Teach For America (TFA) will conduct a pilot to develop a new model for recruiting and training new teachers to effectively teach Exploring Computer Science (ECS) at 5-10 New York City public high schools in 2013-2014. The course will be taught by TFA corps members who are qualified to teach a secondary core subject and who also have taken 2 or more semester-long core CS courses in college. TFA will conduct targeted recruitment of CS college students on 10 New York and New Jersey university campuses. This recruitment will include outreach to CS departments, presentations to CS classes, engagement with TFA campus recruitment teams, participation of TFA alums with a CS background, and a general messaging campaign articulating CS education as an equity issue. An external evaluation consultant will conduct teacher surveys at the beginning and end of the course, interviews with school leaders in the schools in which ECS is being taught, and analysis of student work and instructional materials. In addition, TFA will assess whether targeted CS recruitment efforts lead to an increase in the number of people with a CS background who apply to TFA and who are accepted to TFA. This pilot will test a novel model for pre-service teacher recruitment and professional development that will contribute to the CS 10K initiative. Students in the participating high schools that currently lack CS courses and CS teachers will be directly affected. In addition, this pilot can inform expansion of CS courses within NYC and throughout high schools in other TFA regions around the country. The model of recruiting recent college graduates with CS expertise and training them to be CS teachers also has the potential to inform recruitment strategies of pre-service teachers at other college campuses.
This project trained and supported a group of six new TFA teachers to teach an Exploring Computer Science (ECS) courses in high-need TFA placement partner schools—two public charter and four traditional district schools—in the New York City Region during the 2013-14 school year. The project provided participating corps members an initial five-day ECS training and ongoing professional development throughout the school year in the form of monthly in-person trainings, focused on pedagogy, lesson writing, and rubric design; an Edmodo online learning community where student work and exemplar lessons were posted; and individual coaching on lesson plans. Participants reported that the training and support was helpful. In addition, the project supported the recruitment of 19 new teachers in TFA’s New York region with computer science backgrounds who could potentially teach ECS in future years. Intellectual Merit: This pilot project gave TFA insights into what strategies and best practices are most effective in successfully recruiting applicants with strong CS backgrounds to join TFA. Additionally, TFA learned valuable lessons about what strategies to implement to ensure greater prioritization of CS instruction at high-need placement partner schools. Specifically, this pilot helped inform the switch to a model in which teachers first spend a year acting as advocates for computer Science in their schools in order to deepen principal investment in and prioritization of CS, then teach the ECS course for a minimum of two years. Broader Impacts: Through this project, TFA learned that several partner school principals found the CS courses taught by TFA teachers led to mindsets that supported students’ pursuit of CS learning. As a result, student investment and engagement grew over the course of the school year. This pilot served as a model for recruiting and training new teachers to effectively teach CS and informed the expansion of CS courses within the New York City Region and beyond. This project resulted in a significant increase in prioritization of Computer Science education efforts at Teach For America.
