ABSTRACT
Our overarching goal in this chapter is to highlight the teacher learning that can occur when teachers are situated as codesign partners in computer science education curricular design in ways that leverage their existing professional assets. We do so by demonstrating how teachers’ broader understandings of equity CS education, their existing pedagogical expertise, and their experiences with prior professional learning were built on to advance their CS pedagogy in an 18-month research-practice partnership with elementary teachers, computer designers, school administrators, and university researchers to design of equity-centered computer science lessons focused on student problem solving. When aligned with existing teacher beliefs, goals, and practices, CS education in the teachers’ classrooms shifted from focusing primarily on students’ ability to solve abstracted coding problems, to using coding as a means to collectively solve contextualized problems, such as programming robots that would accomplish real world tasks meaningful to students. Furthermore, teachers learned to become active designers of CS practices, particularly in collaboration with other educators taking on increasingly agentic roles in the design and implementation of CS lessons. Our findings point to the affordances of paying particular attention to existing teacher beliefs, goals, and practices in organizing their professional learning in CS education.
