FIRST Principles to Design for Online, Synchronous High School CS Teacher Training and Curriculum Co-Design

The Covid-19 pandemic has offered new challenges and opportunities for teaching and research It has forced constraints on in-person gathering of researchers, teachers, and students, and conversely, has also opened doors to creative instructional design This paper describes a novel approach to designing an online, synchronous teacher professional development (PD) and curriculum co-design experience It shares our work in bringing together high school teachers and researchers in four US states The teachers participated in a 3-week summer PD on ideas of Distributed Computing and how to teach this advanced topic to high school students using NetsBlox, an extension of the Snap! block-based programming environment The goal of the PD was to prepare teachers to engage in collaborative co-design of a 9-week curricular module for use in classrooms and schools Between their own training and the co-design process, teachers co-taught a group of high school students enrolled in a remote summer internship at a university in North Carolina to pilot the learned units and leverage ideas from their teaching experience for subsequent curricular co-design Formative and summative feedback from teachers suggest that this PD model was successful in meeting desired outcomes Our generalizable FIRST principles-Flexibility, Innovativeness, Responsiveness (and Respect), Supports, and Teamwork (collaboration)-that helped make this unique PD successful, can help guide future CS teacher PD designs © 2020 ACM