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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

You don't become a master teacher overnight. It takes years, perhaps decades. Year one, you're just trying to survive. Year two is frequently a small step back. Year three on is slow improvement provide the teacher works to improve. To me and eight to ten year teacher is usually an advanced beginner, fifteen years? Seasoned. Master teacher? You're probably pushing close to 20 years or more. Of course, there are exceptions but this is the pattern I've most often observed (burnout notwithstanding).

It took a while but we're finally here. Hunter College is launching it's Computer Science Teacher Certification programs. This was the second big initiative I've been working on at Hunter. The first was the Daedalus undergraduate CS scholars program. The Daedalus program started my first year and is now providing the best value (and in my opinion best) undergraduate CS opportunity in New York. CS Certification took longer. I had to design the programs, they had to make it through the whole CUNY governance process which even under ideal circumstances takes around a year and then up through NYSED.

Presenting at CSTA 2020 I noticed a few tweets and posts from people announcing that they'd be presenting at CSTA2020 - the big computer science teachers conference held every July. A common thread in a few of these were trepidation's presenters. Excited to be doing this but nervous. It's interesting that teachers, myself included, sometimes get nervous before presentations even though we present every day as part of our jobs.