Thank you for your comment, Mary Ann Davis! Also, happy belated national teacher appreciation day... maybe we should organize for an entire month! Let us know where you teach, maybe we can start thinking about ways to bring some of what we are doing to a community near you! 

Thank you Kelley!

Thank you for your comment Michael. Much of the novelty to our training has to do with embedding three key facilitator competencies into the CS training. Checkout this blog post that describes the three competencies, Accurate Empathy, Conceptual Flexibility, and Cultural Sensitivity https://yppcsforall.org/consultant-and-facilita...

Another layer to this process is the inclusion of college age students as teacher assistances during the school day. 

Recruitment, so far, has been through an opt-in kind of fashion. We present the idea to integrate CS into existing math classrooms, and teachers from select schools who find it interesting, we want to work with them. Eventually, we hope teachers begin developing professional learning communities where more capacity to teach CS is built within the teacher ranks... in a similar way to how we position young people to teach other young people math and CS content in their communities.

Hi Roxana, thank you for your comment. Also, thank you for noticing the student agency + teacher capacity building as integral of this project! You ask very good question, as we have some big ideas brewing around this unique role and potential for CS college students impacting public school CS ed. in a major way. Surprisingly enough, we are gearing ourselves up to write about this...we want to write to the Journal of Computer Science Integration. We should defiantly connect soon! 

Yes, you should definitely submit something to the JCSI! This is exciting work. Let me know when you want to talk.

Hey Roxana!

Hey Eli! :-D This is such a rad project!

Hi Neil,

We don't have specific goals for college students' trajectories. There are some college students at YPP that want to go into STEM careers, some that want to go into teaching careers, and some that are happy to be giving back to their communities but want to pursue careers in law or art or some other vocation that is outside the scope of the content at YPP.

However, we do want to open the field up to the understanding that teaching is also a CS/STEM profession whether that be in classrooms like is happening here or in out of school/informal contexts like happens elsewhere at YPP. This is crucial for expanding participation in STEM and understanding STEM as a relational pursuit.

Hi Jan,

We are currently in conversation with college students as they finish up the year. We think about impact relationally. That is, we want to explore the impact on relationships that college students are a part of as well as the impact those students have on relationships in the classrooms. One of the things they've learned is that they have to be able to communicate effectively with the classroom teachers as well as the students. Something they have been emphasizing is patience in building relationships with students before the high school students will accept help from them or the college students feel completely comfortable offering advice. Because they have been in multiple classrooms, they have also recognized the different styles teachers have and the ways in which they have to accommodate those styles. For instance, in one class they feel more comfortable giving the teacher suggestions about how to approach the lesson whereas in another they do more to support the teacher's goals without trying to modify it too much. Because they have backgrounds in computer science, they have also been able to think about and make connections between computer science and mathematics and give suggestions about how to modify the curriculum going forward.

Hi Jan,

Our experience working with college students over the years is that they do a good job of balancing their academic responsibilities with their YPP activities. Also the college students are paid in this project. 

Thank you Eden!

Hey Robin!  Thank You!

Hi Emily,

We are interviewing teachers and they participate in professional learning opportunities where we discuss opportunities and tensions. We are learning about the impact on their teaching that way. Currently the district is not allowing researchers in the classrooms for observations. We hope that changes next year. By all indications, teachers plan on continuing the program next year.

Hi Jennifer,

We don't have coaches in the building. We do have a facilitator who is available for help and to observe lessons, although that has been tricky to start this year. The "coaches" are in fact the college students who are in the classrooms weekly. We also have ongoing professional learning meetings throughout the year. The plan is to create cohorts of teachers in the schools so that in a couple years they will be a self-sustaining community supporting each other.