Teacher Educators' Transformations Through a Computational Thinking Professional Development Program

• In Event: Preparing Computationally Literate Teacher Educators: A Professional Development Approach

Abstract

Objectives
This study seeks to understand the transformation of teacher educators’ through participation in a year-long professional development (PD) program focusing on computer science (CS).

Perspectives
CS has emerged as a content discipline in K-12 schools. However, many teacher educators have not had the opportunity or time to learn about CS content and pedagogy, including computational thinking (CT). The PD program in this work consisted of four modules aimed at building teacher educators’ understanding of CS/CT content and pedagogy (See Table 1; Authors, 2021). The PD provided the teacher educators with the time and space to learn and collaborate with each other. The study examines the following research question: How did participation in the PD program influence teacher educators’ understanding of CT content, CT-related pedagogy, and confidence towards CT?

** Table 1 **

Methods
This study provides three unique cases of teacher educators who participated in the PD program. Each case is compiled through triangulated data to understand the experiences of each teacher educator before, during, and after the PD (Yin, 2017).

Data
Data consisted of the initial application, confidence level surveys, notes, and final interviews. The final interview protocol included a modified version of a previous PD interview protocol (Authors, 2019), allowing participants to share their experiences.



Results
PD resulted in the transformation of teacher educators who developed and integrated CT modules into education courses. The three cases presented here varied in terms of CT experience. Table 2 provides a sampling of the quotes and constructs expressed by each teacher educator while Figure 1 shows the change in confidence level for each participant.

** Figure 1 & Table 2 **

Sally is a teacher educator at a small private college in the Mid-Atlantic area. She teaches several education courses and reported that she has integrated science, math, and technology into her courses regularly. Her confidence levels reported as relatively high in the beginning; however, she reported a positive increase in both her ability to assist pre-service teachers and having nearly all of the CT skills she needs now. She embraced the culturally-responsive pedagogy module and integrated these strategies into the module that she developed with Jane.
Jane is a teacher educator from the same small private college as Sally. Her confidence levels were all reported as low in the beginning. Jane reported strong growth in all confidence levels with some room to grow in the area of having all that she needs to teach computing well. Jane relied on her colleague Sally to assist her with the module development and implementation.
Pat is a teacher educator from a different small private college in the Mid-Atlantic area. She reported strong growth in her confidence levels and even shared this growth with her Dean. Pat observed the common CT aspects that are “layered” in math and science methods courses.

Scholarly Significance
Research findings from this work will advance CT research by providing examples of how existing teacher educators’ pedagogical practices transformed to include CT in a variety of education courses.

Author

• Megean Garvin, University of Maryland - Baltimore County