Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. — Albert Einstein

On a recent Saturday, I had the distinct privilege of being part of one of the workshops being offered to Chicago Public School teachers who are teaching the Exploring Computer Science curriculum http://exploringcs.org. This was a terrific opportunity for me to experience what I had heard about a number of times from, among others, the authors Joanna Goode and Gail Chapman. You can get an excellent feel for this curriculum and how it fits in a larger scheme of change in CS instruction by reading the articles Beyond Access: Broadening Participation in High School Computer Science in the current (December, 2012) issue of ACM Inroads; also Beyond Curriculum: The Exploring Computer Science Program in the June 2012 issue of ACM Inroads

What makes this workshop very different from others I’ve attended is the focus not only on content but also on pedagogy. This was a computer science workshop where instead of just hearing about and playing with content, we were mostly exercising and (for most of us) challenging our thinking about teaching computer science. Much of the six-hour workshop was spent in small teams of 3-4 teachers who were given a lesson we (at least I) hadn’t seen before. We had about 90 minutes to come up with our approach to teaching this inquiry-based lesson and then later some of the teams were chosen and given the opportunity to actually teach our 40-minute lesson to the “class”. The beauty of this is that we didn’t just talk about inquiry-based teaching but actually practiced it among our peers.

The content itself was not difficult (and this is true for much of the course), but the change in pedagogy challenges the root behaviors of most teachers. The course lessons are set up to avoid lecturing as much as possible and to provide an interesting, engaging problem setting for the students to work on in pairs or groups. Collaboration, reflection, evaluation, higher order thinking skills are among the key elements.In fact there were three words that the workshop leaders wrote on the easel: Equity, Inquiry, Content. This really sums up the intent of this very successful curriculum. Each lesson in ECS is focused around these.

In fact, after reading, hearing and finally experiencing this curriculum, I’m convinced that all computer science, and probably all courses ought to be taught in this engaging manner. The key is the pedagogy – the shift in the instructional paradigm away from what most of us do now.

We aren’t succeeding in reaching lots of kids with the way we’re teaching computer science today. This approach provides a pathway to huge change in the classroom. We have to change to succeed.