Finding a Home for CS Ed in Schools of Ed: Priming the CS Teacher Pump Report Released

Thursday April 12, the report on finding a home for CS Ed in Schools of Education was released at Microsoft’s Times Square offices.  Leigh Ann DeLyser and Frances Schick of “CS for All” did a great job pulling it all together.You can see the play-by-play (or tweet-by-tweet) of the event on the Twitter stream #home4CS.  The report is available on the website http://www.computingteacher.org/.

Some of the points that I found particularly interesting or compelling:

• Yasmin Kafai talking about the tension between standalone CS classes and integrating CS into other disciplines.  The latter is likely how CS is going to end up in K-8, and budget concerns may make that the most common path to giving high school students access to CS education. But our research shows that it’s really hard to make that work well.  CS will likely get little attention, if programming is just used as the tool for some STEM learning activities.  Questions from the audience were skeptical that we could get teachers to pay attention to both CS and the integrated subject well.
• A big question was how to add something to US Schools of Education that are facing enrollment declines and budget cutbacks.  Aman Yadav addressed that point head-on, by identifying the courses that we’re already teaching in pre-service development programs where CS education could be integrated.
• The discussion afterward was really great.  Participants stuck around for more than an hour to talk about these issues.  A common theme I heard was, “Give us the answers.  What are the best pre-service CS teacher PD programs?  What are the models we should be using?  Where are the syllabi for these courses?”  I don’t think that these are answerable questions in the US.  We don’t have one education system. We have one in each state.  Almost nothing transfers as-is from one state to another, from one university to another.  I’m more interested in the points that Joanna Goode made — how do we grow education leadership to understand the issues of CS Ed?  We need to inform the leaders who know their contexts to help them integrate CS Education.
• I spoke about the challenges of growing a pipeline of CS Education Research PhD’s. One of the questions I got about my topic was, “What is the biggest lever for increasing the number of CS Ed PhD’s?  Is it just money?”  For my colleagues in Schools of Ed, money would really help — they don’t get enough funding.  For those of us in CS, it’s also the creation of PhD programs that meet the needs of CS Ed researchers.  Georgia Tech’s Human-Centered Computing PhD is great for that.  A traditional CS PhD is not a great fit, because it typically requires courses in systems development and theory that don’t help a CS Ed researcher and cost time and effort.

The report makes a bunch of recommendations, but doesn’t offer many answers.  It does start a conversation about how to make CS education sustainable in the US, which is a critical topic for long-term survival of the “CS for All” movement.