Teachers as Curriculum Co-designers: Supporting Professional Learning and Curriculum Implementation in a CSforAll RPP Project

In this episode I unpack Ni et al.’s (2022) publication titled “Teachers as curriculum co-designers: Supporting professional learning and curriculum implementation in a CSforAll RPP project,” which shares results of an RPP where teachers collaboratively designed an app development curriculum that they implemented in their classrooms.

Celcome back to another episode of the
csk8 podcast my name is jared o'leary
each week of this podcast is either an
interview with a guest or multiple
guests or a solo episode where i unpack
some scholarship in relation to computer
science education in this week's episode
i'm unpacking a paper titled teachers as
curriculum co-designers colon supporting
professional learning and curriculum
implementation in a cs for all rpp
project this paper was written by lee
joon knee jillian bausch bernardo
feliciano sin juan jesus and fred martin
apologies if i mispronounce any names
here's the app shack for this paper
quote this paper examines the use of
collaborative curriculum design
co-design as a strategy for supporting
teacher professional learning and the
implementation of an inclusive middle
school computer science and digital
literacy csdl curriculum in three urban
school districts the curriculum is
focused on students developing mobile
apps that provide social and community
good the second year of the program has
been dedicated to developing and
piloting curriculum resources that
support remote learning and culturally
relevant pedagogy while the partner
districts switch to remote and hybrid
instructions this study explores
teachers professional learning
experiences in the collaborative design
of curriculum materials and piloting the
curriculum at their own classrooms the
paper includes analysis of three data
sets one co-design meeting notes and
teacher reflections two semi-structured
interviews with teachers who co-designed
and piloted the curriculum three student
pre and post survey responses on their
attitude and interest in learning csdl
preliminary results indicate that the
co-design approach supplemented with
one-on-one coaching has not only
facilitated the curriculum development
process but also fostered professional
learning and collective capacity
building for implementing the project
curriculum in the partner districts
findings from student surveys show that
students perceive their understandings
of and interest in computer science and
creating apps were slightly improved
regardless of gender end quote try to
summarize this paper into a single
sentence i say that this paper shares
results of an rpp where teachers
collaboratively designed an app
development curriculum that they
implemented in their classrooms as
always you can find a link to this paper
in the show notes as well as links to
the author google scholar profile so you
can check out more works by them you can
find that in the description of the app
that you're listening to this on or by
going to jaredaleri.com and clicking on
the podcast tab you'll notice that this
podcast is powered by bootup which is
the non-profit that i work for check out
the curriculum that i create 100 free or
check out the professional development
you want to learn more about that at
boot up pd.org all right so an rpp is a
research practitioner partnership or
research practice partnership or to
frame both ways and this was between
university of massachusetts at lowell
university at albany and then three
urban school districts in massachusetts
and new york so this project actually
started in the 2019-2020 school year
which we probably all know what happened
at the end of that school year so it
disrupted some things the research
questions for this particular study were
quote one how did the project teachers
implement the co-design curriculum in
their own classrooms two how does the
co-design process foster teacher
professional learning and curriculum
implementation three what are the
student learning outcomes such as their
interests and confidence in creating
apps and learning computer science
overall end quote from page two all
right so the next section is on the
background and so in this the very first
subsection they talk about the
curriculum co-design so it's a
team-based process where teachers
researchers developers iterates through
cycles of design implementation testing
redesign etc to develop curriculum
materials so rather than having an
external organization or researchers
create content for the teachers the
teachers were a part of the process so
that way they could come come back and
be like yo this actually won't work well
because of x y and z variables here's
what we should do instead and kind of
design that into it and because they
keep going back to this process they're
able to iterate over time which is a
good idea so to help with this out they
did co-design meetings which were
bi-weekly meetings where members of the
rpp team could kind of get feedback talk
to each other they also had one-on-one
meetings which was an interesting idea
so like a researcher would meet with the
teacher one-on-one to get some feedback
and when designing the curriculum they
specifically focused on embedding
culturally relevant pedagogies into the
curriculum design itself and then they
had ongoing discussions about supporting
the curriculum implementation so once
you design it you go back and you
actually teach it go oh wait a minute
what we thought was going to work really
well maybe it did or maybe it didn't
here's what we should change to make it
even better so on page three of the
paper the authors describe the overall
curriculum so it's broken down into five
units the first unit is on why computer
science cs4 so this has modules that
focus on apps for social good cs for all
in app lab writing your first computer
program computer science vocabulary and
concepts and then it had an activity
when it was an unplugged activity the
second unit was on why apps matter and
how to make them and so this used app
lab button creation problem solving app
research project and then it had an
activity that was a speaker visit and a
second activity that was another
unplugged activity in unit 3 this one
was on guided exploration with apps
learning basic csdl skills and concepts
and so it had modules on pair
programming
introduction to variables building an
app multi-screen app debugging and had
an activity that was on career in
computer science and then another
activity it was an unplugged activity in
unit 4 this was on more apps modifying
apps and learning more cs had modules on
conditionals app interactivity functions
and then an unplugged activity and then
unit 5 was app completion and
presentation so this had modules that
was app completion and showcase and then
a reflection and an assessment now in
this table they also include alignment
with massachusetts and new york csdl
learning standards so if you're curious
how those align check those out in that
table on page three okay so the third
main section of this paper is on data
collection and analysis so they had
meeting notes and teacher reflections
from the meetings they had
semi-structured interviews with the
teachers and they had student pre and
post survey responses so here are the
results implementation so
obviously covid impacted things this was
originally designed before covid so this
impacted how much time teachers had to
be able to implement things teachers had
full autonomy in terms of how they
adapted and piloted the curriculum so
they could go in order they could change
some things etc they were encouraged to
remix the materials so not every teacher
got to everything there's a table three
on page four that shows the breakdown of
each of the five teachers like what they
did and what they did not do in the
different modules or units but basically
one teacher got to everything another
teacher got to all but one things a
third teacher got to all but two things
the fourth teacher got to all but four
things and then a fifth teacher got two
all but five things but each one of them
was different results from the teaching
strategy and pedagogy teachers tried a
few different approaches so they did
unplugged activities they did pair
programming they did culturally relevant
pedagogy which i kind of wanted to know
more about i know that authors were
compressed for space having also written
for this conference this year trying to
condense complicated ideas down into a
few pages not easy to do so i'm curious
what specifically the pedagogies look
like and how they're implemented okay so
the next subsection of results was on
teacher professional learning experience
so the authors discussed the co-design
for community building the teachers
liked that the district leads were
brought into the meetings and it helped
with communication across the entire
team which i agree like if you check out
the interview that i did with
leandelizer we talk about script and
cs4all and how in script that process
brings together teachers with admin and
various stakeholders to the table to all
collaboratively discuss an
implementation plan and some like goals
so it's extremely important to have not
just the admin on board or not just the
teachers on board you have to have a
variety of stakeholders present in the
planning and in this case in the
curriculum planning and development so i
was happy to see that they did that and
then having the ongoing meetings it
sounded like the teachers really found
that beneficial whether it was like the
group meetings or the one-on-one
meetings those were all beneficial for
the development process which is smart
makes sense to me to do that so teachers
in this process all felt
supported in terms of their teacher
learning and the implementation as so
that they were able to learn from each
other bring some ideas to the table and
then bring it back to their classroom
this obviously led to some
implementation outcomes and challenges
that differed among the teachers because
they were all implementing differently
most likely from pandemic issues but
they walked away impressed with how well
their students were doing with what they
were able to implement the challenges
that they mentioned that they
experienced a lot of them had to do with
remote teaching in 2020 this was new for
a lot of people as they weren't able to
necessarily assess engagement and
monitor learning processes over time
virtually especially if like students
turn off their camera and mics and then
especially if you're trying to do some
unplugged activities and then organizing
pair programming remotely those can be
difficult to do an interesting challenge
that they mentioned is that even though
there was support for the project the
technology did not necessarily align
with that support google classrooms had
some issues where it did not allow
teachers to integrate it with their
google classroom in each district so
like due to district settings or
whatever it would prevent or block
access which having been there and done
that i know how frustrating that can be
like i had one of the classes i was
taking at asu it was blocked by my
district so i could not look at or do my
homework on my lunch break and whatnot
it was frustrating they didn't even give
us like an override like they didn't
trust the teachers with passwords to you
know be able to log into your class
website or the university in town it was
weird now in terms of student results so
the third question so
students had a statistically significant
increase with a medium effect size and
their confidence in creating their own
apps but for this example they did not
have a statistically significant
increase in the confidence in coding or
programming and the confidence in
creating their own apps to help others
even though there was an increase it
wasn't statistically significant right
so then the paper ends with a summary
and discussion which you can check out
if you're interested in it alright so at
the end of these unpacking scholarship
episodes i'd like to kind of provide
some lingering questions or thoughts so
one of them is how might you collaborate
with other researchers or teachers by
developing your own rpp what might that
look like would it be an nsf grant
proposal like the cs4 rpp believe those
are usually in february for the
deadlines so fi if you're interested in
starting one reach out to me and i'm
happy to talk participated in a couple
so if you're a researcher cool maybe
reach out to some local teachers your
teacher maybe reach out to your alma
mater or local research institutions
whether that's a university setting or
an independent organization or
non-profit see if there are some rpps
that you could create but outside of the
rpp design what kind of co-design
processes might you engage in with other
cs educators and how might you do that
like maybe you could reach out to other
educators on cs for all teachers or
other researchers at cs4l's website or
use csta's virtual communities to
collaborate with other people
asynchronously what could you
collaboratively design and share with
the community i personally have a
history of just kind of doing my own
thing and sharing what i create on my
website which is why there's like
hundreds if not thousands of free cs
resources on there a lot of it from when
i was in the classroom and then now from
working at boot up for the last few
years so maybe you do it on your own and
just share it or maybe you collaborate
with others that's up to you overall
though i really like the idea of having
the co-design process for developing
curriculum materials rather than just
having just a curriculum developer
credit or just a researcher having
developers researchers and teachers all
work together i think is a good idea but
anyways this was a really interesting
study to look at kind of bummed that
covid happened and impacted things but i
look forward to reading more projects
like this stay tuned next week for
another episode until then i hope you're
all staying safe and are having a
wonderful week

Article

Ni, L., Bausch, G., Feliciano, B., Hsu, H.-Y., & Martin, F. (2022). Teachers as curriculum co-designers: Supporting professional learning and curriculum implementation in a CSforAll RPP project. 2022 Conference on Research in Equitable and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), 1–8.

Abstract

“This paper examines the use of collaborative curriculum design (co-design) as a strategy for supporting teacher professional learning and the implementation of an inclusive middle school computer science and digital literacy (CSDL) curriculum in three urban school districts. The curriculum is focused on students developing mobile apps that provide social and community good. The second year of the project has been dedicated to developing and piloting curriculum resources that support remote learning and culturally relevant pedagogy while the partner districts switched to remote and hybrid instructions. This study explores teachers' professional learning experiences in the collaborative design of curriculum materials and piloting the curriculum in their own classrooms. The paper includes an analysis of three data sets: (1) co-design meeting notes and teacher reflections; (2) semi-structured interviews with teachers who co-designed and piloted the curriculum; (3) student pre- and post- survey responses on their attitude and interest in learning CSDL. Preliminary results indicate that the co-design approach supplemented with one-on-one coaching has not only facilitated the curriculum development process but also fostered professional learning and collective capacity building for implementing the project curriculum in the partner districts. Findings from student surveys show that students perceived their understanding of, and interest in computer science and creating apps were slightly improved, regardless of gender.”