LTEC Blog

ICTM 2016 Debrief

October 20, 2016

A couple weeks ago we had a great time presenting at 2016 Annual Meeting of the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics (ICTM). The organizers even sent us a lovely thank you letter, perhaps before the hotel told them what the Presidential Suite looked like after our meeting. ;-) As a supplement to our announcement post, below you will find the slides from our various sessions. Please feel free to sound off in the comments section with any feedback!

Goal Organization: From Chaos to Coherence

October 06, 2016

In a previous post, we detailed the four steps we’re following to build learning trajectories from the computer science education research literature:

• Collect goals from the literature;
• Sort the goals into manageable groups;
• Order goals and groups into progressions; and
• Illustrate the goals via instructional activities.

We’re excited to be coming to the end of our focused efforts on collection. Though we expect that more articles will be added to the database over time, we have nearly completed our reviews of our initial pool of scholarly literature. From 109 articles, we extracted 678 learning goals. The collection of articles included empirical studies, analyses of student artifacts, explanations of taxonomies, comparisons of programming environments, and more, and the variety in article types is mirrored in the variety of the learning goals themselves. The goals run the gamut in terms of content, support, and level of specificity.

The CIRCL Center’s Primer on Computational Thinking

September 30, 2016

A few weeks ago we talked about our third approach to building learning trajectories (LTs). The title of that post, “Letting Math Teachers Steer,” was somewhat hotly debated within the group, as some of us really thought of the math teachers as “driving” rather than just “steering.” With all those feelings stirred up, we had more to say about why we work so closely with teachers.

Though the LTEC project has specific research and development goals that we’ve discussed in other posts, the project staff is interested in a broader mission of supporting the spread of computational thinking instruction to all students. One strategy for doing this is to initiate and contribute to conversations about computational thinking in a variety of fields and with a variety of interested organizations.

In this spirit, we were happy to contribute to the Computational Thinking Primer recently posted on the website of the Center for Innovative Research in CyberLearning, or CIRCL. CIRCL primers are intended to be useful starting points for those interested in learning about a topic and finding out where they can learn more. The primers also include a link to a Google doc where anyone can leave comments. We hope that this primer will bring new voices and ideas into the computer science education community and lead to new and productive efforts to bring CS to all.

Why is Working Closely with Teachers so Important?

September 23, 2016

A few weeks ago we talked about our third approach to building learning trajectories (LTs). The title of that post, “Letting Math Teachers Steer,” was somewhat hotly debated within the group, as some of us really thought of the math teachers as “driving” rather than just “steering.” With all those feelings stirred up, we had more to say about why we work so closely with teachers.

We are all hearing the national calls to increase students’ access to computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT). The tough parts are well documented¹,²: the need for machines, for professional development, and for finding space in an already crowded curriculum. Many teachers, undaunted by these challenges, are forging ahead to make it happen in their mathematics classrooms. Their work is evidence that they are up to the challenge of exploration – and inspires us to build LTs that can help guide them as they lead kids to and through new topics in computer science (CS) and computational thinking (CT).

The spirit of play is key to the exploration of new topics, and for elementary students, we particularly want to incorporate and hold onto it. On the other hand, we can acknowledge that playfulness alone is not enough as a child gets older. As a society and within our schools we also want discipline, rigor, and a sense of seriousness in the pursuit of any area we consider core. Elementary teachers are caught in the middle of many conflicting demands and have long experience in finding balance. For example, it is especially clear how seriously elementary teachers take their responsibility to teach children to read. Professional development and coaching in elementary reading abound. Because of testing, mathematics is also gaining in emphasis, evidenced by increasing resources being devoted to professional development and coaching in this area. Though we would love to see resources devoted to CS and CT in schools, therein is a snare we seek to avoid. The greatest danger in this effort is that CS and CT will become just another school subject to be standardized, tested, and used to rank and sort students.

We want to build literacy, but preserve the love of reading. We want numeracy, but not math phobia. As we at LTEC work with teachers, we remain preoccupied with finding middle-ground – avoiding unpleasant extremes. We find our teachers wonderfully willing to dive in, learn, lead, and reflect on their own CT teaching and learning experiences. They, like their students, are eager to find relationships and connections.

Working with practicing teachers helps us to see up close the constant balancing act teachers engage in as they attempt to find the freedom to explore with their students while still making sure they live up to the constant pressures around them. One of the positive outcomes to date is the support our teachers have felt to be able to explore more with their students. They feel a growing sense of becoming connected to and contributing to the larger world of educational research. Via collaboration, their own work has the potential to not only positively affect their own students but many others elsewhere. This excitement about wider impact is all too familiar to the curriculum developers on our team – many of whom spent years teaching mathematics in elementary and secondary schools. A teacher’s reward is the spark in the eyes of the tens of students in her classroom. A curriculum developer and researcher’s reward is imagining that same spark in the eyes of tens of thousands of students.

So we at LTEC will remain closely attuned to the work of practicing teachers – they are the boots on the ground we need to cover.

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