’s a particular Friday (of those above) when you’d be available to talk about your problem of practice, share that in your post too!!

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 39 total)
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  • Anthony Wheeler (he/him)
    Member
    October 17, 2023 at 12:15 pm

    Hi everyone, I’m adding some guiding questions to consider when visiting the CoP forum:

    • What problems of practice are coming up as you implement your CITE artifact?
    • What have you learned about yourself during this implementation so far? 
    • What have you learned about your students?
    Laura M. Gellert (She/Her)
    Member
    October 20, 2023 at 10:50 am

    Hello

    Based on the CoP session today  – I thought we may discuss why, how and for what reason people are using survey’s in their courses.

    I heard some people talk about the buy in and comfort level of the students.  Someone mentioned a survey they created.  I thought it may help to hear about the surveys people are using in their courses to understand where the students are prior to the artifact being implemented and after the artifact has been experienced.  Are the surveys for research purposes or for student assessment or reflection?

    Something to consider,

    Laura

    Aankit Patel (he/him/his)
    Member
    October 20, 2023 at 11:15 am

    Today at the CoP, a faculty member expressed concerns that students were making slow progress on Scratch projects and were not making use of help resources/sessions. I shared some strategies on peer learning that might help address these issues and maybe also make clearer the why behind integration of computing

    • Short crit sessions at the beginning of class: Ask one student to present their work, the class asks clarifying questions, give warm feedback (“join the presenter’s thinking”). Max 15-20 minutes.
    • Pair programming is strategy used by engineers where one person is at the computer actively programming and the other one is thinking through the problem, drawing it out, whiteboarding, maybe researching underlying concepts, talking it out, etc. Video on Pair Programming in the classroom
    • Collaborative problem solving strategies. DOE teachers have been figuring out this problem for a few years now with younger students and perhaps some of the peer learning strategies might be helpful – here is a video DOE CS4All produced featuring our City College colleague Jody Hilton: Puzzling through Problems Together
    Sara Vogel, PhD. (she/her)
    Member
    October 20, 2023 at 1:15 pm

    In my breakout during today’s CoP, we discussed a few problems of practice:

    1. How to help TCs connect with the ‘why’ of using Scratch and learning about CT – especially in-service or graduate students already in the field who feel like using Scratch or learning computational thinking can’t fit in the packed school day.
      1. Laura G mentioned talking with her students about where they see computers in their daily lives as a way to motivate them
      2. Michelle F mentioned she’d like to find videos or examples of teachers teaching with Scratch from real NYC DOE classrooms
        1. Virginia G shared that there are resources up on Youtube from previous Scratch conferences that might provide examples
        2. Sara shared resources from Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS) research including case studies and videos around using Scratch in interdisciplinary school contexts, especially with multilingual learners — these could help teachers see how others have defined the “why”
        3. Curricular examples and videos from the NYCDOE CS4All Blueprint: https://blueprint.cs4all.nyc/
        4. Student projects to get TCs excited about what K-12 learners’ why’s might be. https://emoticon.mouse.org/
    2. How to support TCs problem-solving with Scratch, and how to do it in ways that balance enough structure with students’ agency. We swapped lots of ideas and resources around this
      1. PRIMM model for looking together at code
      2. Microworlds to create smaller “sandboxes” for exploring particular math ideas: https://elementarymath.edc.org/programming/
      3. Jessica’s Getting Started with Scratch slide deck
      4. Rubrics for assessing students’ CT with Scratch: https://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/assessing.html
      5. Teknikio Ideation Game: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z55V_NHHcDe_yOqKOHs1uVMc2WaiDWH1/view
    3.  How to support learning of tech, computing simultaneously, and do it in culturally relevant ways?
      1. Questions came up about whether to foreground the tech or the content when using Scratch to teach. Laura G commented that she thinks about what she is aiming to teach — is she using tech to get to math? Is it to learn something about tech or computational thinking? Both? That can be a helpful way to help set a purpose / priority.
      2. Some expressed doubts about whether culturally relevant teaching can support rigorous STEM learning (especially in our age of standardized tests). We didn’t get to finish this conversation but during our team debrief later, we discussed how when people think about “culturally relevant” activities, they often have in mind surface-level “get to know you” activities divorced from content area learning. We argue that those kinds of activities fall short of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) — see Gloria Ladson-Billings foundational article, which argues that promoting academic success is a core tenet of CRP. CRP and CRSE ask educators to design rich content area learning experiences rooted in students’ lives, funds of knowledge, language repertoires, and so on. Rigorous STEM learning HAS to be culturally relevant / sustaining if it is to connect with especially marginalized students and push our fields forward towards better, more innovative ways of doing STEM.
    Sean (He/Him/His)
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:36 pm

    Sean Turner, Hunter College, A bud – still in progress

    Maria Jerskey (she/her)
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:39 pm
      <li style=”font-weight: 400;” aria-level=”1″>LaGuardia Community College
      <li style=”font-weight: 400;” aria-level=”1″>🐛 
      <li aria-level=”1″>I still haven’t implemented it; it comes at the end of my semester. I’m still learning how to do the platform! 🙂
    Anders (AJ) Stachelek (They/Them)
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:39 pm

    Hostos Community College
    A rose is that students seemed to have genuinely enjoyed the summer pilot of the Excel program and its use in conducting statistical analysis and doing real-world problems.
    A thorn was the whole IRB process – that was moderately painful when adding the research assistant as additional personnel. The rest was not so bad.
    As for the bud, I am super excited to now dive deep into analyzing student work and seeing what they actually learned and analyze their responses to technology (VERY positive anecdotally, like I said but will be cool to actually unpack their comments).
    Problems of practice seem to be student engagement in the online environment.

    Melissa Garcia (She/ella/her)
    Participant
    November 2, 2023 at 4:39 pm

    🐛 In progress-
    Learnings: my original scratch template was too complex for the focus on multilingual learning and audio recording in diverse languages.
    Problem of practice: managing the amount of worktime and encouraging undergraduate tinkering. risk taking

    Marcella Mandracchia (She/Her)
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:40 pm

    Hostos Community College

    Rose: It is too early for this one for me.

    Thorn: Students need support with technology

    Bud: Students like the idea of working with creating the children’s book.

    Elise Langan (She/Her/)
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:40 pm

    Hi Everyone,

    I can’t find the roses or thorn but I’ll report that my ASYN students seem nonchalant about their upcoming Padlet assignment to prepare for their teaching demos…

     

    Xin Bai
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:42 pm

    Students showed resilience in coding and problem-solving. They created greeting cards, games, and activities. They learned a lot from each other rather than from me.

    Michelle Fraboni
    Member
    November 2, 2023 at 4:43 pm

    Hi all –

    Working with Scratch Jr. was a Rose! – my students LOVED it and felt a tiny but more prepared to use

    Scratch…

    Aankit Patel (he/him/his)
    Member
    November 3, 2023 at 9:39 am

    that’s a bud! You have some response…perhaps not the response you were expecting? but you’re learning something!

    Laura M. Gellert (She/Her)
    Member
    November 3, 2023 at 9:39 am

    A Rose – excitement from my students on just being exposed to Excel, Desmos and Didax virtual manipulatives

    A Thorn – there is not enough time to explore with other things that we are exploring

    Anna Pinkas
    Participant
    November 3, 2023 at 9:39 am

    BMCC

    🐛

    Coordinating activities is a challenge but it looks like we are making progress on the Makerspace staffing issue.

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