I’m sorry to hear that was your experience, @pmadson. I would recommend asking the Regional Partner if you can “audit” the fall PD workshops next year, now that you have taught the content, so that you might get something different out of it. I can’t promise that they’ll have a seat for you, but they will hopefully be able to give you additional support where you need it.
—Michael K.
Thank you for the thought. I have no idea who the “regional partner” would be. I actually found someone who cut the course down to the minimum content that touches on all of the standards. We have decided to move forward with that version next year to see how things go.
For my background, I’ve taught 24 years, 14 of them as a CS teacher, and 14 of them I’ve used Code.org curriculum.
Now that I’ve spent nearly two semesters teaching the class, I have more thoughts.
I’ve had a teacher from another district reach out and ask me for guidance teaching the new Indiana Foundations class. I have a hard time recommending her to use Code.org for a lot of different reasons.
Pacing unrealistic for a semester class. There’s no way for everything to be covered in a semester. While it’s great to have more than you actually need, it is absolutely necessary to map the standards to lessons to see what is actually needed and what isn’t so you can what is able to be cut out.
Next, some lessons are filled with “fluff” for a lack of a better word. Some of the activities aren’t meaningful or a pain to setup or facilitate. Using string, cutting out cards, etc is a lot, at least to me. While people may disagree with me, I don’t have a ton of time to be doing all that, nor does it fit my teaching style. Wish I had some alternative stuff for many of these lessons.
Teaching the programming unit a second time, I really enjoyed it this time around. I was much better teaching it and I think my students genuinely enjoyed it though they complained a lot. But I don’t an inexperienced teacher could effectively deliver the unit. Just my opinion. I really believe code.org needs to provide some sort of background info, maybe in the form of videos, to teachers to help them teach the material. An inexperienced teacher will never be able to teach students to create a function, pass an object as a parameter as well as a string, import that function, and call it on the main. Again, maybe I’m wrong, but it just seems to be too much.
Another issue I have is having students navigate from an Activity Guide, to a Unit Guide, to the website is cumbersome. Some of the diagrams in the activity guide aren’t easily edited in Docs format and some of us don’t have the ability to print 120 pages every day.
As I build the course in our LMS, I find myself modifying the curriculum to better fit the needs of myself, my students, and anticipating the needs of any teacher that teaches the course in the future. The lessons that I deemed as “fluff”, I’m finding new resources to utilize, I’m adding in differentiation in some units and lessons, and support materials where I believe teachers will need them.
I don’t hate the course, but I’m far from happy. Maybe some of my concerns seem petty, and maybe they are, but these are just my experiences. Having a student navigate between 3 or 4 different tabs isn’t easy for many students nor is having a teacher make hundreds of copies every week.
Overall, I need to do some serious reflecting as to what I recommend to this teacher who reached out about curriculum.
I welcome counterpoints, suggestions and opinions, please.
@bjennings1 thank you for the thoughtful feedback. I’ve passed it along to the Code.org team to make sure they see it.
—Michael K.