The first issue of this volume bundles a set of articles focused on preparing and supporting teachers to teach computer science in K-12.
The first paper Preparing undergraduate students to support K-12 computer science teaching through school-university partnerships: reflections from the field by Mouza and colleagues showcases a hands-on approach to address the still existing shortage of K-12 computer science teachers: Undergraduate students are prepared as part of a school-university partnership to assist teachers in their classrooms. In their study, Mouza et al. analyze reflective journal entries as well as classroom observations and report that the students were found to be able to transfer their content knowledge to pedagogical practices in K-12 classrooms. They conclude that – at least for the time being – such partnerships may be viable approaches to support teachers in bringing more computer science to K-12 classrooms.
Ni and coauthors continue this thread. In their paper Computer science teacher professional development and professional learning communities: a review of the research literature, they scope the research literature around teacher professional development. The readers are likely to be surprised by the wealth and breadth of such programs. In addition to this scoping and classification, the authors comment on challenges to the sustainability of teacher professional development and professional learning communities. The authors’ mapping to theoretical frameworks and models, the choice of block-based programming versus other approaches, and to the type of evaluation performed provide useful resources for those who implement or aim to design teacher professional development opportunities and professional learning communities.
Nijenhuis-Voogt and coauthors focus on a very specific aspect of teaching computer science in K-12. In their paper Teaching algorithms in upper secondary education: a study of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge, they report on a qualitative study with Dutch secondary school teachers in which they sought to gain more insight into the pedagogical content knowledge for teaching algorithms in upper secondary education. Their analysis reveals two major patterns, one in which the algorithm is presented as an object of study and one in which the algorithm is also considered as a program to be implemented. While these two patterns use the same instructional strategies (with the added implementation component for the second strategy), they differ in the appreciation of and reliance on previous programming experience of the students. This study’s explication of these seemingly subtle differences can help to better understand classroom observations in teacher training and professional development and serves as a first step towards a more complete understanding of pedagogical content knowledge for teaching more advanced upper secondary computer science.
The fourth paper in this issue, Finnish teachers as adopters of educational innovation: perceptions of programming as a new part of the curriculum, continues the discussion of Ni and coauthors in an orthogonal direction. Korhonen and coauthors present the results of a large-scale survey of Finnish teachers who had participated in a one-day in-service training related to the recent addition of programming to the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. The participants surveyed commented mostly on the advantages but also on the complexity of the new curriculum component. The authors analyze the teachers’ perceptions of internal and external factors that affected the adoption of the new curriculum. In doing so, they present the reader with important themes such as participation, tools, and materials. In addition, they also convey the teachers’ perceptions of responsibilities towards a 21st-century society that should be addressed when leading curriculum implementation efforts.
On a more fine-grained level, Karlin and coauthors examine a particular high school’s approach towards systematically bridging the gender gap in K-12 computer science education. Their paper, Building a gender-inclusive secondary computer science program: teacher led and stakeholder supported, showcases practice that led to an above-average recruitment of female students into computer science courses. Among the factors revealed through their analysis, the authors list targeted recruitment as well as a number of factors related to teacher support, such as teacher overlap, co-teaching, and support from stakeholders that were not computer science teachers. As with the previous paper, this paper presents a wealth of practices with rich descriptions and we hope that readers will be intrigued to try to match these to their own curriculum implementation efforts.
The final paper in this issue, Affordances and limitations of teachers’ instructional styles when teaching computer science and computational thinking, focuses on the teacher in an individual K-12 computer science classroom. Searle and coauthors studied four teachers and their instructional styles. On a macro level, they sought to understand the instructional styles as such, whereas on a micro level they analyzed the teachers’ actions through the lens of a framework for computational thinking. The teachers, selected for clarity of instructional style, and their actions led to vignettes showcasing three different instructional styles: direct instruction, discovery learning, and modeling and scaffolding. Looping back to the theme of the previous papers, these vignettes, together with the analysis of their affordances for teaching computational thinking, are most helpful resources for teacher professional development, including but not limited to the case of such training in the context of implementing new curricula.
We hope that the readers appreciate this set of papers as much as we do and that the research results described in these papers will have a lasting impact on teacher training and professional development.