As I’ve been reviewing literature on K-5 CS professional development, I’ve found that many articles are highlighting the importance of collaboration in PD. Here’s a draft of my lit review section on collaboration…..
Collaborative professional development opportunities are in contrast to the traditional workshop PD. Peer collaboration enhances the effectiveness of PD for elementary school teachers. A significant challenge for teaching CS is teacher isolation (Basu et al., 2022), which highlights the need for collaborative learning environments. To address this, collaborative initiatives, such as Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are recognized as valuable tools to break professional isolation, encourage collaboration, and provide ongoing support for teachers. This occurs in the PLC through “resource sharing, curriculum co-designing, group discussion and reflection on curriculum implementations.” (Ni et al., 2023, p. 18). The notion of PLCs aligns with the call for ongoing and collaborative professional development to support relevant classroom instruction (Monjelat & Lantz-Andersson, 2020). Peer instruction has also been used to model what would be happening in a classroom computer science environment.
Several studies have highlighted the benefit for both teachers and administrators, to discuss, reflect, coach, and mentor in campus or grade level teams (Nesmith & Cooper, 2019, Menekse, 2015). Boz & Allexsaht-Snider (2022) also found that teachers benefit from collaborative spaces where they can collectively address challenges and share strategies. Teachers naturally collaborate in PD working sessions during difficult tasks “when the people were grouped with the right people and could talk to each based on their progression in the course and within their familiar zone of coding and robotics knowledge and skills.” (Boz & Allexsaht-Snider, 2022, p. 3958). Mentorship programs improve the efficacy of the training and increase computer science teacher capacity (Menekse, 2015). Highlighting the teachers’ efforts, growth and creativity through a professional development showcase event also helps to develop shared success (Nesmith and Cooper, 2019). In recent years, social media has also influenced teacher peer collaboration, enabling teachers to connect with one another asynchronously to get just-in-time support. “There is a recent and growing engagement of teachers using social media for interacting, where conditions that foster a more collective and shared style of professional development and discussion are emerging” (Monjelat & Lantz-Andersson, 2020, pp. 2177–2178).