Tomorrow we'll kick off cohort 3 of Hunter's Computer Science teacher Advanced Certificate program. That is, New York State's only currently approved program for working, certified teachers that leads to New York's new Certificate to teach Computer Science. This is not our first rodeo, having gone through this twice already but there are a few differences this time out. First off, we're going big. Cohorts one and two had about 20 candidates each.

I wanted to give a little more context on yesterday's post. In reading over the various comments on social media related to the topic of required and desired CS teacher knowledge there are those that fall on the content is king and pedagogy not so important and others who think you don't really need a deep knowledge of CS. I think you need both and think current teachers need to be given a reasonable but finite amount of time to get there.

There were a few posts over on Facebook this weekend about teacher certification. It started with a question - should teacher certification be based on an exam like APCS-A with the teacher correctly answering 85% or greater. A lively discussion followed. There was agreement and disagreement with responses ranging from: good idea it's too hard it's not hard enough There was also a discussion of the importance of content knowledge vs knowing how to teach in general.

Time to follow up on my last post and all the surrounding discussion. To be honest, I was a bit surprised at first to see that many posters were all for what I consider a weak program. I think all of us agreed that you want and need a gentle entry - you have to be accessible to teachers with little or even no prior computer science experience but I was taken back by the number of teachers who thought it was fine to have a graduate level program where the teachers end up with no more knowledge than a high school student taking APCS-A.

A friend's post brought my attention to a new graduate CS Education Certificate program. It's not a New York State program so isn't in competition with what I do but it's the type of program that I was afraid of. The type that will hurt CS education more than it will help. There was enough discussion following the Facebook post that I thought I'd write about it here. Before talking about the program itself, one issue that came up multiple times in the Facebook thread is that old red herring - we can't teach teachers real CS because if they know the real deal they'll all go into industry.