Ed, great to hear from you! The ITEST project sounds fantastic with such great potential, I cannot wait to hear additional details and to learn from your process and impacts. It would be helpful to know more about the career pathway itself and what courses it involves so to better understand if there are ways to incorporate more math and then data science elements within the existing program (or even to add a data science course, if there is not one yet, with a tutorial section for extra support, or otherwise). I'm also wondering if you all have provided extra support to ELLs in terms of ensuring vocab was clear with special sessions, hand outs, and short videos. Would be great to talk further about data science and additional scaffolding that might be doable within your context. Look forward to continuing the conversation.... Cindy  

There is nothing better than an enthusiastic, caring, informed, dedicated, and, just overall awesome partner such as you, Dawn!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you! I really appreciate you sharing the two different iterations and outcomes for the involvement of principals. I find it very valuable that the strategy of integration was successful, and feel that is an important outcome for the field to incorporate into future work. 

When the teachers and principals apply, do they apply as a team? I am curious about the logistics to support that engagement. 

Great question and honestly without careful attention to the logistics -- and the recruitment or partnership process going two ways - for practitioners to want to be involved with us and for us to feel that it is a good fit  - there would be no moving forward! And, yes, when we started to speak to district/schools/educators about our work in CS-TLC, we tried to make it clear that the work required a team from each district or school (a minimum of one administrator although in many cases we had more than one, at least 2 CS teachers although in the case of larger districts especially, we had many more, and a guidance counselor, as possible). In most cases this has worked out great, for small districts though it can be problematic to require a team inclusive of an administrator given there are so few administrators and part of the expectations for the entire team was spending a week with us over summers at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ. So, we have made exceptions in a few cases when we're partnering with committed districts/schools that are very small and just cannot pull that piece off. In those cases though, we have found that one of the teachers who attends from those schools generally can 'put on the administrator hat' if and when helpful.

First of all, thank you! We had so much fun and learned so much from each other over the past 2 summers holding our in-person summer institute where the majority of us were based out of an RU dorm, and, spent days and evenings together. We are so disappointed that we had to call it off for this summer - although we will do some online work together, it certainly won't be the same....

During the summer institutes, we worked hard during the days focused on learning from other educators and researchers re

• Content pedagogical knowledge (e.g., collaborative learning) and specific applications (e.g., app inventor)
• Taking culture, equity, and social justice into account when designing and refining content, activities, assessments to make them as relevant and engaging as possible for all students
• Hearing from RU's internal online course curriculum designers about best practices in designing some online modules - or for those smaller and/or more rural schools - online classes that might be able to be used across schools/districts
• Speaking with department chairs and deans from RU on expectations for kids coming into CS at Rutgers  and/or into Douglass (the women's college here at RU that has very strong living learning communities) but also to start to make that connection between high schools and higher ed
• and, much much more

And spent a lot of time sharing practical knowledge and experiences that different schools and/or teachers had - and began to think about ways that this information could be used in other situations (adapted to different contexts, different populations of kids, etc.).

Time was spent within school teams working on planning while having different 'experts' available to confer with during these time periods.

And, finally, we spent a lot of time - especially in the evenings - on team building and just having fun together. Optional activities included things like

• a sunset canoeing trip
• a night of bowling
• a bus ride around RU and then a night out at a local restaurant 
• a peak at the stars at the infamous RU observatory (although weather seemed to always be against us)  
• a late night group working session and an hour of code

We had more ideas for this summer but will keep these quiet so that it can be a surprise for the time!!

As for mobilize, we really like it and it seems to be the best platform that we have found so far (although we would love to learn about others that people have used successfully) - however, it is by no means perfect, and, it still takes lots of attention to try to keep all engaged and participating. We have found over the years (as I'm certain others have!) that anything that one needs to log into in addition to their regular items/apps/or otherwise, becomes problematic, but we never found a common platform that would work for us. As research tells us, we need something to become habit, to be part of our regular routine for it to be truly valuable to us on a consistent basis. So, I would say that we use posts, discussion boards, polls, the integrated calendar feature, and I'm sure a few more things within mobilize but what it boils down to is ensuring it remains a useful source of information, a place to get a quick response, and just a useful place to be so we take the time and effort (but also remember) to log in!

Thanks, Jan. As you know, much of our work has improved thanks to your inspired feedback and continues due to your tremendous support, so I'm thrilled to be able to connect with you through this forum!

As you mentioned in your post, we certainly have better integrated admins into the work of the RPP and also began to involve guidance counselors in the second year, thanks to what we learned from NCWIT, Angela Cleveland, and others. In year two, we also moved teacher PD from synchronous to asynchronous which we originally thought would be less desirable since one doesn't have the direct interaction and lack of real time ability to ask questions, etc. However, given the difficulty to schedule synchronous PD and teachers' preferences, it seems that the asynchronous PD is preferred and is moving forward (this began before Covid, wonder if synchronous would be preferred now, would be interesting to see but we plan to stick to what we're doing). It will be important to understand how (if at all) outcomes from the asynchronous PD compares to that of the synchronous PD from last year.  

As far as researchers (like me), we're centrally involved in the RPP as true partners and learn so much from the rest of the RPP team, and, hopefully, bring our specific expertise to the research component of the RPP work as well as exploring how the RPP itself organizes itself to move change forward.

Yes, teachers are given stipends for the work outside of their school day (e.g., PD and summer institute). There are (bi-monthly) RPP meetings during the school day that teachers participate in depending on schedules and subs are used in some cases. As for sustainability, it is certainly a concern but we definitely have teachers who we believe will continue to participate in the RPP for the longer-term. In some newer work, we are thinking about how to identify specific aspects of an RPP that contribute to continued engagement - we certainly believe that a large part of it is the relationships (and, of course, that they find the information and resource extremely valuable).

The social aspect of collaborating/connecting online has been most promising and useful for our RPP team members. Virtual 'office hours' via a chat feature seems productive as well as when teachers are intentionally connected to colleagues to accomplish a task and/or provide a resource - they are more likely to stay engaged with each other and then share virtually with the group and respond to questions/comments on their post(s), etc. Additionally, given we are all online now more than previously, there is certainly an increase in the potential for continued engagement.

Of course! 

We are looking at the RPP itself to try to better understand if using it as a mechanism to “house” the PD and related activities leads to positive outcomes such as increased knowledge of CS, change in institutional practices, teacher leadership, etc. (based on bi-annual pre and post surveys; brief evals after each PD session or otherwise; observations; interviews/focus groups, and artifacts) - and then to consider how we tease out what aspects of the RPP seem most beneficial (and ideally explore to which teachers/administrators, under what conditions/contexts).  

We are also focusing on what modes or combination of modes (F2F PD, virtual PD, virtual collaborative platform) have the greatest impact on teacher satisfaction/self-efficacy, content development, pedagogy (which is quite difficult, needless to say).

Finally, we would like to further investigate the use of research by the members of the RPP - where find, how the information is conveyed, how using the info, etc.