Teacher Ed on C'est la Z

CS Teacher Certification - starting Cohort 3

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 10:25:35 -0400

Tomorrow we'll kick off cohort 3 of Hunter's Computer Science teacher Advanced Certificate program. That is, New York State's only currently approved program for working, certified teachers that leads to New York's new Certificate to teach Computer Science.

This is not our first rodeo, having gone through this twice already but there are a few differences this time out.

First off, we're going big. Cohorts one and two had about 20 candidates each. This time, we'll have around 55 teachers who will be joined by around 5 masters students. That's exciting but a little scary. I'm sure I've also mentioned before that a handful of our teachers are from the Dryden school district up around the finger lakes. I'm super excited that we're able to not only work with NYC teachers but also to help build the community beyond the five boroughs.

Bigger cohort means more instructors. Adding to the team this year is my long time partner in crime Sam. I wanted to include Sam from the start but unfortunately he was on sabbatical the year prior to cohort 1 and according to DOE rules (he's a K12 teacher) you can't work in any capacity during your sabbatical year. Sam's been involved in almost all of my teaching side projects along with JonAlf and Topher so it's great that we can get the band back together.

We're also adding on my friend and colleague on the Hunter CS side, William and I've been looking to be able to actually work with him for years.

We'll also have 4 TAs per class. That is going to be interesting. The TAs are undergrads - they're all terrific but it's possible that some of the candidates teach in the schools that the TAs attended. It'll all be good but it will be interesting.

As to running the show, we'll still use Zoom - one big Zoom when appropriate but breaking into groups of assorted sizes as appropriate from small breakout rooms to midsize "sections" for sharing. This will be a bit of an experiment but we'll get it right. One nice thing about teaching teachers is that they know when you're trying something new and if you're open and honest they'll help you to get it right. I think that's also probably something unique about our program. Since it's designed by and for K12 teachers and many of the instructors are K12 teachers we're all part of the same community. It's not a bunch of K12 teachers taking some classes taught by college people who have theories of how to teach K12. I mean, yes, we do have college profs involved as well but we also have K12 teachers, including myself who've walked the walk. The teachers in the program get this and know we're a family and our goal is to make the program as strong as possible, not only for them but for future participants.

Now, that might sound a little hokey but I really believe it.

Beyond Zoom we'll be using Slack for all discussion - much better than using Zoom chat. Besides the extra Slack features, Zoom chat goes away when the Zoom closes. Our Slack from even cohort 1 lives on and is still active. Truth be told, I prefer Zulip to Slack but we had already committed to Zoom which is fine.

The final piece for tooling is repl.it and that's been a game changer. During our first year, repl.it wasn't quite up to speed so teachers had to install environments on their own computers. This was at the start of the pandemic so it was 100% remote. Woof. All sorts of issues including some nice ones like a teacher with a DOE laptop that used to have Java on it but not any more (but the registry still had some hidden settings). Repl.it allows us to have one single consistent interface that everyone can use plus it integrates with GitHub. Of course, if a student comes in with a stronger background they can do their own thing but using repl.it has made things so much easier.

So, tomorrow at 9:00am we're off to the races. An 8 day all day programming class followed by 16 half days of more advanced programming along with 16 half days of CS teaching methods. In the Fall we'll do our ethics class and curriculum development and then finally topics in the Spring.

That will bring us to around 100 certified teachers.

Probably won't sleep tonight but looking forward to tomorrow.

Teaching and Pedagogy - words and music

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 20:12:43 -0400

I wanted to give a little more context on yesterday's post.

In reading over the various comments on social media related to the topic of required and desired CS teacher knowledge there are those that fall on the content is king and pedagogy not so important and others who think you don't really need a deep knowledge of CS. I think you need both and think current teachers need to be given a reasonable but finite amount of time to get there.

Whenever the topic comes up I think of Eddie and the Cruisers. Tom Berringer is playing a song - "On the Dark Side" for the band as the band ridicules him. Eddie (Michael Pare) says "Not bad" to which a band mate says - "he can't sing, he can't play and he can't write. What's not bad?" to which Eddie replies "he's got something we need, words and music."

Words and music - teaching and pedagogy. One isn't enough - you need both. You need the content but you also have to do something to bring value to the kids beyond just dumping the content on the desk - it's why I'm so against scripted curricula.

Why do I think both sides are so important? I probably got here from teaching at Stuyvesant for over 20 years. On top of that, I'm a Stuy grad ('84), Stuy husband (Devorah, also '84), Stuy brother, and two time Stuy parent. While Stuy has and had some good teachers, I got to see a bunch of bad ones. I saw teachers who didn't know their subject areas and teachers who didn't know how to teach. The rub is that at a school like Stuy the kids will figure out what they need on their own. You can put an unripe avocado on the teachers desk and the kids will still pass all the exams. Sure, the kids pass but every kid deserves a teacher that adds value to their lives.

Some of the worst at Stuy were teachers for whom Stuy was their first (and only) gig - they never really had to learn how to teach but for a variety of reasons - all the kids pass the AP or in the case of teachers that know content but not teaching, the "smart kids" like the teacher because they "know stuff" - they think they're good teachers.

Sorry, you have to add value.

The best thing that happened to me when I started was when Stuy's chairman didn't hire me. I ended up at Seward Park and that's where I started to learn my craft. Once at Stuy, I had to be careful not to fall into the trap - you can become a good or even a great teacher at a specialized school but, just like anywhere else, you have to work for it. You have to really look at what and how you're doing.

All of this is to say that to add value to your students you really have to know both the content and you have to know how to teach - you have to add value. If you can be replaced by an avocado, you're not earning your paycheck.

Now, I'm not saying that the teachers who don't know CS and are taking on this new challenge shouldn't be given time to learn the subject or that raw teachers who know their subject shouldn't be given time to learn how to teach but you eventually have to get there.

If we're okay with teachers who have to follow scripts for either content or pedagogy for the long term then we're devaluing our profession. I'd like to think we add more.

Physics Teacher Wanted - must NOT know Physics

Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:00:53 -0400

There were a few posts over on Facebook this weekend about teacher certification. It started with a question - should teacher certification be based on an exam like APCS-A with the teacher correctly answering 85% or greater. A lively discussion followed. There was agreement and disagreement with responses ranging from:

good idea
it's too hard
it's not hard enough

There was also a discussion of the importance of content knowledge vs knowing how to teach in general.

Since there was a lot going on in the thread I thought I'd pull my own thoughts out into this post.

Let's first look at the test. There are a number of states that have a content test for computer science. For some states, I think it's the only requirement. In terms of content, at least the Praxis exam is something like APCS-A on steroids. This is not a good thing. Don't get me wrong, I think a qualified CS teacher should know more than APCS-A on steroids but a single day test is not how you measure deep content knowledge. I know plenty of students who've passed standardized exams - be they regents, AP, or other but they were no way qualified to teach the course. They knew the formulas, recognized the patterns, but didn't really know the material. Is this what we want of our CS teachers? I certainly don't. I'm not hugely opposed to an exam covering somethign like college CS1 content other than my general anti-testing beliefs - it would help to curtail some of the problems that will invariably arise with weak certification programs but it should no way be the actual bar to teach - if it exists, it should be just one standard measure along the way.

Now to that content vs pedagogy thing. What current teachers and in fact most people in the CS Ed space forget is that states move slowly and that we're playing the long game. Right now most CS teachers are converts from other disciplines and relatively few have strong CS backgrounds but over time this will change. As CS becomes more established we'll have young teachers entering the filed with the intent of becoming a CS teacher. If states and teacher prep programs set the content bar low that'll be what we're stuck with for a LONG time. We wouldn't dream of creating a science teacher credential where the teacher hardly knows any science - no way should we do it for CS or any other subject.

The truth is that we need teacher prep programs that ensure that new CS teachers know both the content and how to teach it and that content should not be tied in to any specific curriculum. I wrote more about all of this here.

So what do do with current teachers and current needs? Easy - give them time. Back when I started teaching I was a career changer. I never took an education course, never student taught, nothing. Turns out that Math was a shortage area so I had an option - as long as I had enough math credits I'd get a temporary license and start teaching. Instead of teaching 5 classes, I'd teach 4 and get a mentor. I then had to get a certain number of education credits within a certain period of time. Since I already had the subject credits it was just about learning how to teach. Truth is, I barely survived that first year but things did get better.

New York and other states probably couldn't do the exact same thing. First off, current and potential teachers might not know the content so it wouldn't just be ed courses and second, certification rules have changed big time since NCLB. Still, they could do something similar - approve certification programs like the one I created at Hunter - ones designed for current non-CS teachers and give teachers a period of time to complete it. For career changers, create CS version of programs like the NY Teaching Fellows.

What isn't acceptable is saying that CS teachers don't have to know CS and that career changers who know CS don't have to learn how to teach. Create the programs and give people time. We're playing the long game and the only way we lose is if we cut corners for convenience at the expense of the kids.

Teachers Can Learn CS and CS people will go into teaching

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 12:24:52 -0400

A friend's post brought my attention to a new graduate CS Education Certificate program. It's not a New York State program so isn't in competition with what I do but it's the type of program that I was afraid of. The type that will hurt CS education more than it will help. There was enough discussion following the Facebook post that I thought I'd write about it here.

Before talking about the program itself, one issue that came up multiple times in the Facebook thread is that old red herring - we can't teach teachers real CS because if they know the real deal they'll all go into industry. I mean, who would want to teach with all those high paying tech jobs.

I call BS on this.

First, let's look at math and science. While it's true that since no child left behind, teacher certificate has been greatly neutered. Today you can be a math teacher and know math or you can be a math teacher who took only "math-ed" classes and barely know high school math. Back in the day you had to know math or whatever your field was.

New York's always been the financial capital of the world and somebody with a decent math background could always get a better than teacher paying job on the street. Beyond that there have always been plenty of other better paying options yet we have math teachers. Same for science. We've got big pharma over in New Jersey yet we have science teachers. Sure, math and science teachers are harder to find than say English teachers but somehow they seem to be out there.

The same will be true for CS teachers as long as there's a path towards a career. Up until recently there were very few CS teaching positions and no certification programs so if you were a CS minded person and wanted to teach you had two options - get a certification in another area like math and try to teach CS anyway or go into another field. Now that pathways into the profession are starting to exist and one can forge a career teaching CS those CS minded teachers to be can indeed enter the field. This will take time but it will happen.

Related is the old "you can't be it if you can't see it." Up until recently most schools didn't offer CS so while students could see and be inspired by say a history or math teacher and then follow in their career footsteps the possibility of being a CS teacher never existed. Now it does. True, we're offering CS in far too few schools and even in those schools we aren't reaching all the kids but it's a long road and we're just starting the trek.

This journey will take years if not decades but at least we've started the journey.

A critical piece will be the graduate preparation programs which brings us back to the certification program I mentioned at the start.

Professional development and workshop models have been an important first step to expose large numbers of existing teachers to CS and to kickstart CS around the country but it isn't sufficient. PD is invariably tied tightly to a product and is for the most part mass training. It's not a model that can truly build top flight teachers. It's an important part of phase 1 but we have to go beyond it.

That's where the schools of education come in. They're the ones preparing new teachers and ultimately they will have to prepare CS teachers as well. No matter what, well resourced schools will find knowledgeable teachers but under resourced schools will, as usual, have to take what they can get. Strong programs will create strong teachers for these schools. Weak ones will leave our under resourced schools further behind and this is why I go nuts when I see a bad program that purports to prepare K12 CS teachers.

The program in question requires the following courses:

Computer Science Principles (3 credits)
Java Programming (4 credits)
Computational Thinking in K-12 Classrooms (3 credits)
Equity in Computer Science Education (2 credits)
Methods of Inclusive Computer Science Teaching (3 credits)

So to start you're taking 7 graduate credits in APCS Principles and APCS-A and that's basically it for CS content. It's the quintessential you take it you teach it. Heck, you might as well offer APCS-P to 10th graders then just choose an eleventh grader to teach it the following year. These are not graduate level classes. Now, I get it, you have to start somewhere and you want to be able to take in candidates with no prior CS experience. That's fine - you can start with a basic programming course but this program both begins and ends there.

It also offers a 3 credit class in Computational Thinking. I find this interesting. I'm guessing it's focused on teaching the younger grades and as aside, this whole program looks like it would be pretty good for an elementary school teacher. It just loses credibility as a K12 program that includes high school. Based on course number it looks that it's classified as a Teaching and Learning course not a Computer Science course so I really question what it's all about anyway. It also got me thinking - CS programs as far as I can tell don't have their students take a class in computational thinking. Between the CS and other requirements we learn it but might not even use the label.

There are also two other teaching and learning courses - Methods and Equity in CS. They could be fine but given what the overall design of the program is, who knows.

As I said before, this sounds like a great program for an elementary school teacher but I certainly wouldn't my kids taught in High School by a teacher prepared in this way. I want my math teachers to know math, history teachers to know history, and yes, CS teachers to know CS.

I get it - we need to start from 0 but when you're creating a graduate program the end product has to be a truly prepared teacher or you're doing a disservice to the teacher candidate, their students and to the field as a whole.

The thing is that you can do it right. I think our program at Hunter does and the early results from our first cohort are confirming this.

Our first course is essentially a APCS-A alike because we know you have to start form the floor. We expect our teachers to come in with at least a little programming experience but given all the tutorials, MOOCs, and standalone courses available I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a teacher candidate to do a little pre-work to get ready. We also point potential students to resources where they can get up to speed.

From there we go to data structures and also a topics course - depth and breadth and as a fourth CS course we have an ethics course that includes a strong programming component rather than just reading case studies and articles. We complement the CS with a methods course and a curriculum design course and also fieldwork which is reuquired by NY State.

We talk about APCS-A and APCS-P in our CS Ed classes but don't design our program around them. A teacher should not only be able to work with a provide curriculum but also be able to design their own.

I think we're getting it right and I think the reason for this is that it's designed by teachers who both know CS and have been teaching it successfully for a long time and it's designed to prepare the types of teachers we want to work with.

Yes, you have to start at nothing but you don't want to end there and the more good programs launch the more good teachers we'll produce.

If we build them, they will come.