This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Georgia Institute of Technology proposes an innovative program - Operation Reboot - that assists both unemployed IT workers who wish to make a career switch into high school teaching and existing high school teachers who wish to become more proficient in the computer science content area. The IT workers and existing teachers will be paired. Together, they will co-teach at least two computing classes over a year. During that year (and possibly the next), the IT worker will participate in the Georgia Teacher Alternative Preparation Program (GaTAPP) which provides teaching certification to individuals who hold a bachelor's degree but not a teacher education degree. GaTAPP serves unemployed workers, returning troops, and anyone else wishing to make a career switch. In Operation Reboot, the IT worker and the existing teacher will be mentored by an exemplary computing teacher, and they will participate in a successful Georgia Tech program that provides summer workshops and year-round professional development for computer science teachers. Operation Reboot participants will earn a computer science endorsement.
A teacher's motivation, self-efficacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to teaching are closely linked with their professional identity. Through co-teaching, the courses needed for GaTAPP, mentoring, and the teacher workshops at Georgia Tech, this program will transform the IT worker's identity into that of a computing teacher. Specific outcomes include (1) the transformation of 30 unemployed IT professionals into high school computing teachers, (2) improvements to the content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of at least an additional 30 existing high school computing teachers, (3) an increase in the number and quality of computing courses offered at the participating schools, and (4) an improvement in the computing education of thousands of students. Beyond its affect in Georgia, this program could provide a model for other states working to improve the quality of education in the face of a severe shortage of teachers with computer science content knowledge.
