Adjunct Computer Science Teachers

At ScriptEd, we are often asked about whether we will get into the business of training classroom teachers to teach computer science.

I don't know the answer to this question yet, but as an organization made up almost entirely of former teachers, I think think this idea makes us cringe a little bit.  Most trainings we experienced when were teachers were not very helpful, and most of the teachers we know do not think highly of professional development opportunities.

Teachers have a lot of work to do. They teach all day long and then have to grade assignments, lesson plan, call parents, attend meetings, etc. Teaching is, hands down, the hardest thing I've ever done.  It's more difficult than starting and running a company and training for triathlons at the same time. When I was teaching, any type of professional development training afterwork hours was a huge burden and mostly felt like a waste of time.

Asking teachers with full schedules to attend trainings is tough. Asking a teacher to learn an entirely new subject (computer science) well enough to teach it is infinitely more difficult. Further, 40-50% of teachers leave the profession within the first five years, so even when young teachers are trained to teach computer science, many will end up leaving and taking that knowledge with them.  This is especially true for computer science teachers -- ed tech companies (and tech companies in general) are looking for talent.

Of course there are some teachers who will leap at the chance to learn computer science, and for those folks CS trainings are great if those teachers are supported with the necessary resources.  It's also important to incentivize these teachers appropriately so that they'll stay in the classroom.

So if ScriptEd ever does a training, it will be incredibly efficient, productive and useful, and will have an eye towards keeping teachers in the classroom.

In the meantime...

What other alternatives are there, then, to get more computer science teachers into the classroom other than training current, in-service teachers?

I've always loved the idea of an adjunct high school teacher role. ScriptEd volunteers are essentially adjunct teachers.  They teach a couple of times a week in addition to their jobs. This allows our volunteers to experience a lot of the joys of teaching without getting bogged down or overwhelmed. We now have volunteers that are in their 4th year of teaching with us, and these volunteers have become very good teachers.  Good enough, in my opinion, to be 'real' teachers.  Unfortunately, however, it's not possible to get our volunteers certified as teachers if they want to continue only teaching part-time.

I've been working with a couple of my ScriptEd team members to figure out whether we can make certification a reality for our volunteers.  It looks like an uphill battle. In order to get an alternate certification, our volunteers would need to become full-time teachers, which most are not able or willing to do.

We are going to continue to look for ways to figure out how to do this, but bureaucracy is real and in the mean time, we're doing what we need to get our kids the CS education they need to thrive in the 21st Century.