Effective Computer Science Teacher Professional Development: Beauty and Joy of Computing 2018.

The Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP) course has been fully active for 2 years, garnering a large group of diverse students [2], and flaming the need for highly trained CSP teachers, especially in effective practices for diversity and equity. We have conducted summer professional development (PD) workshops from 2012-2018 which have prepared 748 teachers to teach AP CSP using the Beauty and Joy of Computing (BJC) curriculum. To improve equity and readiness for teaching, we have refined our PD by: shortening the PD from 6 weeks to 1 week; developing new, highly scaffolded pre-PD work; and modifying the in-person schedule to incorporate more pedagogy and teaching experiences, while continuing to provide in-depth, hands-on support for teachers to learn the basics of programming. The most recent revisions to our PD schedule resulted in improved post-PD survey results, with teachers from the 2018 cohort planning to adopt more of the BJC curriculum than in past years. From 2017 to 2018, planned adoption rates increased by 13%, resulting in 73% of the 2018 PD participants planning to adopt more than $60%$ of the BJC curriculum and 58% planning to adopt 80-$100% of the BJC curriculum in their classrooms in 2018-2019. In this paper, we discuss the most recent BJC PD implementation and provide evidence of increased teacher self-efficacy in areas including fostering interest in computing for underrepresented populations.