Understanding Teacher Sense-Making Discourse During Collaborative Professional Development of an Expansively-Framed Computer Science Curriculum

Elementary school teachers are being increasingly asked to teach computer science—something that most teacher certification programs do not prepare them for. In an attempt to study how elementary teachers learn to teach computer science, I analyzed the ways that teachers behaved during a professional development accompanying the implementation of a fifth-grade computer science curriculum. My findings suggest that teachers benefit from professional development that encourages collaboration and active participation in teachers through discussion and modeling. Furthermore, my findings suggest that teachers benefit from using curriculum that deliberately connects new concepts to content that they are already familiar and comfortable with—a model known as expansive framing. By encouraging active teacher participation in professional development and by using curriculum that relates to teachers’ existing content knowledge, we may be able to help elementary teachers prepare to teach computer science with more confidence and accuracy