Expanding a Statewide Pathway for CS Teacher Certification: A Curriculum Model for Secondary Education Teacher Candidates

The University of Alabama (UA) will form a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership (RPP) among six Alabama higher-education institutions (Alabama State University, Jacksonville State University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of Alabama in Huntsville, University of Alabama, and University of South Alabama), as well as other RPP partners (e.g., high school Computer Science educators across Alabama, and the Alabama State Department of Education). A national plan for expanding K-12 Computer Science (CS) teacher professional development must include (pre-service) future teacher candidates (TCs) well beyond the current models of only training in-service teachers.

This project will contribute to a new approach for virtual online instruction that prepares pre-service TCs as credentialed future CS educators who will introduce their students to computational thinkingskills and concepts. Participant TCs will be recruited from a diverse pool of candidates across the six partner institutions and topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion will be a foundation of the two-course pathway.

The project is driven by the following core CSforAll needs: scaling effective professional development (PD) efforts to a large cohort of new CS teachers--many of whom have little to no formal CS preparation; establishing certification programs and preservice paths for teacher PD; establishing online and hybrid PD approaches, creating robust PD materials for teachers and facilitators; and assessing the effectiveness of PD models with respect to content knowledge, pedagogy, computational thinking, classroom equity, and student outcomes

To address these needs, the implementation, research and evaluation of this project will focus on expanding our existing knowledge and impacts from a locally successful and recently completed implementation for training Secondary Mathematics TCs in CS within their existing Mathematics teacher preparation program. The statewide expansion and implementation will widen the geographic coverage to TCs at our partner institutions and broaden the recruitment to all focus areas of Secondary Education (e.g., Science, Mathematics, Career Tech, and even Social Studies and other teaching fields in secondary teacher preparation).

The specific goals of the project include: (1) recruiting and enrolling up to 90 secondary TCs to begin the CS preparation pathway in pursuit of a CS endorsement added to their secondary teaching discipline; (2) producing 72 CS credentialed secondary TCs, of which 27 will receive a course-specific certification for AP Computer Science Principles (CSP); (3) producing 45 full CS subject endorsed secondary teachers; (4) leveraging an RPP model that builds beyond a prior effort, this project will provide preparation opportunities that will enable TCs to be ready to teach CS upon graduation, including Praxis preparation to become fully credentialed in CS; and (5) expanding and enacting the UA campus CS curriculum for all disciplines of secondary TCs across six higher-education partner institutions, providing an opportunity for openly sharing all developed resources and assisting the partner institutions in bootstrapping their own CS education efforts.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.