Teaching Teachers
As part of the change of pace of an academic summer, CS Professor Kathi Fisler shifts from teaching students to teaching teachers.
In July, Fisler led a workshop on teaching introductory computer science for high school and college computer science, math and science teachers. The workshop is part of the TeachScheme! project, a multi-university effort to improve introductory computing curricula.
The TeachScheme! project began at Rice University (Houston, TX) in 1996. It arose from the observation that traditional introductory curricula neither taught solid design foundations nor engaged the broadening group of students interested in computer science to view programming as a tool to study other disciplines. In response to these concerns, the program founders created a new, design-oriented curriculum complete with textbook and programming environment. As the founders saw increasing numbers of students starting college with prior yet weak computer science training, they decided to take their approach directly to high schools. The project provides free week-long summer workshops on the curriculum and its pedagogy for high-school teachers.
Fisler has been a TeachScheme! instructor since 1997. The workshops currently host 80 teachers a year from around the nation and the world. Teachers have responded enthusiastically; over 100 high school teachers have adopted the curriculum, as have several universities. Fisler and her research collaborator Shriram Krishnamurthi, a project founder and a computer science professor at Brown University, started a local workshop in Providence last year. Each summer, they bring in between 25 and 40 teachers for an intensive week of training. Their colleagues currently run similar workshops at Northeastern University, the University of Utah, and Adelphi University.
The team currently has a three-year, 1.9 million-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation to support the project. The funding supports development of the software and teaching materials, as well as the summer workshops; all materials, the software, and the workshops are free of charge to teachers (the project pays travel, housing, and food expenses for the high school teachers; there are no registration fees). Supplementary funding from CORD helps sustain the free workshops, and WPI contributes graduate credits to teachers who complete the program. The team welcomes sponsorship from other institutions.
For additional information about the workshops or the curriculum, visit the program's web site at or contact Kathi Fisler at kfisler@cs.wpi.edu