A total of 50 Delaware teachers across different school districts attended the Partner4CS Summer Teacher Professional Development (“PD”) from June 19 – 23, 2017. These teacher participants came from various school departments, including Computer Science, Mathematics, Literacy, Technology, Arts, Science, Library, Foreign Language and Engineering. The majority of teacher attendees teach at the middle to high school levels.
This week-long PD was led by the Partner4CS team at the University of Delaware — Professors Lori Pollock, Chrystalla Mouza, Terry Harvey, and James Atlas. Additionally, five teacher leaders (Yanaka Bernal, Laurie Drumm, Maureen Masters, Tanga Myers and James Sekcienski) from local schools facilitated the content organization and activity implementation for this PD.
Contents and learning objectives of this PD were divided into two tracks: one for Computer Science Principle (“CSP”) AP teachers and the other one for non-AP teachers. Sessions designed for both tracks covered topics from CS education tools and technology, CS curriculum to CS pedagogy. In addition, teacher participants had opportunities to practice teaching CS concepts through their creation of computational artifacts (see Figure 1) and through interacting with experts and other teachers (see Figure 2). This PD also set up “Teaching Showcase” sections which allowed teachers to share their experience and expertise in CS education. A full list of the PD schedule can be found here.
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- Figure 1. Computational Tools Introduced in the PD.
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- Figure 2. Teachers Used Decision Trees to Represent Fairytales.
The gallery presented below showcased how teacher attendees engaged into this week-long PD.
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- Dr. Altas Explained an Activity to Teachers.
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- Dr. Harvey Facilitated the Discussion Groups.
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- Teachers’ Investigation in an Activity.
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- Group Discussion
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- Teacher Group Work
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- Teacher Shared Ideas and Thoughts.
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- Teachers Explored Makey Makey.
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- Teachers Shared Ideas on How to Introduce Scratch to Their Students.
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- Teachers Collaborated on Tasks.
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- Teachers Explored Code.org Curriculum.
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- Teachers Explored Finch Robots.
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- Teachers Explored Sphero Robots.
This is the fifth summer PD organized and hosted by the Partner4CS team at the University of Delaware. For more information about our previous PD sections, please visit the Partner4CS website.