Institutionalizing Capacity: Problems of Practice Encountered in Scaling Computing-Integrated Teacher Education (Poster 7)

• In Event: Expansive Framings of “Capacity Building” in Computing Education: Agency, Infrastructuring, and Advocacy

Abstract

Purpose
This study characterizes the problems of practice that emerge as colleges of education work to scale institution-wide computing-integrated teacher education initiatives.

Background
Scholars have argued that the focus of initiatives to build capacity in K12 computing education should move beyond one-off professional development opportunities for teachers, and instead focus on expansive institutional change processes that consider broader systems and structures (DeLyser & Wright, 2019; Mills et al., 2021; Proctor, Bigman & Blikstein, 2019). Scholars have also argued that in order to support initiatives at the level of institutional change, it is crucial to partner with practitioners to identify and provide guidance for the problems of practice that routinely emerge in systems change work (Safir & Dugan, 2021). Although research is beginning to provide guidance around scaling district-wide CSed initiatives (Phelps & Santo, 2021; 2022; Santo, DeLyser, Ahn, 2023), the context of schools of education in relation to systems change initiatives for computing integration are understudied.

Context
The InSCITE (Investigating and Scaling Computing-Integrated Teacher Education) RPP supports computing-integrated initiatives across 15 schools of education in a major university system in the Northeast.

Methods
This study centers on analysis of qualitative data collected on each college team’s strategic planning processes, including organizational documentation (of team’s strategic plans and internal meeting notes), field observations and memos (of administrators facilitating strategic planning workshops), and recorded meetings and interviews (of teams sharing and deliberating on their problems of practice). To capture the complexities of the unit of analysis—an activity system oriented around the object of innovating and scaling an initiative—the data corpus was used to construct descriptive cases for each of the 15 college teams (Engeström, 1987). Each case was analyzed using both a grounded approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1997) and an approach informed by the scholarly literature on scaling education initiatives (Coburn, 2003) and the emergence of contradictions in activity systems (Engeström & Sannino, 2016).

Findings
Using Coburn’s (2003) theorizing of scaling education initiatives, the problems of practice identified in this study’s analysis were organized into four categories: the issues and tensions college teams encountered in their efforts to spread their initiatives (across departments, programs, and majors), to share ownership of the initiative (with implicated stakeholders such as students and adjunct faculty), to achieve depth in their initiative (through a scope and sequence of pedagogical experiences that progress cumulatively), and to ensure sustainability (by developing new institutional culture, routines, roles, and funding sources). Results show which tensions were common across cases (such as tensions of initiative ownership in onboarding new faculty), as well as how approaches to resolving common tensions differed in ways that can be explained by the context of each college team. For example, one team shared initiative ownership with new faculty by developing a self-paced orientation module, another team by developing a resource repository of classroom-tested plug-and-play activities, and yet another team by offering one-on-one mentorship routines.

Significance
As schools of education increasingly aspire to build capacity for computing-integrated teacher education, the current study provides guidance for navigating the problems of practice of scaling such initiatives.

Authors

• David Phelps, Telos Learning LLC

• Rafi Santo, Telos Learning LLC

• Sara Vogel, City University of New York

• Aankit Patel, City University of New York

• Colin Angevine, Digital Promise