Reimagining Professional Development for K-8 CS Teachers
Jennifer Tsan, Merijke Coenraad, Zachary Crenshaw, Jen Palmer, Donna Eatinger, Kristan Beck, David Weintrop, Diana M. Franklin · Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education · 2022
There is a need for more K-12 computer science (CS) teachers. The need to scale teacher professional development (PD) points the CS education community towards virtual learning, and prior work shows that in-person PD with a diffuse schedule is more successful than condensed schedules. There is currently little research about virtual K-12 CS PD with a diffuse schedule. The pandemic served as a forced opportunity to explore the design and implementation of a diffuse-scheduled virtual PD for two small, equally-sized cohorts of middle school (grades 5-8) teachers; one from a metropolitan school district and another from across the United States.