TITLE: The Obstacles in the Way of Teaching More Students to Program AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: September 23, 2014 4:37 PM DESC: ----- BODY: All students should learn to program? Not so fast, says Larry Cuban in this Washington Post blog entry. History, including the Logo movement, illustrates several ways in which such a requirement can fail. I've discussed Cuban's article with a couple of colleagues, and all are skeptical. They acknowledge that he raises important issues, but in the end they offer a "yeah, but...". It is easy to imagine that things are different now, and the result will be similarly different. I am willing to believe that things may be different this time. They always are. I've written favorably here in the past of the value of more students learning to program, but I've also been skeptical of requiring it. Student motivations change when they "have to take that class". And where will all the teachers come from? In any case, it is wise to be alert to how efforts to increase the reach of programming instruction have fared. Cuban reminds us of some of the risks. One line in his article expresses what is, to my mind, the biggest challenge facing this effort:
Traditional schools adapt reforms to meet institutional needs.
Our K-12 school system is a big, complex organism (actually, fifty-one of them). It tends to keep moving in the direction of its own inertia. If a proposed reform fits its needs, the system may well adopt it. If it doesn't, but external forces push the new idea onto system, the idea is adapted -- assimilated into what the institution already wants to be, not what the reform actually promises. We see this in the university all the time, too. Consider accountability measures such as student outcomes assessment. Many schools have adopted the language of SOA, but rarely do faculty and programs change all that much how they behave. They just find ways to generate reports that keep the external pressures at bay. The university and its faculty may well care about accountability, but they tend to keep on doing it the way they want to do it. So, how can we maximize the possibility of substantive change in the effort to teach more students how to program, and not simply create a new "initiative" with frequent mentions in brochures and annual reports? Mark Guzdial has been pointing us in the right direction. Perhaps the most effective way to change K-12 schools is to change the teachers we send into the schools. We teach more people to be computing teachers, or prepare more teachers in the traditional subjects to teach computing. We prepare them to recognize opportunities to introduce computing into their courses and curricula. In this sense, universities have an irreplaceable role to play in the revolution. We teach the teachers. Big companies can fund programs such as code.org and help us reach younger students directly. But that isn't enough. Google's CS4HS program has been invaluable in helping universities reach current K-12 teachers, but they are a small percentage of the installed base of teachers. In our schools of education, we can reach every future teacher -- if we all work together within and across university boundaries. Of course, this creates a challenge at the meta-level. Universities are big, complex organisms, too. They tends to keep moving in the direction of their own inertia. Simply pushing the idea of programming instruction onto system from the outside is more likely to result in harmless assimilation than in substantive change. We are back to Cuban's square one. Still, against all these forces, many people are working to make a change. Perhaps this time will be different after all. -----