Research

In the first year of the grant, we consulted with our advisory board and communities, and identified two problems of practice:

1. The lack of knowledge about the design, implementation, and sustainability of teacher pathways,

2. The lack of knowedge about teacher community needs, particularly teachers marginalized by their identity, teaching focus, or geography

3. The lack of knowledge about teacher conceptions of what "high quality" teaching means.

We decided to address these three knowledge gaps, running three independent sets of studies to understand each concern. Below we summarize our progress on each.

Pre-service Pathways

Thus far, our pathway study has found that while there have been many efforts to create teacher pathways (more than 70 programs exist in the U.S. on paper), there are actually very few pre-service pathways, and those that have been created have been through heroic efforts of individuals, rather than with strong institutional support. Many are threatened by the broader declines in enrollment in colleges of education, and are largely being bolstered by short-term grant funding or philanthropic gifts. That they exist at all is a feature of exceptionally ambitious and entreprenurial individuals and small teams who had a vision and the skills to navigate administrative, political, and resource complexities. Most efforts, however, have not centered equity in their efforts, instead prioritizing teacher's CS content knowledge over all else.

Teacher Community

The community study has thus far found quite universally that teachers view themselves as a "faculty of one" at their schools. Either they are the only CS teacher in their school or district, or they are one of many, but others teach such radically different areas of CS that there is little affinity. Most desire community, or at least leadership understanding of what they are doing, and report that the isolation is a major reason many have considered leaving the profession.

CS Teaching "Rigor"

Our study of teaching excellence examined the word "rigor", deconstructing teacher and student conceptions of the word in the context of computer science. Our study broadly found that no one agrees on what rigor means in CS: not K-12 teachers, not post-secondary faculty, and not students, despite the word "rigor"

being used broadly as a goal for teaching quality.

Advisory Board

In August 2024, we met with all of our advisory board members, discussing the findings above and strategizing on problems of practice to focus our attention in Year 2.

The board's insights, reactions, and knowledge of the ecosystem included:

• Existing CSTA community support efforts are infrequent, geographically concentrated, though there is a desire in CSTA chapters and in states to expand it and welcome new teachers to it.

• There may not be ways of transforming CSTA chapters sufficiently to 1) focus on equity, 2) meet the needs of rural teachers.

• Administrators and counselors still do not know the purpose of offering CS and still systematically route some students away from it.

• Many pre-service programs, including some of our own, do not take an equity lens, instead focusing primarily on CS content, harming requiring, but also teachers’ ability to equitably serve students, and teach them about the role of CS in society.

• Many competing priorities in CS and from other constituencies interested in other competencies; this has led to a lot of creativity in Oregon and Washington about how they grow capacity.

• CTE and its enhanced funding is part of the CS teaching ecosystem; it should be leveraged, not positioned as an alternative or a tension. That said, even if there are creative ways to work around it, it is more work for teachers: more paperwork, more meetings, more industry oversight eroding teacher’s professional identity.

• Ongoing funding is a central challenge in pre-service pathway sustainability.

The board recommended several possible directions for our second year:

• Create a sustained higher education CS pathway community of practice. Broaden the grant team into a more formal coalition of faculty in the PNW with best practices, programmatic goals, leadership, onboarding. Allow for people to rotate in, out, and share the institutional knowledge we’ve developed.

• Amplify coalitions. Find a sustainable way for our coalition to amplify Oregon leadership team, CS for All Washington, and CSTA chapters, finding a sustainable model for higher ed to support coalitions.

• Investigate demand. What is driving (and/or suppressing) demand for CS teachers in schools: why are schools offering it? Why are they not? Focus on CTE directors and school administrators. Use Reimagining CS Pathways framework to guide conversations about possibilities.

• Create CSTA PNW. Equity focused, meeting the needs of rural needs, creating community partnerships. Sustain it operationally with university supports, but empower equity-centered teachers to lead.

• Detail and deconstruct the nature of the CTE problem. Talk to CTE directors, to CS teachers without CTE endorsements, to CTE CS teachers; understand the reality on the ground of the interplay between the two.

• Develop an equity-centered checklist for pre-service. Operationalize what it means to be equity centered, use it to audit our own programs and as a tool for others to audit theirs.

• Bolster equitable CS pedagogy for CTE endorsed CS teachers. We offer an annual summer bootcamp for CTE endorsed CS teachers to learn pedagogy, focusing on experience. CS endorsed teachers help run while learning clock hours, while earning their CTE endorsement. A joint design project, with teachers as co-designers with us. Use design sprints to arrive at sketches of plans.

Year 2 priorities

Based on the boards recommendations, and deliberations in our Year 2 kickoff, our tentative focus areas will be:

• Understanding teacher success at equitable CS teaching and how these outstanding teachers envision CS teaching could be if it were supported, structured, and resourced in schools. This focus will help us develop a teacher-centered vision for advocacy, while also deconstructing how the status quo interferes with that vision.

• Understanding the interaction between CS teacher hiring and the many structural deterrents in the status quo (e.g., funding, demand, CTE incentives). This focus will help us identify policy recommendations, help new CS teachers and administrators navigate these deterrents.