Bill to establish a STEM Master Teacher Corps
May 3, 2011 at 10:26 am 5 comments
Alan’s comment in a previous blog post spoke to the issue of different kinds of needs in education. I agree completely. The ACM Karlstrom Award that Barb and I are receiving in June is about “outstanding contributions to education,” which may not have anything to do with teaching. The citation on our award is about Media Computation. There are other kinds of contributions besides producing curriculum. Sally Fincher received her SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution award for her research and for establishing a cohort of computing education researchers which are revitalizing the field today. But neither creating curricula nor doing research are about the act of teaching, about having an eye for identifying student problems and misconceptions, and about the art and skill of intervening to facilitate learning (from expository lecture, to designing good problems). Alan’s right, too, that we don’t know how to measure excellence in teaching, though we certainly need that in computing, and all of STEM. I suspect that we know more about teaching reading and writing than we do calculating and analyzing.
Senator Al Franken introduced this new bill, to establish a STEM Master Teacher Corp. It seems to me to leave open the question of how we identify master teachers, but does address the most significant bit: We need great teachers.
‘The purpose of this chapter is to establish a STEM Master Teacher Corps program that–
‘(1) elevates the status of the STEM teaching profession by recognizing and rewarding outstanding STEM teachers;
‘(2) attracts and retains effective STEM teachers, particularly in high-need schools, by offering them additional compensation, instructional resources, and instructional leadership roles; and
‘(3) creates a network of outstanding STEM teacher-leaders who will–
‘(A) share best practices and resources;
‘(B) take on leadership responsibilities in their schools, districts, States (if part of the participating area), or consortia with the authority to provide professional support to their STEM colleagues not participating in the STEM Master Teacher Corps;
‘(C) aid in the development and retention of beginning teachers by serving as their role models and providing them with instructional support; and
‘(D) inform the development of STEM education policy.
via Read The Bill: S. 758 – GovTrack.us.
Entry filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: STEM, teachers.
1.
Alan Kay | May 3, 2011 at 2:22 pm
This is yet another reason-and-worry to try to get a better handle on what it means to “be fluent in STEM” (or in Computing, for that matter).
Otherwise, we could have very effective teachers (and getting awards for it), and the students are still learning nothing that is above threshold.
Cheers,
Alan
2.
Beth Simon | May 4, 2011 at 10:43 am
Um, I’m really asking for ideas, isn’t the measure of the “best teacher” based on measure of gain in learning, normalized by a pre- and post- test scoring system? That is, based on how much of a topic your students didn’t know when you started teaching them, how much of that did they master by the end of your teaching them?
“Concept inventories” is the nifty catch phrase, but is that
a) all that we need in CS
or
b) the only thing that will give us SOME information? What else could we all be doing RIGHT NOW at the start of our courses, then again at the end to help us figure out how effective we are?
3.
Mark Guzdial | May 4, 2011 at 10:57 am
I think the problem is that we don’t know how to measure learning in CS. “Concept inventories” and even Allison’s FCS1 are about concepts. In CS, we also care about skills (e.g., coding) and habits/practices (e.g., software engineering, test-driven development). Measuring those is harder. If we don’t have good measures, what do we do pre/post? What if you measure “concepts,” and the teacher says that s/he emphasized “skills”? Is that a bad teacher, or the wrong measurement?
4.
Beth Simon | May 6, 2011 at 10:10 am
I agree that we don’t know how to most perfectly measure learning in CS, perfectly. But the fact is we do it ALL the time. So how about measuring something? even if it’s not perfect. Can you and I agree on measuring “something the same” as a pre- and post- test in CS2? How about data structs? How about OS? Can we convince Stuart Reges to do the same? Suzanne Westbrook? Robert McCartney?
5.
Mark Guzdial | May 6, 2011 at 1:13 pm
You don’t have to convince me that it would be useful to do this, even imperfectly. That was the point of my CACM piece on moving from science to engineering: We have some measures, we should use them, and measure progress against them. I thought that you were asking, “Why aren’t people doing this?” And the answer is: We don’t all agree on the measures. Maybe the first step isn’t to go after people who are unlikely to agree, but to start with those who are likely to buy into a research and measurement approach.