Public Group active 8 months, 2 weeks ago
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
Admins:
Community of Practice (CoP) 2023-2024
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In my breakout during today’s CoP, we discussed a few problems of practice:
- 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.
- Laura G mentioned talking with her students about where they see computers in their daily lives as a way to motivate them
- Michelle F mentioned she’d like to find videos or examples of teachers teaching with Scratch from real NYC DOE classrooms
- Virginia G shared that there are resources up on Youtube from previous Scratch conferences that might provide examples
- 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”
- Curricular examples and videos from the NYCDOE CS4All Blueprint: https://blueprint.cs4all.nyc/
- Student projects to get TCs excited about what K-12 learners’ why’s might be. https://emoticon.mouse.org/
- 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
- PRIMM model for looking together at code
- Microworlds to create smaller “sandboxes” for exploring particular math ideas: https://elementarymath.edc.org/programming/
- Jessica’s Getting Started with Scratch slide deck
- Rubrics for assessing students’ CT with Scratch: https://scratched.gse.harvard.edu/ct/assessing.html
- Teknikio Ideation Game: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z55V_NHHcDe_yOqKOHs1uVMc2WaiDWH1/view
- How to support learning of tech, computing simultaneously, and do it in culturally relevant ways?
- 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.
- 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.
🐛 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 - 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.
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