Welcome! I'm an AP CSA teacher and new practitioner for the CSAwesome RPP Project. Like many AP CSA teachers, I started out teaching AP CSP and then needed to learn to teach AP CSA too. 

Our project, with researchers at the National Center for CS Education at the College of St. Scholastica and Elms College, focuses on transitioning teachers from teaching AP CSP to CSA with differentiated PD that starts in the summer and supports teachers throughout the school year. We welcome comments, questions, and feedback!

PD during a pandemic was monumentally challenging! I hope there's a vigorous discussion in this forum around the question you ask: what are the challenges teachers encounter in PD and productive strategies - ones that work.

Perennial challenge: time! We've found teachers like and benefit from in-person PD with peers and leaders with content and pedagogical expertise. This isn't always possible as we saw during the pandemic. Another challenge was (given limited time) was finding a balance between introducing new content and modeling productive (often new) pedagogy. One strategy was the inclusion of video snapshots of classroom lessons that exemplified pedagogies in the context of specific content. Short overview videos such as you describe have also been well-received by teachers.

PD, whether delivered in person or via technology, needs to model best practice in classrooms. At the same time, the pedagogy needs to be highlighted or called out.  

A potent PD experience is actually teaching a new curriculum. Your strategy of supporting teachers not only prior to teaching but during is one that's worked well in our project.

How do you keep in touch and support participants throughout and determine cognitive, social emotional needs?  

I was insightful of you to include SEL as a component of the PD. This past couple of years has been especially trying for teachers we have been working with. It sounds like part of what they are learning is both the technical aspects of the new course, but also pedagogical approaches. How do the pedagogical approaches differ for the CSA vs. CSP course, or are they similar but just a different context?

Just want to say, I love this idea and look forward to checking out CSAwesome further. The distance between CSP and CSA was a concern for me during CSP development, this seems like this could be great way to bridge the gap for teachers! Also, some of my teacher friends keep complaining that they don't REALLY know how to code, and honestly, I might just point them to CSAwesome :) Thanks!

Hi my name is Chanda Jefferson and I am happy to join the conversation. I absolutely love that the CSAwesome project provides a google community to support teachers as they begin to teach CSA. As a former AP Biology teacher, the transition from teaching freshman Biology to AP biology was difficult and I relied on an AP Biology Facebook group for support. Can you share a success story from the CSAwesome google community and if you could add a new feature to the program, what would it be?

CSAwesome curriculum and professional development are amazing!!

One pronounced challenge for instructors to teach CS courses with online hands-on activities at scale is as follows: instructors must have a deep understanding of not only the course materials but also of how to support student learning when students are working on the online activities.
For example, students may have difficulty debugging syntax errors when working on coding tasks. When students ask questions, the instructors often need to examine and debug student solutions themselves and decide on proper feedback for the students in order to maximize the learning.

In the SAIL-CC project, we also provide faculty professional development to get community college faculty well prepared to teach online courses in CS/IT.

How does CSAwesome PD enable the instructors to develop the capacity to support student learning (i.e., how to troubleshoot student solutions and how to answer student questions)? For example, does CSAwesome PD provide faculty with practice activities such as troubleshooting example student solutions and answering example student questions?

Excellent project