One really can get a lot out of following Twitter hashtags from conferences and other events. Today I saw the following Tweet:
This in a nutshell is the concern with a lot of current efforts to prepare computer science teachers in a hurry. Yes, you can teach a teacher to teach a specific course and you can give them a lot of scaffolding and tools to get by. They may even see great results. But what happens when things change?
My school has something like 20 different courses in the Math department. Can you imagine hiring a teacher who could only teach one of them? Even one that is a soft of default course? Seems like a long shot. We want our Math teachers to be able to teach a range of courses. We want that not just so they can be moved around as needs change or to give them diversity during the day but because we want teachers who know where their course fits into the whole curriculum stream.
Shouldn’t we want that for computer science teachers. The #Home4CS event, from what I can tell from Twitter, was about preparing pre-service computer science teachers in university schools of education. One can easily find Masters degree programs in teaching English or teaching Math or teaching other sciences. A MS is Teaching Computer Science? That’s a bit harder to find. That’s really going to be essential if computer science education is going to grow and mature the way we really need it to develop.
Content knowledge is absolutely critical for teachers to be able to continue as computer science changes. It’s necessary but not sufficient though. Teachers need to know how to teach computer science. It’s not the same as other subjects. Yes, people with deep content knowledge can learn to be good teachers. And teachers can pick up content knowledge and develop into good CS teachers. Learning content AND how to deliver it before starting in the classroom would be a huge advantage. It would be better for teacher and students alike.
It is not going to happen until schools of education start making a home for computer science educators.
1 comment:
We're planing on starting our program at Hunter in the fall and I think it hits the sweet spot in terms of content and pedagogy. I'm hoping to do a session on what were rolling out at CSTA (through a GitHub sponsored session).
I'm concerned, however that even with pre-service programs other places won't do a good job preparing generalist CS which I plan to write about some time this weekend.
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