Since entering end of term grades I've finally had a few days of legit down time. It's been a long time. In the past few years, I went right from Fall finals int dealing with whatever issues arose around planning the next teacher ed cohort. Not so this year. The three classes I'm teaching are the same as last year so while I'll be doing a lot of tweaking, planning, and updating once we get started, there's not much to do now.

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.

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.

I'm kicking off a couple of exciting summer projects next week and it's been pointed out to me a couple of times that I'll be working with educators at every level to help them to deliver CS instruction to students at every level. What an opportunity to be a part of and learn from - working with every level of teacher for every level of student. I'm part of the teaching teams but I think I'm also going to learn a lot.

I organize a monthly professional development session for CS teachers. It's targeted at teachers who are beyond the beginner stage and don't want yet another hello world blinky arduino scratch workshop. Don't get me wrong, given the need for CS teachers we need plenty of beginner workshops but we also need to take teachers to the next level. I refer to my workshops as being for teachers of APCS-A, similar, or beyond.

I run periodic professional development sessions here in New York with my partner in crime JonAlf Dyrland-Weaver. I call them PD for "APCS-A, similar or beyond" and they're designed to fill a professional development gap. We try to run them once a month but it's a little less frequent than that. The NYCDOE has taken on the monster task of CS for all and since they're trying to get to everyone they have to run a bazillion sessions but all at an introductory level.

Last week I spent a couple of days as part of a team running professional development for a group of pre and in service elementary school teachers. Two days talking about computational thinking. Wait a minute - elementary school teachers? I'm a high school guy pretending to be a college guy. My extensive experience with elementary school education is that I raised two kids and I don't think I messed them up too much.

Looking forward to flying out to Phoenix for CSTA-2019 Saturday morning. The conference doesn't officially start until Sunday, Monday for me since I'm not doing any of the pre-conference workshops. We'll have most of Saturday as long as we're up to it, Sunday, and Monday morning. Actually, there is the GitHub reception on Sunday evening so that's kind of official conference stuff. As to the conference, I'm super looking forward to it.

Lat day of the 2019 NCWIT Summmit. Got up crazy early, got back from my run and saw this when I checked Twitter: A1: CSTA, Twitter chats like this one, @guzdial and @alfredtwo's blogs among others. In all cases because those places start from assuming I'm a CS teacher, rather than starting from assuming I'm a teacher who is better at teaching something else. #csk8 https://t.co/6DO77fzq0j — Sarah Judd (@SarahEJudd) May 16, 2019 I don't usually participate in Twitter chats.

I spent this past Saturday morning up at the Microsoft building in Times Square. What was I doing there? Aankit Patel invited me to check out the professional development that he and his team organized for the teachers involved in the assorted CSforAllNYC programs that his office runs. Wow. Lots of great things going on. I was only able to stay for a couple of hours but I spent some time in two rooms run by TEALS, a room of BJC teachers, a group working with p5.