Our Story, where you’ll learn more about our history, motivations, and objectives behind running the PLCs.
Structuring the PLC, where you’ll learn about the methods we used to organize the PLC and keep things running smoothly.
Getting to Know our Teachers, where you’ll learn about the dedicated teachers who spent their summers learning and growing with us.
Our Workshops, where you’ll learn about the workshops we used to teach our approach to curriculum design during the first summer.
Sharing and Showcasing our Work, where you’ll learn how we shared the work of our teachers with a wider audience at the end of the PLC.
Storytelling, where you’ll find out how we told the stories of our teachers and the PLC and to what end.
During the Summer of 2021 and 2022, PiLa-CS convened and supported a community of practice to learn more about how to enable better CS teaching for emergent bilinguals. Below you’ll find more about…
Our Story
History and Motivation
Since the start of PiLa-CS in 2017, the project’s researchers had often worked one-on-one with teachers, sitting in on classrooms and getting to know students alongside their teachers. We took a hands-on approach to curriculum design, scheduling meetings with teachers where we would devise unit plans based on what topics they had to cover and what their students were interested in, creating exemplar Scratch projects and reviewing how each lesson went. However, as a relatively small project, there were only so many teachers we had the capacity to help. Thus, we began running translanguaging professional development workshops as part of EECS. This helped us to reach a wider range of teachers, introducing them to our pedagogy and approach despite the fact that we would never see the inside of their classrooms. We often had teachers who wanted a chance to talk to us and stay in touch with our project even after these sessions. Running a PLC was an opportunity for us to strike a balance between the two— we could support many more teachers than we could when we were co-creating curriculum, while still being able to provide individual attention and feedback when necessary, as well as fostering relationships between teachers that allowed them to bounce ideas off of one another and benefit from each other's expertise.
Key Activity: Design Journaling
We invited teachers to make use of a design journal template to help them plan computer science activities that start syncretic conversations with their students and build on students' translanguaging.
Recruitment
We recruited teachers from New York City and San Francisco public school districts who were considering issues of equity in teaching computer science to their students, many of whom were multilingual learners. Many teachers from the summer of 2021 returned in 2022, while a few of them were new to the PLC and even the project itself.
Goals and Objectives
During our summer PLCs, teachers, researchers, and undergraduate interns worked together and independently to…
Design/iterate on computing curriculum that builds on and reflects our students and their communities’ funds of knowledge and diverse language practices (self-guided, no weekly workshop)
Challenge ourselves to start with our students and reject deficit-thinking
Cultivate a supportive, collaborative and reflective learning community
Grow personally
Take up leadership and ownership in our community
Tell teachers’ stories to the wider field
Structuring the PLC
Year 1
The first PLC was very hands-on, and included an extra option for teachers to participate in telling their stories. Each week the PiLa-CS team ran a synchronous workshop covering a different aspect of our approach to curriculum design.
There were five workshops, the first of which being orientation and different aspects of our approach to curriculum design. These happened weekly on Mondays.
Flipgrid submissions where teachers recorded short reflections on the past week were due weekly on Tuesdays after each workshop.
The design teams met in small groups every Wednesday to practice curriculum design together.
The teachers who opted into helping us tell their stories met with the team every other Thursday.
There were optional office hours every Friday for teachers to come in and ask questions/get help from the team.
The second to last Monday was the design review where teachers went over their presentations for the final showcase that Friday. The last Monday after was the final reflection of the PLC.
Year 2
The second PLC was made mostly of returning teachers, and thus took a much more hands off approach, allowing teachers to work in self-made groups while still being able to come to us when they felt stuck, get feedback from colleagues.
The first Thursday and Friday of the PLC were the Goal Check-ins, where we met one-on-one with teachers to discuss their plans for the summer.
The first Monday of the PLC was the Kickoff sessions, which were split into morning and afternoon sessions.
Flipgrid reflections were due at the end of the week every Thursday.
There were optional office hours every Monday for teachers to come in and ask questions/get help from the team.
The third and fourth Tuesday and Wednesday were the Feedback sessions, where teachers met in small groups to receive and provide feedback on their projects so far.
The final Friday (and final meeting) were the end-of-PLC showcases, split into morning and afternoon sessions.
Getting to Know our Teachers
During the summer of 2021 a cohort of teachers participated in PiLa-CS's first Professional Learning Community.
Watch as they commence their journey toward the implementation of more equitable CS teaching practices, especially for bi/multilingual learners.
Featuring team members from Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS), https://www.pila-cs.org
Produced by Danielle Fuller
Thank you to the teachers who participated in our 2021 and 2022 Summer PLCs! Here are some of their names:
Ashley Ufret, Catherine Romero, Deliann Morales, Elizette Estrella, Ilka Stoessel, Jacqueline DuFont, Jessica Wygand, Jinyu (Katy) Liang, Kimberly Sánchez, Kristi Jones, Melissa Hannon, Melissa Nicolardi, Patricia Davis, Patricia Elfers-Wygand, Patricia Robinson, Richard Gross, Robin Rivadeneira, Rosane Weiss, Rose Ann Valerio, Susan Murray, Théa Williams
Our Workshops
Workshop 1: Orientation and Intro to the PLC
During the first workshop (video above), the PiLa-CS team and participating teachers worked together to set the foundations of a successful summer through community norms building.
Workshop 2: Getting to know your students
In this workshop, teachers tackled a main concept of the PiLa-CS approach to equitable CS education -- getting to know students and using what you learn to shape what and how you teach.
Watch as the teachers surfaced what students have shared with them about experiences, language, and literacies from home and different communities, and then brainstorm ways to put these at the core of their lesson plans.
Featuring team members from Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS).
Produced by Danielle Fuller
Workshop 3: Resources from the community
In this workshop, teachers considered how they would build on bring community conversations in their computing units, bringing the wider world into the classroom.
Featuring team members from Participating in Literacies and Computer Science (PiLa-CS).
Produced by Danielle Fuller
Workshop 4: Goals
In this workshop, teachers considered how they would map out the goals — including language and translanguaging goals — for their units in order to ensure they are interacting with CS education and language in an equitable way.
Workshop 5: Assessment
In this workshop, teachers considered ways in which they can take a holistic approach to creating assessments that accurately reflect students’ dynamic translanguaging practices, knowledge and abilities.
Sharing and Showcasing our Work
At the end of each PLC, the teachers presented their work to an audience of teacher, educators, and researchers interested in fostering equity in CS education.
In the 2021 Showcase, teachers focused on presenting an overview of the curriculum they developed over the course of the summer.
In the 2022 Showcase, teachers focused on a wider range of projects, from curriculum to social media campaigns to showcases of student work.
The project decks below show each teacher’s project presentation by the end of the PLC.
Storytelling
Throughout both PLCs, the PiLa-CS team collected the stories of teachers that we worked with and found multiple ways to tell said stories in an equitable and inclusive way. We are grateful to them for allowing us to tell their stories! We sought to both celebrate their identities, perspectives, and accomplishments and show other teachers and educators that it doesn’t take a fancy certification to introduce computer science to your classroom in an equitable way. The videos throughout this page and the projects below are some of the ways in which the PiLa-CS team has made sense of the stories our teachers have shared and experienced with us throughout the 2021 and 2022 PLCs.
Am I a CS Teacher?
Created by Kyla Yujiri
What does it mean to be a computer science teacher? Who gets to claim that they are one?
Teachers were interviewed prior to PiLa-CS's first PLC in Summer 2021. Listening to those interviews, Kyla was able to learn about these two teachers' backgrounds, thoughts, and experiences as Computer Science educators.
Explore the different pathways that these two teachers have taken to—in one way or another—become CS teachers.
Ilka Stoessel
Melissa Hannon
Computing Beginning
Corporate Job
Non-CS College Education
Teaching Beginning
Belief in CS and Equity in CS
CS in the Classroom
I am a CS Teacher
Understand the PiLa-CS experience through sound! Below you will find a soundscape and two podcasts that will help you connect to the environments and experiences of PiLa-CS teachers.
The Sound of PiLa-CS
Created by Raya Hudson
Episode 0: The Environment
This project is based on sound alone and dives into the world of the classroom and school as a whole, specifically in NYC. An important part of this project is also the way we interact with each other and how through new and old technology we can understand each other past language.
Episode 2: Growth
Two teachers from different schools talk about their sessions with PiLa-CS weekly and discuss how they have taught them new ways to tackle the next school year.
Music: David Versace - Inner Reflections
Episode 1: Community
Two teachers talk about what community means to them and how it impacts their ways of teaching.
Music: Lisofv - No Rest Or Endless Rest, Glaciære - Dolphin
Credits
This page was brought to you by the PiLa-CS interns, as supported by the rest of the team! As the summer PLCs rolled to a close and (most of) the interns prepared to move on to future prospects, we made it a goal to document the past two summers in a way that would make it easy for other potential PLC organizers to see what we did and adapt it to their own programs. Below is a short (non-comprehensive) overview of the work that went into making this page a reality!
Page layout and design by Sarane James and Kyla Yujiri.
Page index and Our Story sections written created by Sarane James.
PLC workshop videos and their descriptions created by Danielle Fuller. Other workshop descriptions written by Sarane James.
Generic versions of the workshop slide decks and resources created by Kyla Yujiri, Raya Hudson, Lauren Vogelstein and Sara Vogel.
Materials uploaded to NYU Archive and videos/sound files to NYU Stream by Sara Lauren Vogelstein and Sara Vogel.
2021 and 2022 example calendar created by Lauren Vogelstein. Schedule descriptions by Sarane James.
Showcase preview video by Raya Hudson. Descriptions by Sarane James.
Am I a CS Teacher flowchart and description by Kyla Yujiri.
Soundscape and podcasts by Raya Hudson.
Find out more about the interns and the rest of our team on the Our Team page!
