Ditto to what Leigh Ann said.

A couple of other things that we're noticing:

- Compared to other efforts around disciplinary improvement around, say, Math, Reading or Science, in CS there's often no existing instructional system (or even, instruction) in place. I.e., no curriculum, assessments, PD efforts, regular teacher collaborative time, coaching, etc. More than that, there's pretty much never a local definition of 'what counts' as 'computer science'. So district leadership teams need to do a whole lot of work to think together about what they want to accomplish in terms of learning goals and pedagogy, and then building out from there.

- We're seeing really particular issues around buy-in on the part of teachers, a lot of which have to do with the fact that at the K-8 level many efforts focus on CS integration, with not as much 'stand-alone' CS. This means showing teachers in all disciplinary areas ways that CS or CT can be relevant to what they're teaching. This might be easier with math or science teachers where there are lots of obvious overlaps, but less so in other disciplines. This isn't to say that there aren't buy-in challenges when a district wants to take a new approach to, say, math instruction, but the nature and scope of the buy-in challenges differ.

Really cool project! I'd love to hear more about incentivization for schools and school leadership to support allotting more time to PD, teacher collaborative time, and coaching. I've been evaluating a project that tries to support content area teachers in engaging with multilingual learners, and some of the challenges that program has faced have centered around building in institutional supports for valuing the work that teachers are doing within their schools and between schools in their district.

In doing some dissemination on our project I've noticed that some schools responded positively to the nearly total lack of knowledge of CS on the part of admins and teachers.  These are schools that are looking for ways to revamp their STEM programs and develop more inquiry-based and PBL courses, which are built around a growth mindset.  These are educators who like the idea of having all of the school stakeholders diving into the unknown together and learning as a team.  It's all about opportunity, and it sometimes is easier when you look around and notice that none of the other school know what they're doing either (just like when NGSS and MTSS were new).  They just need that foot in the door from programs like this, that guide them through the process.

Totally! I think there are really wonderful opportunities and openings for distributed leadership and collective learning in an area like CS because the playing field is a bit more level from the start. And passionate teachers that have been doing the work already can really be elevated as instructional leaders to help others in a planning group.

We're seeing lots of different approaches on developing CS expertise, most of which I think track fairly well in their form with what we see in other disciplinary areas, the challenges are more how they're configured and rolled out in relation to one another.

As an example, one district we're working with had their core CS leadership team (made up of admin, building leaders, teachers) worked with a consultant over the course of about four months to study and make sense of the K12 CS framework and other standards/guidance documents, and during this period, did a lot of deliberation about what kinds of valued learning goals they had around CS/CT. This was really critical upskilling of those doing the core planning work that could then support strategy development, including their approach to instruction, and thus, PD. The group then identified an external PD provider that aligned with the instructional vision they'd developed, and started to bring them in to work with cohorts of teachers in pull-out PDs, with follow-on happening through principals making efforts to weave the ideas around integrating CT in their teacher observations.

We also see things like utilization of content coaches who do lesson modeling for teachers, and support for lesson development during summers.

The systems change lens is vital to understanding how we will scale CSforAll - thanks for taking the lead on this!

Thanks Carol!

Jill, to your question on measuring systems change, there's lots of different things that measurement can focus on here, depending on your purposes (research measures and improvement/formative measures of course being different).

One approach we use is having district teams do self-assessments together during our workshops using the SCRIPT Rubric, which has them rate themselves in terms how they're doing in areas like leadership, materials and curriculum, professional learning, partnerships, etc. I think of this measurement mostly as a support for planning and decision-making, rather than necessarily being about showing evidence externally. As teams self-assess, it prompts reflections on where they're at, sharing of information across the team about things not everyone may know about, and reminders to consider decision-making in certain areas that may otherwise get lost in the shuffle.

Beyond that, we've used district-wide surveys of those involved in CS instruction, where we ask about all sorts of things related to the instructional system overall - nature of CS learning opportunities at different grade levels, whether there are processes for planning/deliberation, presence of teams and collaborative time for teachers, presence and awareness around an instructional vision for CS, faculty buy-in around importance of CS, etc. Happy to share if it's useful!

Hi Pei-Ling! In terms of Instructional Visions, there are so many areas educators and their districts can have around "Why to teach CS", from personal joy and agency, to competencies and literacies, to civics, to workforce development. There are even more diverse viewpoint regardling what we are talking about when we talk about CS--which kinds of concepts and skill sets "count". As you might imagine, depending on what the educator's and district's answers are for these two questions, instructional strategies would look very different! Do you design a community engagement project leveraging CS and CT? Or do you design a creative poetry unit around these competencies? Or do you design a career exploration hackathon?

I think goes back to the second recommendation we make in the video, related to building a cross-district, cross-level team that's committed to figuring out all of these challenges together. Ideally a group includes people that are in positions where they can advocate (or even better, have some control) over various levers, like scheduling, professional development, development of new courses, and credit policies. While having the right folks at the table doesn't eliminate challenges, it does create the conditions for creative problem solving around them using a systems perspective.