How Bottom-Up Researcher-Teacher Collaborations Can Support Bottom-Up Computational Thinking Integration - C-STEM for sustainability: Leveraging a research-p

Big-Picture Argument: When teachers are positioned as having valid expertise and are empowered to define CT in ways that they find meaningful and personally relevant, they are more likely to feel comfortable with it and invested in it. As a result, they are more inclined to choose to integrate CT into their teaching practice independently.

Presentation Sub-Argument: An emphasis on collaboratively constructing understandings of CT rooted in everyday experiences at the beginning of the learning process can enhance teacher engagement and confidence. It enables them to contribute pertinent experiences and ideas to the learning process, which makes the ideas meaningful and relevant.

Data Evidence & Analysis

Researcher-Practitioner Meeting, March 2023.

Topic: Introducing CT

Agenda: Icebreaker, Brief Presentation, Whole Group Discussion RPP

Members: 3 Researchers specializing in computational thinking, sustainability education, and teacher education, 1 computer science specialist, 1 retired teacher, 4 in-service teachers.


Transcript	Analysis
Researcher 1: And so this presentation is called “what is computational thinking?” but spoiler alert! There's not really consensus about what counts as computational thinking and what computational thinking is. But I think what we really want folks to get out of it is to think about it in terms of like what becomes really useful for us as we're doing this work. Following Prompt: Share an example of when you engaged in computational thinking in your everyday life.	Frames conversation as reflecting on how we use CT in our everyday lives—not about teaching.
Content Specialist: I probably do this every minute of my life. This is, this is my jam. This is my superpower. I want to share an example of how I did this with elementary students. I had a software package that was called contraptions, and basically it was about a 100 puzzles that were rube Goldberg-like things…But I use this fun software basically to teach computational thinking. Researcher 1: Awesome thanks for sharing. So it sounds like it's an example of you engaging kids in computational thinking. Yeah? Content Specialist: But it it was computational thinking for me as well, because I was abstracting from observing what are the practices that students are learning, and then I had to- um, my solution was, how do I make those problem-solving strategies concrete and replicable so they could write about them and talk about them in their, um, reflections. So all of us were doing computational thinking. Me to develop the instruction and them to solve the puzzles.	Responds enthusiastically, expressing comfort and expertise in CT. Sharing how they taught CT, not how they engaged in it. Flags Content Specialist’s response as teaching-oriented. Amends response to highlight how they used CT in the classroom episode.
Researcher 2: Well, I was gonna share a slightly different, um, like type of example, maybe? Just because- so- This isn’t my jam. Actually, I’ve never heard of this jam until like a couple of years ago and I’m still learning about it….so thinking about, um, like situations in my life that I have been able to recognize patterns in and make predictions, and because at the time, like as we're talking, my, my 3 year old had come in, and was yelling about something or whatever. And so I was like, okay, so 3-year-old doesn't get a nap, he is going to be cranky later, and so as simple as that is, like that's a pattern that I can recognize. And it's not just that, because, like he does it, but it also depends on how much sleep he got the night before. It also depends on how, like, cranky his parents are in reacting to his crankiness. And then I realized that this this um like conditional reasoning thing, like that was something I was doing too. Like, when I'm trying to predict, like his mood at 6 pm, I'm going- I am doing all these things based on, on um, like patterns. And…that does have elements of computational thinking, and those are the sorts of practices and strategies and ways of thinking about stuff that we can help kids to refine and become more sophisticated moving towards like a computational thinking, computing, computer way.	Offers a different type of response, highlighting CT in everyday life and positioning herself as not an “expert” but able to use CT and label it as such.
Teacher 1: I was just um thinking, I don't know if this really counts or not. But I, I just thought of this because it's been in the forefront of my brain lately, because I really love hiking, and I've started doing more challenging rock scrambling kinds of things. And I, you know I used to, like, see them on a hike and think, yeah, I just would look at the whole thing and think, there's no way I can do that. But now I've discovered the joy of every inch or foot, figuring out how can I just go 6 inches higher. You know, and so when you break that down into these little things it's really really fun. But, on the other hand, you also have to be looking ahead to, you know, so you don't end up in a dead end, where I do very frequently. But um anyway, I just sort of like that. I just, it feels very like computational. (Content Specialist: It is!) It feels very, you know it's, it's the first time I really put a lot of thought into making it up a wall or something, and I, I love it.	Though not confident, feels empowered enough to offer a response. Content specialist reinforces this by validating the response.
Teacher 2: For- I think this is de- this counts as debugging, but um, right now grading papers for my precalc class is- takes forever. It used to be something where you like- you know you can just kind of check out, oh ok they got the right answer and that’s it. But now that I know that the process to get to that right answer can take- it takes up half a page, then it’s kind of like debugging to find like where was that tiny little mistake because at this point it’s like, you drop a negative? Completely different answer. You write sine instead of cosine, completely different answer. Um, so it reminded me of like, I remember I was taking like a MATLAB course in college and I remember it was like, it was a semicolon. My entire code would be wrong and it was just a semicolon. I’m like, this is-! And that frustration I felt of this is what it takes?	Offers an additional example of CT in their everyday practice—debugging students’ mathematical reasoning.