This collaborative project establishes a Disciplinary Commons: a group of educators, from diverse institutions within a geographic region, who teach the same computing course. Building on a model previously piloted on a smaller scale in the United Kingdom and in the United States, these teachers meet together regularly for over a year. In addition, the teachers each prepare a detailed portfolio describing their own teaching of the course, critique each other's portfolios, and visit each other's classrooms. This combination of critical self-examination and peer review helps them understand their own teaching, identifies places where innovation and change are needed, shares what works, borrows from others, and sees their own teaching in the context of a broad range of possibilities. Finally, this project has a third, larger goal: to establish a new scholarship of teaching within computing education by modeling a rigorous, peer-reviewed forum to describe what is done when teaching.
The Intellectual Merit is that the Commons advances knowledge and understanding within computing education in two ways. First, it produces exemplary materials within specific subfields of the computing discipline in the form of multiple, evaluated portfolios. Second, it builds a community of reflective (and communicating) practitioners, whose interactions lead to improvements in the teaching and learning in the discipline; more generally these communities promote a scholarship of teaching, involving public evaluation and review of teaching materials and approaches.
The Broader Impacts are that as the participants bring reflective and collaborative practices back to their home institutions, it promotes local change within a large number of different contexts. The participants become part of a regional community, with deep understanding of the teaching and learning in classrooms at a variety of other institutions serving different student populations, giving them perspectives that few educators obtain. Collaborations among members of these communities (and others who are brought in) have the potential for innovations that are regional and national in scope.
