The Research
The Research Project
Video Transcript
Titled: Building Capacity in Computer Science Education and Student Near Peer Classroom Mentorship, we are developing a research-practice partnership between us, The Young People's Project (YPP), Boston Public Schools, Bootstrap, and Boston University. YPP is building off a previously funded National Science foundation grant where high school students were trained to code math games for middle grade students.
The main idea for this project is to build teacher capacity in Computer science education! Our work is to provide professional development for Boston Public School teachers which exposes them to a classroom model of instruction developed by the Young People's Project and the Algebra Project, where we utilize the Bootstrap materials to integrate Computer Science into existing 9th-grade algebra classrooms.
For over 25 years, YPP has been at the forefront of developing young people as Math Literacy Workers, or MLWs for short.
MLWs are high school and college age students who work collaboratively with each other to design, plan, implement, and iterate Math learning experiences for elementary and middle school students in their neighborhoods. One of the primary roles for the College Math Literacy Workers is to help develop and nurture high school MLWs to become model youth leaders and champions of math literacy in their community.
The critical component of this project is the inclusion of local college students who are studying or interested in computer science. These college age students, predominantly students of color who come from the same neighborhoods as the high school students they will teach in schools, are hired, trained, and developed by YPP to enter the classroom alongside math teachers as computer science content experts serving as an invaluable resource to the classroom culture. Through our work as researchers and practitioners, we have learned that institutions entrusted to educate youth miss out on incredible educational and youth development opportunities when neer-peer cascading structures of instruction are not leveraged.
When YPP was founded, in Jackson Mississippi, by a hand full of 8th graders and 20 year olds, all former Algebra project students, it was done so as one possible answer to the question “what and how much do young people have to do to help get Jim Crow out of education in the United States?
We hypothesize that this NSF supported work will help us move the needle on this question, as we build capacity in educators of students that in many cases would not have had equitable opportunities to learn computer science in expensive ways during their high school careers.
We see this project an opportunity for us to share, contribute and enrich the research + practitioner communities within Mathematics and Computer Science Education with the work we have pioneered via cascading near-peer instruction in mathematics.
If you want to stay informed on our progress, make sure to visit our project website, at yppcsforall.org.
Thanks for listening, and Keep on Pushing.
Colleagues from The Young People's Project (YPP), Boston Public Schools (BPS), Bootstrap, and Boston University aim to increase the capacity of mathematics teachers to integrate computer science into their classrooms. The goal of this project is to provide a model of professional development for BPS teachers that uses a culturally sustaining classroom model of instruction developed by YPP and the Algebra Project. With the help of local college-age students, the program integrates Bootstraps computer science (CS) curriculum into existing Algebra and geometry classrooms. We reached 4 algebra 1 and geometry educators in year 1 and plan to reach 18 total over three years. We expect to reach approximately 1500 students.
Currently, YPP is recruiting and training local College STEM Literacy Workers (CSLW) and teachers to support classroom implementation. The training is broken up into four topics: 1) history, mission, vision, and culture of the YPP; 2) culturally sustaining CS education - effective teaching and the power of young people; 3) computational thinking practices through experiential learning; 4) effective professional development and the Model of Excellence (MOE). We expect CSLW and classroom teachers to develop awareness about, and competence in, their ability to facilitate effective learning, including meaningful student discourse about computer science.
Teacher and CSLW learning include regular conversations among stakeholders to assess and provide feedback on progress, participant observations of workshops and classroom implementations, interviews with teachers and CSLW, and classroom assessments of students' computational thinking practices. Participating schools have already begun to integrate and expand computer science opportunities across the school curriculum.
Our first professional development was co-led by CSLWs and colleagues from Bootstrap as part of the 2021 Math and Computational Thinking Lab (MCTL). The YPP/Bootstrap MCTL is a 50 hour experience with rich mathematical and CS content for teachers who intend to teach in the fall semester. It is intended to place the PD in the context of YPP's work to broaden participation in STEM through near peer learning and teaching, introduce Algebra Project and YPP pedagogies of experiential learning and teaching. We will implement the second implementation cycle in 2022-2023