Preparing future STEM teachers for our computational future
STEM teacher preparation in the United States is undergoing transformational change. Or at least it aspires to. Schools across the U.S. are adopting the Next Generation Science Standards; the Common Core is transforming and modernizing many U.S. school’s views on mathematics. And with all of this change has come many challenging problems of organizational change in higher education to transform pre-service STEM teacher preparation. And these changes can’t come soon enough: we don’t have enough STEM teachers in the United States, and the STEM teachers we do have aren’t demographically representative of U.S. youth.
Ed Geary, the retiring director of SMATE at Western Washington University, has been leading an NSF-funded project to facilitate this transformational change around Washington state. Many of the state’s major colleges and universities that prepare teachers are engaged (including Western Washington University, Central Washington University, Eastern Washington University, University of Washington Tacoma, University of Washington Bothell, University of Washington Seattle, Washington State University Tri-Cities, Washington State University Vancouver, Seattle Pacific University, and Pacific Lutheran University). On June 24th and 25th, faculty and administrators from all of these institutions met for a work retreat to analyze their landscapes and plan for organizational change.
My role in this was to bring the computing perspective to all of this planning. For anyone involved in higher education STEM research, the story is a familiar one: computing is transforming science into data science, computing is transforming engineering through digital modeling and simulation, computing is transforming mathematics, and computing is, for all practical purposes, the T in STEM.
What I found across the two day workshop is an amazing community of higher education leaders who are experts in their domains of science and math education, but, overall, mostly inexpert on the role of computing in their disciplines. There were common misconceptions of computing as educational technology; there were skeptical questions about the relationship between computing, science, and math; and for those with more literacy about computing, there were legitimate fears about the feasibility of both integrating computing into STEM, integrating into STEM teacher preparation, and successfully building teachers’ confidence in learning and teaching about computing.
There was a parallel lack of literacy about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Justice-centered, anti-racist perspectives on teaching and learning were still unfamiliar to many attendees. Many had a student-focused, program-centered view of diversity efforts, rather than a structural one. The diversity working group, led by Jose Rios of University of Washington, Tacoma’s School of Education, played the role of trying to share more structural, institutional views of diversity with the group.
My role then, along with the several other members of the computer science working group (Ann Wright-Mockler of PNNL, Shannon Thiessen of Washington state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Vickei Hrdina of Washington’s ESD 112), was to try to communicate both the computing and diversity perspectives on STEM teacher preparation.
Unfortunately, I didn’t come with a deep toolbox of STEM+Computing ideas, and it became immediately clear that this was one of the biggest needs. STEM education faculty need examples of the conceptual relationships between STEM and computing, examples of things teachers can do to teach these relationships, and examples of how students might experience these relationships. NSF has funded a range of STEM+Computing projects; I wish there was a curated set of examples emerging from these projects for me to entice the faculty I met to learn more about these integration points.
In the absence of those curated examples, I just came up with some on the spot, based on my limited exposure to some of that research. For example:
- In primary education, youth experiences are defined by rules and procedures about how to assemble for recess, how to participate in discussions, how to get permission to go to the restroom. Simply relabeling those processes at computational, and interrogating their efficiency, error-proneness, etc. is an integration opportunity. Additionally, primary-aged youth often have rich digital experiences in their everyday life at home on smartphones; interrogating those experiences is another way to discuss the role of computing in society.
- In math education, engaging youth in computational media about math — like Wolfram Alpha — can reveal relationships between mathematical ideas and augment students’ mathematical reasoning.
- In science education, engaging youth in computational forms of data collection and analysis is a key integration point, even with simple computational media such as spreadsheets.
Of course, lack of literacy about computing wasn’t the only barrier to change. The teams at the retreat brainstormed the many barriers they faced to organizational change, which included things like:
- Lack of time for change
- Lack of alignment with university goals and strategic plans
- Limited money for implementing change
- Limited excess teaching load for new courses
- Leadership transitions that delay change
- University financial instability
- Lack of data pipelines to drive change
- Fear about change
- Staying motivated during long term change
These are all fundamental challenges in any organizational change, and there was an overarching challenge of administrative leadership with confidence in organizational change skills.
Another major challenge behind all of this organizational change was the need to coordinate state policy around this change. For example, in Washington state, there are still many policy barriers to preparing CS teachers:
- The CS teaching endorsement is test-based, but the NES test is really hard and spans all of K-12 rather than treating primary and secondary separately. Therefore, there are big barriers to preparing future CS teachers to pass this test (especially for primary teachers). We need policy change that differentiates these primary and secondary pathways to support CS integration in primary and standalone CS education in secondary.
- The most common route for CS teachers in Washington is Career and Technical Education (CTE) certification, partly because it’s the only real pathway that exists, but also because hiring CTE teachers comes with enhanced funding for schools. This incentivizes teacher preparation pathways that involve no rigorous preparation in CS teaching. We need policy change that incentivizes rigorous preparation.
Another major barrier I noticed is that there are very few boundary spanners to connect all of these needs to help make higher education make strategic decisions. Who knows about STEM education, CS education, higher education administration, education policy, and organizational change? And how many of those people can play a long-term role in supporting change over a decade? I’m realizing that as a tenured professor committed to the Pacific Northwest who is aggressively learning about all of these things, I’m one of the few experts that the state has. Maybe the only expert. But my time is just too limited to stretch it fully across the state.
All that said, even spending a day and a half with this community of higher education leaders felt really impactful. Giving administrators confidence that such expertise exists, giving them a few ideas about computing to take away with them for future planning, and making myself available as a resource, felt like it went a long way in getting computing onto everyone’s landscape of priorities. I’m not fully confident that it’s a high priority, but at least it’s there.
