A Mid-Project Report on a Statewide Professional Development Model for CS Principles

This paper summarizes our mid-project results in developing and evaluating a CS Principles (CSP) professional development (PD) model for training several cohorts of teachers across an entire state geography. CS4Alabama is an NSF-funded project that has adopted the successful practices of a national AP training program developed by the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) in pursuit of scalable deployment and sustainable persistence of new CSP courses across Alabama. We have created a CSP curriculum and PD program based on year-long in-person training and distance learning collaboration, which also was offered as a national MOOC as part of Google CS4HS. A statewide Teacher Leader (TL) model is used, where those who have previously taught rigorous CS courses serve as mentors in training new peer cohorts as they establish CSP courses in their schools. Teachers in these cohorts collaborate together on content and pedagogical learning experiences, fostered by the TLs. This paper reports on assessment results that are uncovering the facets of our model that are most suitable for building a sustainable network of CSP teachers. The paper summarizes our PD model, offers various lessons learned, and details the findings of the project's external evaluation team.