Skip to main content

C'est la Z

Tag: CS Education

New York - where actual teacher preparation in optional.

This morning, I read Arthur Goldstein's latest blog post. Arthur, is a relatively recently retired NYC public school teacher, a UFT (United Federation of Teachers) chapter leader, and a frequent critic of Michael Mulgrew, the current and long term UFT president. I'm a union guy through and through but I also, like Arthur, believe that UFT's leadership is neither pro-teacher nor pro-student but rather pro-themselves. It's a rather sad state of affairs.
# COMMENTS

Do you really need a degree for tech - an MLH podcast

Yesterday, I noticed a LinkedIn post by my friend Jonathan Gottfried of Major League Hacking about an MLH podcast, The State of Developer Education. The episode he shared caught my eye. It was titled "Do you Really Need a Degree for Tech?" Here's the YouTube link. It featured Lauren Schaeffer, Developer Advocate for Grammarly. I enjoyed listening to Jon and Lauren's conversation and recommend that you too take a listen, Lauren talked a bit about her journey and highlighted some happenings and practices along the way in school, IBM, MongoDB, and finally Grammarly.
# COMMENTS

A poor craftsman blames his tools

Yesterday, Alfred Thompson posted on students knowing their development environments. Alfred's post was inspired by a related post by Eugene Wallingford. Eugene's post was about more than development environments and both his and Alfred's posts are worth a read. Being a tool wonk I thought I'd add my two cents. I've always been a tool wonk. Use the right tool for the job and if you need to buy one, don't cheap out - get the best value right tool.
# COMMENTS

Some Professional Development Is Worthwhile

No, I'm not walking back anything from my last post. I still think we have to stop using professional development as the primary means for preparing CS teachers but I wanted to take a minute to make it clear that while there's plenty of lousy PD out there, there's also plenty of good stuff. For bad PD, it's frequently mandated and frequently neither useful or relevant or even if its potentially relevant, but the time it becomes useful you don't remember it.
# COMMENTS

Why PD doesn't work for CS

EDIT I was reminded that by referring to CS4All and what it's doing in NYC people could read an implication that the many hard working educators are not doing a yeoman's job and indeed they are. They've been doing the heavy lifting from day 1 to bring opportunities to students and I did not mean to impugn their work or efforts in any way. I also want to mention that I know that there are many educators working in NY in CS who have been providing direct support for teachers outside of PD and this post is not about them and their good work.
# COMMENTS

We need certified teachers, not professionally developed teachers.

Last time I mentioned that there are many teachers teaching CS in NY that have no intention of earning the new certification and also don't really know the subject. People might not want to here this but it's true. I don't blame the teachers for this since they've been repeatedly told that "CS is super easy" and that their PD training 100% makes them CS teachers and really prepares them.
# COMMENTS

Certified CS teachers - 2 flags in NY

I've been running Hunter's teacher certification program now for three years. We started with our Advanced Certificate which allows currently working teachers to earn an additional cert in CS and soon a few masters students joined the pipeline. In three years we've made great progress. Approximately 45 New York City teachers are either state certified to teach CS or are qualified to recieve the certification once they file with the state.
# COMMENTS

End of summer program beginning of summer break

Yesterday was the last day of classes for our current cohort. The rest of the week and maybe weekend will be all grading all the time and then I'll try to tune out work for a couple of weeks to try to recharge the batteries. Since there are some ongoing Hunter administrative snafus I'm not all that optimistic on getting real down time but we'll see. So, how did it go?
# COMMENTS

The Big Four Four

Nope, not 40 years old, I'm closer to pushing 55. I'm talking about the number of New York's certified computer science teacher. Two years ago, there weren't any. Last year we got 21 and now, with the semester wrapping up we'll get another 23. That's 44 state certified computer science teachers in a hurry and what's more, 44 teachers that I can comfortably say really know their stuff both in terms of CS content and how to teach it.
# COMMENTS

Trends In Professional Development in CS - it's not all good

My friend Tom tweeted earlier which led me to this piece on trends in CS professional development (PD). Tom's tweet was talking about virtual vs in person PD so I initially thought I'd write about that and PD in general but the article actually led to some deeper issues with PD. The article talks about PD being focussed on specific units or modules, narrowing to more popular offerings and also becoming less localized.
# COMMENTS