Leaving Las Vegas thinking about Computer Science Education

The SITE conference was in Las Vegas this year. It was great to connect with old friends and find new ones. While on the plane home, I want to reflect on what I learned before the hubbub of teaching and my next conference arrives. 

What did I see? I chose to focus on the work being done in Computer Science. The panel put together by Chrystalla Mouza was especially excellent. The panel had a great discussion of strategies and challenges in recruiting and retaining teachers for CS. The metaphor I settled on was the blanket that is too small. If a specific district is able to "recruit" from another school system, the problem does not get solved. It just changes location. The same can be said if we transition Math or science teachers. The three strategies that emerged were:

1. Recruit internally from areas that have a enough teachers (e.g. art, Media, English or Social Studies). For this to be successful the professional learning has to be different and address ways of thinking and projects of interest that would fit different thinkers within their domain expertise.

2. Make it part of a general campaign to go into teaching. 

3. Focus on second career/ career changers. Here there is a need for short programs and funding during the process of changing career.

The second strand was TPACK which after over 15 years of research is still one of the most often used frameworks. Punya Mishra led a series of presentations sharing the work done on the third handbook of TPACK research soon to come out. The work was varied and interesting and the variety of approaches, measurements and direction was extensive. 

Finally, and unsurprisingly there was discussion and grappling with AI everywhere I went. AI is changing everything including education in ways that we do not fully understand, but researchers from around the world are trying to apply what we learned from previous critical moments (advent of personal computing, internet, social media).