Adapting the disciplinary commons model for high school teachers

Abstract

The Disciplinary Commons (DC) is a model of teacher professional development that encourages members of the group to reflect upon their teaching practices, develop a community, and, more broadly, to become more scholarly about their teaching. The DC involves a series of monthly meetings where university faculty members examine their course in detail while producing a course portfolio. Evaluation of the early DC's suggests that they successfully created a sense of community and sharing among the participants. We have adapted the original model to a new audience, high school computing teachers. The adapted model maintains the key aspects of the original model while adding two new, important goals for this new audience: improving recruitment and creating community. The high school teacher audience particularly needed strategies for recruiting students and was in greater need of community. We present evaluation evidence suggesting that we achieved the design goals in a replicable model, including a substantial increase (over 300%) in recruiting students.

Growing a K-12 Community of Practice

“…They focus on how best to document and share knowledge within computing classrooms. Ni's doctoral dissertation [15,16,13] focused on creating successful communities of practice for high school computing teachers. She has focused on many of the needs of high school computing teachers (many of the needs are similar to what has been reported by the CSTA), and how best to help them.…”

Online vs Face-To-Face Engagement of Computing Teachers for their Professional Development Needs

“…Goode describes the provision of workshops in computer science and pedagogy and notes that these cause teachers to develop their own small networks of support. Morrison et al [22] adopted the originally university-focused Disciplinary Commons approach [14] to be used with school teachers, by providing monthly meetings to discuss issues of teaching and curriculum over a period of a year. One substantial US study into PD across all subjects suggests that key elements are: having ongoing training that is connected to practice; focusing on specific curriculum content; and building of strong relationships between teachers [10], and this is backed up by similar findings in the UK [9].…”

Georgia Computes! An Intervention in a US State, with Formal and Informal Education in a Policy Context

“…In our work with creating face-to-face communities of teachers, we found that more intensive interactions led to more sharing of recruitment practices. [Morrison et al 2012]. For example, one more intensive recruitment strategy that ICE started was to send out letters to parents of students who did well on a standardized exam.…”

“…DCCE was aimed at connecting undergraduate and high school computer science teachers in order to develop a community focused on common goals and activities to revitalize undergraduate and high school computing education in Georgia [Morrison et al 2012]. …”

“…We have written other papers where we consider the success (or failure) of our individual efforts, such as the summer camp program , undergraduate faculty professional development [Ni 2009;Ni et al 2010], the teacher professional community [Morrison et al 2012], and our media computation contextualized computing curricula [Guzdial 2013]. We have provided richer and more detailed descriptions of particular facets of our context elsewhere, such as our studies of high school computer science teachers in Georgia [Ni and Guzdial 2011;Ni 2011].…”