Colorado Strategic Approach to Rally Teachers

Abstract

Colorado Strategic Approach to Rally Teachers (C-START) has provided computer science (CS) professional development to 1,425 K-12 teachers from 2016 to the present impacting over 7,000 students (who are ~33% female and 21% from other underrepresented groups). Pre and post training surveys from the 2019 summer cohort revealed teachers made statistically significant gains in CS content knowledge, confidence in teaching CS, confidence in learning CS, motivation to learn CS, and knowledge of engaging students in CS. C-START professional development trainings are offered each year based on educator requests, such as Beauty and Joy of Computing, Mobile CSP, Java Programming, Web Programming, Snap!, CS Unplugged, and Introduction to Cryptography. Synergystically, the C-START program has hosted the National CSPdWeek three times featuring Bootstrap and Exploring Computer Science. C-START has had a significant positive impact in Colorado CS high school education. For example, in 2015, a year before C-START began, only 170 high school students in Colorado took the AP CS A exam and only 15.4% of those students were female. In 2018, 791 high school students took the AP CS A exam in Colorado and 20.6% of the exam takers were female. Similar positive outcomes exist for students from other underrepresented groups (e.g., from 7.3% to 21.3% for Hispanic/Latino). While C-START is not the only PD opportunity for Colorado teachers, we are confident that C-START is helping more Colorado students access CS education.