Paper at WiPSCE’12: “Grand Challenges for the UK: Upskilling Teachers to Teach Computer Science Within the Secondary Curriculum”

Further to the CAS paper presented at Koli Calling 2011 in Finland in November 2011, Sue Sentance (Anglia Ruskin University) presented a paper entitled: Grand Challenges for the UK: Upskilling Teachers to Teach Computer Science Within the Secondary Curriculum at WiPSCE’12, the 7th International Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education, in Hamburg in November.

The paper is available to download for free via the ACM Author-ize service below; the abstract is as follows:

Recent changes in UK education policy with respect to ICT and Computer Science (CS) have meant that more teachers need the skills and knowledge to teach CS in schools. This paper reports on work in progress in the UK researching models of continuing professional development (CPD) for such teachers. We work with many teachers who either do not have an appropriate academic background to teach Computer Science, or who do and have not utilised it in the classroom due to the curriculum in place for the last fifteen years. In this paper we outline how educational policy changes are affecting teachers in the area of ICT and Computer Science; we describe a range of models of CPD and discuss the role that local and national initiatives can play in developing a hybrid model of transformational CPD, briefly reporting on our initial findings to date.