Reflections

Reflection for 401: Introduction to Inquiry
While I've had the opportunity to develop as an English teacher this last couple of years, I'm at a strangely early juncture in my career where I'm going to start teaching in an entirely new content area. Luckily it's a field with which I have at least some professional background experience, more than most teachers, but, as any teacher can tell you, knowing how to do something is a very different skill than actually teaching it to another person, let alone a kid. So my content knowledge is a little out of date and slightly off target, my pedagogical knowledge is developing as a new teacher, and my content pedagogical knowledge is close to nil. I'm creating a new program in the school, with effectively no peer teachers, no specific content standards to satisfy, and no extant curriculum to leverage. Meanwhile I have about two months to get a grip.

What I do know well is my student population-- where they're coming from-- and I also have a strong idea of where I want to take them. This gives me an excellent clue into what I need to learn to serve them. I need to figure out how best to engage students in learning to program computers: how to get them interested in joining and remaining in the program. I especially want to figure out how to make it appealing and accessible to the huge groups in our school who have traditionally been underrepresented-- girls and non-Asian minorities, and kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who haven't had a lot of exposure and access to computers. I want to be able to take these kids and build them up so that they can compete when they head toward college or employment, and not continue to be excluded from such a huge and lucrative career sector in our area. So my biggest question is: how can I best start to teach computer science to kids who have never touched the stuff before? How can I prepare these students to compete in a college level computer science program?

During high school I was a pretty well-rounded kind of nerd, and was indeed already enthusiastic about computers; the best Christmas gift I ever got was a Commodore 64 with a tape drive and a whopping 64KB of RAM! But I didn’t take any computer science classes in school: my high school had three Apple IIs and a fleet of electric typewriters. My college didn’t have computer science classes, either, but I did get basic exposure through working in the computer lab, and in fact my first job out of college was doing technical support at another college. Luckily, I’ve since had some industry experience with programming, and have developed a pretty solid foundation in the practical aspects of computers, as a user, support person, network tech, programmer, and even training others. So essentially all of my knowledge in this field has come from actual work experience and “learning on the job.” While this leaves me weak on the theoretical underpinnings of the science, I have strengths in troubleshooting, explaining, and a keen philosophical understanding of which skills are thought patterns are fungible and transferable, and what kind of skills are on the other hand incidental to the eccentricities of particular languages. Since the ultimate goal is to aid the students in developing problem solving and critical thinking skills, I think I have a good foundation for that, even if my specific programming language knowledge is a little stale.

I’m most hoping to leverage this program as a way to fill in these gaps: research how others teach this material, and bone up on the specifics of the languages I’ll be working with. So I have both pedagogical and content matter concerns to work through, and am very glad to have this opportunity to research and develop course material as a project.

 Reflection for 402: Content Knowledge
1) Oh, hey, Barry! Whassup? Not much going on over here, just catching up on some late work, enjoying the sun... Oh, that reminds me: you left your swim trunks hanging on the railing at the beach house last time you were over. Yeah, we'll just hold on to them until next time, no problem. Thanks for bringing the wine! Sorry about the dog, by the way; she's new, and we haven't had time to go to training.... you know, she's really just still a puppy. Anyway, let's talk about education-- I've got a few suggestions to lay on you:
 * Read Diane Ravitch's book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System. I know it's been out for awhile, but it does a really good job of distilling the history of educational reform in the country-- I think it should be a must-read for anyone involved in policy decisions. You might not agree with her opinions, but she's got a well-informed perspective and even some tips on how to move forward from here. Speaking of which:
 * You should really get rid of NCLB before the whole system implodes. I know it's hard, and realistically you can't just call it quits without an alternative-- you'll have to have some suggestions of what to replace it *with*, and give it a catchy title, even. But the whole program is going to self-destruct soon, and will take out as lot of good teachers and schools with it, and I don't think you want to be the guy holding the bag when the inevitable happens.
 * Figure out a way to pull some of the tasty military budget and throw it at increased teacher compensation. Specifically, find a way to provide incentives to people willing to teach (and remain!) in the most needy schools: those are the ones with the most teacher turnover and highest percentage of young teachers anyway. If you can sweeten the pot enough to make more experienced, well-trained teachers want to take those positions, and even make it a point of pride for them to take those positions, then I think it might go a fair way toward assuring that the poor and under-performing schools have the same talent pool to work with as the fancy suburban schools. I think there would also be a lot to gain by incentivizing teachers in hard-to-fill subjects such as STEMs and special education... yeah, I said "incentivizing", you know what I mean. Make young folks start seeing teaching as a field to be proud of which demands talent and skills, like in Finland, instead of a "fallback job" for people who can't hack it in private industry. Stop paying lip service, and start paying for quality.
 * Keep pushing for head-start and community inclusion programs, especially for English learners. Education begins at home, but you need to make sure to support that effort and bring whole families into the equation. We need more adult education programs in nutrition, child care, literacy, access to services, and all that, to help communities recognize the value of education and encourage a culture of learning and respect.
 * Ease off on the whole teacher accountability and standardized testing business-- emphasis on the "business" part. It's just demoralizing everyone involved and degrading the quality of actual teaching and learning that's going on. Increase requirements of teacher preparation programs, make sure you have high quality teachers in place, and then let them do the jobs they have been trained to do. This is the *one time* I'm telling you how to do *your* job, so back off and let us do ours, ok?

2) The greatest benefit I've gotten out of the Ravitch book is a much clearer understanding of the path that education reform has tracked thus far, and identification of the problems inherent in current reform efforts as well. Basically those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. Before reading this book, my opinions on issues such as charter schools, merit pay, privatization, and so on, were informed only vaguely, I admit to a parrot-like mimicry of the dominant left-wing gestalt, which i could never really defend with statistics or case history. Now I feel like I've gained enough information to actually hold a valid opinion! Even though I still don't know how to go forward from here on a policy level, I feel informed and involved in the issue like I had not been before, which is pretty sorry for an actual teacher.

3) Keep teaching, do my best to educate others on these issues, and raise students who are sufficiently critical and civic-minded to fix this mess that the elder generations got them into. As my sister says "every little bit counts, said the mouse, as he peed into the ocean." I'm not cut out for politics or policy, and I'm too chicken for actively fomenting revolution, but I've always figured that good teaching is a subversive profession-- disabusing people of bad thinking, provoking them into considering the previously unimaginable, expanding their worlds, and training them to question *everything*, from cultural norms to the value of standardized testing. So I'll try to keep up the Socratic tradition of impiously corrupting the youth.

4) 5) I'm going to mix subjects here.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">CATE- California Association of Teachers of English. http://cateweb.org. Hosts of the annual Asilomar Language Arts Teaching convention in Pacific Grove. They also publish several newsletters and a journal.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">CABE: California Association for Bilingual Education. []. Hosts of a gigantic annual convention, tons of references and resources for bilingual and ELD literacy, content and curriculum, teaching strategies, and even a jobs board.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">CSTA: Computer Science teachers Association. http://csta.acm.org. Lots of information about advocacy, workshops, regional chapter meetings, professional development, and research.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">AACE: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. Hosts multinational conferences, publishes journals, hub for professional networking and a portal for a digital research library for members.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Bay Area Resources: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Readings: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Journals: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Conferences: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">World things:
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">CalShakes: I've still never been to an event there except for the Renaissance Faire! Embarassing but true.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Google: like visiting in real life: I think the computer science kids would get a kick of out seeing photos from their opulent campuses in the south bay.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Tech Museum in San Jose: their mission is "to inspire the innovator in everyone". Our academy is all about technical innovations, and this seems like a no-brainer for a fun field trip some day.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Computer History Museum in Mountain View: they have a completed version of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, essentially the first computer. Designed in 1837 but never successfully built until 2002; the one in Mountain View is one of two in the world. Five tons and 11 feet long.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">NASA AMES Exploration Center, Moffett Field, Mountain View. What better exemplar of technology advancing human understanding of the universe than a trip to NASA?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun, eds. Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New perspectives on gender and gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Analee Newitz & Charlie Anders. She's Such a Geek! Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006. A collection of essays about women's perspectives on geekdom.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Journal for Computing teachers.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Journal of Computing in Teacher Education: more meta, about teaching teachers, so more general application across curricula.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Innovations in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">UC Berkeley BYOB Workshop for teachers: BYOB is a programming environment which i suspect will be the next language selected for the CS AP exams: I'd love to go to a workshop with either UCB or MIT, since they're the ones who write the language and its parents, Scratch/Smalltalk.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Asilomar from CATE: it's right by the beach! A weekend of workshops on a myriad of language arts topics in Monterey; previous subjects have covered everything from the neuroscience of learning to dystopian young adults' literature.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Charles Babbage's Difference Engine
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Globe Theater, on a private tour.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Pub crawl tour of James Joyce's Dublin.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">The Library of Congress.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">I want to return to the Huntington Library as a real adult professional with some sort of research purpose and connive them into letting me touch their Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with my own gloves fingers. Seeing that thing in real life was my first and headiest brush with the immensity of human creative history. I almost passed out, it was weird.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Reflection for Course 403: Pedagogical Knowledge
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">1) Guiding Questions: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">I actually ended up reading over 30 articles in the pursuit of my research, and feel like I’ve made good headway in my understanding. I’ve developed a good sense of what historically has led to girls being underrepresented in the CS field, and know what the current trends are in academia as well as the industry. The last two questions are more challenging, since they regard fairly new developments which are still working through initial exploration, and research is only starting to deliver real answers. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">2) Challenges and successes: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Continuing that thought, the most challenging aspect of my research has been the sheer “newness” of the work I’m looking at: the vast majority of relevant research comes out of Canada, Greece, and Australia, where it seems that CS is more strongly established in the schools, with relatively little research having been completed in the US. Similarly, the majority of research has focused on younger girls, or college level students. So in some ways, my specific area of interest has not been explored very much yet, and the game design tools I’m interested in are still in development themselves. I do feel like I was successful in locating a bunch of associated material, and am now pretty confident that the notion of using game design to engage and teach is solid—I am looking forward to designing and implementing an introductory lesson sequence and examplar products for my capstone project, and even feel that I doing so I will have the possibility of even contributing to the currently sparse body of research on the topic. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">3) Scholarly growth: <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">I feel like I’ve developed some actual authority in the existing research, believe it or not, and it’s interesting that I now feel more confident heading into teaching computer science, just for having explored some of the various pedagogical strategies involved in the field. The lesson study was a comforting foray into teaching CS concepts again, and gave me confidence that my days training others in the private sector were not spent for nothing. The literature review and research were definitely the core of the course of me, and I admit I was a little disappointed when I realized how modest the scope of the assignment was intended to be: I had to cut a large number of resources and streamline considerably, and it felt like my written treatment hardly did justice to the topic. At any rate I feel a more intimate personal connection to the teaching of computer science now, like I have some skin in the game—I wasn’t actually a CS major myself, partly for reasons I discovered in this research process.
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">What are the consequences or implications of current trends in female/minority participation in computer science?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">What strategies can be used to make a middle school or high school computer science curriculum attractive and accessible to historically underrepresented students?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">How effective are game design and story-telling projects at attracting/retaining girls/minorities to/in a computer science program?
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">How effective are game design and story-telling projects at actually teaching fundamental programming concepts?

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 12pt;">Reflection for Course 404: Final Reflection
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Well, I’m tired. This MAIT program has been an interesting ride, in that the further down the path I get, the vaster and hazier the landscape has become, and I find myself toward the end here facing a familiar existential irony: the more you learn, the less it seems you know. Continuing within the St. Mary’s program has reminded me that I find deep gratification in challenging my own thinking, and I have found the program exciting and intellectually rewarding. I love coming back to St. Mary’s and marinating in the strange world of “teaching about teaching.” They present a fine balance between practice and philosophy: on the one hand improving pedagogical strategy and content knowledge; and on the other hand reinforcing the sense that teaching is a vocation, even a calling. Program been extremely challenging in many ways, but invigorating and inspiring as well, feeding both the mind and the heart.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">The readings assigned early in the program focusing on pedagogical knowledge were thought-provoking, challenging, and even infuriating at times, serving well to remind us of our higher calling as educators. Meanwhile the many articles I went through in the process of my literature review gave me an additional window into the world of education, as a constantly changing, research-driven pursuit. Especially when we spend our days teaching simplified versions of material that was created years ago by Pythagoras and Shakespeare, it’s exciting to remember that knowledge of effective teaching practice is always evolving, through intellectually rigorous research and painfully iterative experimentation and practice. It seems tempting for a teacher to get lazy and accustomed to the easy continuation of traditional practices in the classroom, assuming that “old ways is right ways”, teaching material within the models in which they have always been taught, without confronting the challenges of a modern, diverse student population. Thus my experiences in this program have really illuminated the need for effective educators to be lifelong learners themselves. While the temptation as a more seasoned educator is always to fall back on material that was previously established, this program has compelled me to continue analyzing my own performance and effectiveness in teaching differently, every single year, depending on the needs of my current students.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">When selecting a project to focus on for this program, I initially found it difficult to even select a discipline to work in, teaching both English and Computer Science. On the one hand, English seemed to somehow have more validity as a core academic discipline, and I’ve always been strident about the need for improved ELD and literacy education. Yet Computer Science was an entirely new field for me as far as teaching went, and my course load would be shifting further in that direction in the future, so Computer Science held the greatest sense of potential, need, and even urgency, since I as of then had no curriculum at all to work with. Beyond my immediate need for an accessible and enjoyable approach to the material, there were other issues I wanted to tackle: the Computer Science program at my school was in disarray after a miserable false start of a pilot year under a previous teacher, the students were feeling bitter and neglected, and somehow needed to be made enthusiastic and engaged again. Finally, the program had a problematic tendency to attract very specific types of students; as a woman from a poor socioeconomic background, I had a bit of a chip on my shoulder and wanted the program to be more representative of the school’s demographics, to do my little part in correct the imbalances within the industry at large.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> Luckily, just as we were selecting lines of inquiry, I had a conference call with a college level computer science teacher back east who mentioned a fairly new development environment called “Scratch,” developed at MIT to teach young students and even non-majors at the college level: Scratch is extremely light on syntax, but still presents many of the core computer concepts my students would need to learn. In addition, Scratch is easy to get started with and students can quickly progress into designing video games, for example, so it promised to be high-interest with a short learning curve, ideal for reengaging a class of angry boys and attracting all sorts of other students to the program in future. As I proceeded with my literature review, I discovered that while research was still sparse and the strategy novel, game and interactive story design could not only be viable paths to teaching computer science, but had the added benefit of attracting underrepresented populations as well—girls and disadvantaged students with little prior computer experience.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> From there the project plowed along as well as could be expected; out of necessity I even went through the pilot phase relatively early. After making some revisions based on the mixed results of the pilot and bulking up the preparatory materials provided within the project, I hope that this project will help attract and retain a broad range of students to our Computer Science program, introduce them to core concepts, and prepare them for more rigorous, syntax-demanding languages, even while introducing them to a project-based curriculum. Serendipitously, the Computer Science AP tests may be shifting to Scratch in a couple of years, further increasing the ways in which this program of study can help prepare them for college and industry. And especially considering how dry and even outdated much of traditional high school Computer Science curriculum is compared with how quickly the industry standards shift out from under us, I think that this project could ultimately be of service to other new teachers in need of curriculum or hoping to revamp a stale program. After another year of use case testing and refinement, I’ll likely make it available on the web.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;"> As far as things that this program have taught me about myself as a person, I have to admit that one of the main realizations I’ve taken away from my experiences in this program is that I am a terrible academic. While I’ve always enjoyed learning, I was never a good student in my high school or undergraduate life, having always eked by with the least amount of effort possible, never feeling a real need to “study” to meet expectations, and thus I have been continually plagued by a lack of discipline. My instructors have always made note of this point, that I have difficulty living up to my own potential as a student, even while I generally manage to satisfy a certain status quo and perform to general standards, while still managing to leave both me and my instructors vaguely disappointed. This tendency seems to continue in my life as an educator: I persist in being very deadline-driven, constantly balancing the pressure to produce adequate work with an underlying, self-destructive compulsion to procrastinate. The discipline and mindfulness required to actually find time to complete these assignments as the program progresses have been tremendous, even if at times the work itself was not terribly rigorous—typically I found the strictest and most formal assignments, such as the literature review, the easiest to complete, while the more process-oriented interim assignments would trip me up. Frequently over the course of this program I have found myself confronting a sense of paralysis, usually in response to an acute sense of my own inadequacies, the likes of which I have sometimes heard referred to as “impostor syndrome.” Who am I kidding to believe that I can be successful as a student, much less as an educator, with such eccentric habits?

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">While this has in many ways made my experience in post-graduate study stressful and challenging, it has helpfully given me an appreciation for similar difficulties that my students themselves experience. The greatest challenge in this program has been the expectation that we be self-driven, having to determine our own deadlines, define our own project requirements, and even forcing us to grade ourselves with self-defined rubrics. My own tribulations in attacking the assignments presented over the course of this MAIT program remind me that any curriculum must balance the most basic pedagogical demands of subject matter content with the need for material to be made interesting—and even entertaining-- and that it is important to appeal to the innate curiosity and social nature of my students to help them succeed. This is an arena in which I think project-based lesson design really shines, and it is notable to me that I have ended up focusing on lesson materials which would have interested me when I was a high school student. As I am currently working with an academy which is itself very project-driven, I’ve developed a deep appreciation of the challenges my students encounter when tackling the long-range, autonomous projects we tend to assign: while I initially interpreted many of the intermittent deadlines and assignments given to us during the course of study to be tedious, micro-managed, and sometimes even orthogonal to the final goals of the program in the short term, they have ultimately proved invaluable in assisting me to meet my long-range deadlines.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Obviously I am my own worst critic, but this project has also helped me identify some of my strengths as an educator as well. I entered this program as I was preparing to enter my third year of teaching, confronted with the impending commencement of a year teaching four subjects, three of which were completely new to me, all the while teaching to a student population with which I have had very little experience. My first two years of teaching had been spent teaching fundamentals of language arts to students needing foundational phonics and basic English language instruction, yet now I was challenged to teach two levels of computer science as unprecedented pilot courses, even while maintaining a collaborative freshman English class and taking care of the Yearbook class. Struggling to balance this diverse course load while muddling through the MAIT program reminded me that, ultimately, I am quite flexible, and have the aptitude to carry broad pedagogical concepts into a multitude of venues, even while catering to students of diverse academic caliber. Meanwhile I try to draw my students into this variety of content knowledge with personal rapport and sensitivity to their own interests and personal needs in mind.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">As I have spent the duration of this program adjusting from one primary area of subject knowledge to another, my explorations within the scope of the program have been invaluable in informing my content area knowledge of the new subject: Computer Science. One of the major reliefs from “dropping out” of the technical industry and shifting into teaching was relief from the constant demand to keep up with ever changing programming languages and environments. So it’s somewhat ironic that the first thing I had to do in order to make this course of study succeed was to learn several new programming languages. Luckily, I’ve developed many of the important fungible skills that I hope to impart in my students— the ability to research efficiently, think logically, teach myself, and quickly translate between the schema of a new language and known ones—so I have thus far been able to stay ahead of them. I am of course still quite new to these languages even now, far from the thousands of hours required to establish expertise or even just credibility, but I can already see that next year I will know more, and teach it better.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">As far as pedagogical content knowledge goes, while I have a fair amount of professional experience in the field of computer science, it’s one thing to know a subject and a whole other thing to know how to teach it! Especially when one is working with material that can be interpreted as vocational training, it’s far too easy to fall into the trap of assuming that industry experience is a substitute for a strategic acumen in actually teaching the material. During the process of researching my literature review, I realized that the materials and strategies required for teaching computer science to high school students was vastly different from those materials which would be more appropriate in a professional context, and that the motivators which applied to each body of learners were quite different as well. Once I started piloting the project, I also had to adjust my sense of scope considerably: in the industry a work week at least 45 hours long, but in a classroom you’re lucky to get a tenth of that.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Due to the almost experimental approach I took to my project’s pilot run, wanting to see what students could learn independently if they were just “thrown in the deep end of the pool”, I learned a number of pedagogical lessons the hard way. As I watched my students during early instruction in a subsequent programming language, I came to the disturbing realization that while some of the students were catching on quickly and even excelling in the new language, others were persistently, utterly lost about the most fundamental concepts—somehow, something hadn’t made it through the translation. I was so accustomed to the industry standard, that a person working in programming typically wants to be there and in fact has talent in the field, I had failed to realize that this material would not come inherently easy to all of my students. And as I looked closer, I realized to my shame that it was precisely the students who I would have provided with additional scaffolds in a more traditional content area—if this had been an English class, for example. The most confused students were my English language learners and special education students, who I had always taken such painstaking care with in language arts classes. So I have realized that I really need to slow down, provide more scaffolding and skill-based training, and be very careful to structure any project-based curriculum with more frequent checkpoints during the development process. But ultimately I am glad to have developed a sort of theoretical rationale for my approach to teaching Computer Science, and some confidence that I’m approaching the field in a forward-thinking, reflective fashion, even if it needs some polishing up.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Beyond the many brains I’ve picked at during the process of learning these new skills and content, from phone conferences with Computer Science teachers in Florida to chats with industry movers and shakers, it has been invigorating to share a room so often with other “teacher-scholars” attempting to hone their own practices. Even though I initially balked, I was surprised at how informative it was to work with colleagues from other disciplines, and even multiple-subject teachers: getting a peek into the great variety of subject matter, styles, and student populations was very effective in remind me that the world of pedagogy and teaching is immense and ever-changing. Teachers so frequently spend their days alone in a crowd, performing their work behind a closed door, and it’s very refreshing to come out and learn from one another as a community of educators. I am also gratified that my instructor for the capstone project, Raina, is so knowledgeable about my content area: after spending most of the program with both students and instructors who just had to give me the glassy-eyed benefit of a doubt when I started speaking in tongues about my projects, finally here was a professor who had some interest in my subject area and could give me more critical feedback.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">Despite a lot of whining and pointed commentary I might have given along the way, I think that the MAIT program was pretty successful, especially given that this program itself is a first year pilot. Who am I to criticize! I really enjoyed the application-oriented approach to the final project, that we were encouraged to make it something practicable with real-world utility. I also found the literature review to be an important experience, adding substance gravity to the program sequence; you probably won’t hear this from too many others, but I almost wished the assignment were more rigorous! And as I mentioned before, despite my early resistance, I do think it was productive to mix up the cohorts between single and multiple subjects- it really helped distill the sense that, despite differences in subject matter and student audience, we’re all really still teachers and learners. I believe that the St. Mary’s MAIT program is itself a model and exemplar of a project-based curriculum at any level, building within its student body a sense of self-control, individualized direction and goals, as well as accountability for the final product of their work.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt;">As far as suggestions go: in general, I think the program sequence could use a little balancing between the start and finish: the first class was pretty fluffy, while the capstone has been a real bear. Finally, the specific requirements for use of technology seemed a little inauthentic, even forced: many people complained about the WebEx experience. Did St. Mary’s buy some expensive Cisco site license that needs to be justified somehow? And while I applaud the efforts to make students more facile with current educational technology, it seemed that using both a wiki and BlogSpot was confusing and arbitrary, especially when Dropbox and email also got into the mix. And now that St. Mary’s has adopted Google docs, they might want to revisit this next year. If technology is going to be a focus, it might want to be made more explicit in the program goals.