What has England learned (Part 2)?
Last week I started a summary of a talk Miles Berry gave in Madrid last October. This week I will cover what he said England has learnt from teaching coding to kids over the last three years in terms of what teachers need and what kids have been learning.
Miles Berry made an interesting observation about the development of computational thinking skills and the relationship to coding skills. A research experiment was conducted whereby a group of students was split in half and one half did extra coding classes after school. At the end of the year both groups computational thinking skills were evaluated. There was NOT a significant increase in computational thinking skills by those students who did extra coding. What this showed is that whilst coding is probably the best way to build computational thinking skills if those skills are not being explicitly taught then they wont magically appear. This also reinforced the fact that it is possible to develop computational thinking skills without using computers.
This points to the absolute importance of properly training teachers in not only how to program with something like Scratch but also what are the facets of the skill of computational thinking and how might they be taught. Miles suggested that "Outstanding teaching of computing" = Pedagogy + ICT Skills + Computer Science Knowledge. The English experience was that although teachers ICT skills were OK their CS Knowledge was very low which is likely a situation mirrored all over the world. Thus a lot of support was required and England has started to deliver that through the Computing at School organisation, the use of master teachers and the provision of dedicated professional development. Australia has provided some similar resources such as the free Digital Technologies courses through Adelaide Uni.
There are many other resources that schools can avail themselves of which are very cost effective or free (and that interestingly England has in many cases created!). For example:
Whilst England has made great progress a report in November 2017 found that they still had a long way to go to ensure all teachers have the skills and confidence to deliver the computing curriculum. We are three years behind them so it is even more imperative that Australian schools get planning and training now.
So in summary, there were three standout messages from England's experience. Schools have to plan to deliver these new subjects, they must provide comprehensive teacher training not just in coding but also in computation thinking and lastly teachers must be given the resources they need to deliver the subject adequately. How is your school going?
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