REBECCA ZARCH
RPPforCS
NSF Awards: 1745199
2021 (see original presentation & discussion)
Grades K-6, Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12
Research Practitioner Partnerships (RPP) have become a major player in K-12 computer science education with the initiation of 1187 NSF-funded projects. RPPforCS, learning community for these awardees, has been documenting the progress of these projects for the past four years.
RPPs strive to more deeply create a partnership between those championing change initiatives and those practitioners working to implement those changes in the districts, schools and classrooms.
This video provides an overview of projects engaged at the various grade levels from early education (pre-K - 2) to high school and dual enrollment into community college
Viewers will learn how to find out more about projects that are relevant to their interests and geography.
Related Content for RPPforCS: Research Practitioner Partnerships across K-12
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2019Three Insights for Sustainable CS Education in Districts
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2015Researcher-Practitioner Partnerships in STEM Education
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2021Mobile CSP: Students Prevailing Despite the Pandemic
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2021Tough as Nails, Nimble Fingers: Computing in Rural East KY
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2019CAFÉCS CS4All Teaching Assistant Program
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2020Using Concurrent Enrollment to Broaden Participation in CS
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2020CS4All Springfield: An integrated CS/CT K-5 curricula
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Alan Peterfreund
Thanks for viewing the video. To find 13 other RPPforCS videos select Resource Center - RPPforCS. We look forward to a robust conversation over the next week.
Rebecca Zarch
Director
Hello folks! Thanks for visiting this video. The RPPforCS community is doing incredible work to create more equitable CS across the K-12 pathway and into higher ed. You can learn more about specific projects on our website: https://www.sagefoxgroup.com/rppforcs, as shown in the video. There are also many great videos from some of the RPPs in this showcase that give a glimpse into how researchers and practitioners work together to address challenging problems of practice in CS.
Bernard Yett
Laura Larkin
Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow
Rebecca and Alan-
Having a community to connect, collaborate, amplify and leverage is so important for educators. I'm wondering how you push out the information on the website? How do you advertise to those outside the community to reach administrators and decision makers to add or improve computer science, especially where it is currently not implemented?
Rebecca Zarch
Director
Hi Laura, thanks for the question. Most of our within-community work is designed to build capacity at the project level in addition to exchanging knowledge (which of course is capacity building too). Thus, folks share strategies for reaching key stakeholders, but RPPforCS isn't necessarily in a position to do so. We do hope our resources help those planning projects to think through these issues.
David Barnes
Associate Executive Director, NCTM
Hi Rebecca! Very interesting. I’m intrigued by how RPPforCS functions as a learning community for these awardees? Is there a community of the whole as well as separate communities for researchers, practitioners, leaders, …? Also can you talk about the progress you are documenting? Are you seeing an impact in the number of students able to undertake a CS career? And the number that actually do go onto a CS major or profession?
Rebecca Zarch
Director
Hi David. Our community has actually evolved over time. We were funded alongside the first cohort of awardees and was thus heavily influenced by their engagement in pursuit of supporting research across projects. As a social learning community the “curriculum” emerged as a result of participant experience. In the first year technical assistance support was provided for projects launching RPPs for the first time. Over the last three years, RPPforCS transitioned to providing a forum for sharing lessons learned about affecting CS education through an RPP and fostered sub-groups addressing similar problems of practice or using similar approaches. Thus the experiences of Cohort 1 heavily shaped the trajectory of the RPPforCS community. Cohorts 2 and 3 had increasing access to a well-established community and resources from the launch of their projects, with Cohort 3 having access to published materials during the proposal phase. We offer a resource-rich newsletter and ~monthly webinars that focus either on an RPP-related topic or a CS-related topic although we're always mindful of the intersection. Our project is not designed to have a direct impact on students, rather we support projects that are doing that implementation work.
David Barnes
Associate Executive Director, NCTM
Thanks Rebecca. That makes sense and I can see how the collective knowledge supports that new cohorts. The aggregation of impact data from partners might be an opportunity to better see how your collective support is working. Just a thought.
Rebecca Zarch
Director
Thanks David. We actually built this into the grant but for a variety of reasons the grant priorities shifted. This is something we're still interested in and committed to in the next phase. Always good to hear we are on the right track
David Barnes
Anita Crowder
Your organization and resources have been invaluable as we begin our journey as an RPP project. I just want to say "Thank you!" for this video and all of the work you have put in to create an engaged community of researchers and practitioners.
Alan Peterfreund
Anita: We are so appreciative of your kind words and to hear that our work is valued by our community.
Anita Crowder
Juana Moreno
I completely agree with Anita. Thank you for all you are doing to help our RPP projects!
Anita Crowder
Rebecca Zarch
Director
If folks are interested in getting their RPP + CS related work published, check out our call for papers
Anita Crowder
Renee Fall
As a member of this community, I appreciate the work RPPforCS has done. I value the webinars and opportunities to hear about other projects' work, or to delve deeper into a particular theme such as evaluation metrics. Each RPP is unique, but we are finding ways to benefit from the community. I'm curious if you have identified what are the greatest challenges to the researcher-practitioner collaborations in the CSforAll RPPs and if you have ideas about how to support those relationships?
Eric Hamilton
I was not aware of anything like this. We are just starting a CS strand in the international collaboration project we help to lead. One direction we are pursuing is to place more tractable problems in the hands of students. Ii think RPPforCS may be an important resource for us to pursue this potential. Thank you for the video; greatly appreciated.
Alan Peterfreund
Eric: We would be delighted to follow up with you to better help you take advantage of our resources. I am also very interested in your work in relation to another of our projects csedgrad.org and is introduced in our video https://videohall.com/p/2125
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.