A Grassroots Effort: The Chicago story surprisingly begins in Portland, OR, at the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) conference in 2008. A group of computer science teachers, including Don Yanek and his colleague Jeff Solin, computer science teachers at Chicago’s Northside College Prep sat in a room together. Jeff Solin stood up and said that they were from Chicago and asked if anyone could help them. In the same room were others that would eventually become integral to the Taste of Computing effort, including Gail Chapman, an author of the Exploring Computer Science (ECS) curriculum, and a leader of ECS professional development. She also provides support to districts interested in implementing ECS. Baker Franke, a computer science teacher at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, was also at the SIGCSE conference, and became part of the Chicago group.

Each of the original team remembers that moment well. Don Yanek explains:

I guess it really started out of a need in terms of our local school; we were experiencing dropping enrollment, and at one of the SIGCSE conferences, my coworker Jeff stood up at this panel discussion which was talking about the current landscape of high school CS education and the fact that programming is disappearing across the nation and enrollment was at an all time low. He stood up at this meeting and talked about our school, it's a higher performing school, for gifted students, and we're experiencing the same problems, and basically made a plea in this large conference room -- is there someone who would be willing to help us or talk to us about it? And in this audience of a couple hundred people, a gentleman stood up in the back and said "I’m from Chicago, I teach at -- let's talk after this".

Gail Chapman also remembers:

I actually was in the same room with Don Yanek and a couple of other people from Chicago at a SIGCSE conference presentation when they discovered each other. I didn't know them; I just knew that they were interested in doing something in Chicago, and our lives were on parallel tracks because it was exactly the same time that I started working on Exploring CS curriculum.

Trying…and Failing: Upon their return to Chicago, Yanek, Solin and Franke joined forces with Dale Reed, a professor at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The first step the group took was to create a Chicago chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). The group also wanted to increase computer science offerings in Chicago schools. To that end, the group, now including Loyola professor Ron Greenberg, submitted two NSF proposals to fund wide-scale change in Chicago. Neither the first proposal, submitted in 2009, nor the second proposal, submitted in 2010, received funding. They concluded that part of the problem was that they didn’t know exactly what they would do.

Baker Franke explains how the group realized they needed a curriculum:

Our initial plan was get a bunch of teachers to talk to a bunch of principals to generate something, so that eventually someone on top might say hey, what are all these principals complaining about, all these principals have all these teachers who are saying they need computer science, what the hell is that. That was sort of the plan. Somewhere in there, we decided, what if someone says yes? Right. What is our plan? And part of the reason no one, people said oh that's a really interesting idea, what do you want to do? We didn't have an answer. We couldn't say here's a curriculum we're going to teach, and we're going to provide all the training for all the teachers. We didn't have that, we didn't even know that that's what we were supposed to do.

The Ideal Curriculum: While Reed, Yanek, and their colleagues were writing and submitting proposals, their experiences in the computer science community helped shape their understanding of how to bring more computer science to Chicago. In 2009, Yanek participated in a CSTA leadership workshop led by Chapman. Chapman and her colleagues in Los Angeles had just finished writing the second version of ECS, and sent it to Don after he mentioned that he was looking for a CS curriculum to implement in Chicago. A year later, Yanek, Reed, and Jeff Solin, traveled to Los Angeles to experience ECS for themselves, via a professional development workshop led by Chapman.

Dale Reed explains how different the ECS professional development was from what he and his colleagues expected:

Three of us, myself, Don, and Jeff Solin went out to UCLA. Part of this was funded by a travel grant from Loyola, so there's partnership at work there. We went out there, participated in the PD, 3 or 4 days, and Don and Jeff have been in a lot of PD sessions before, started to do the drill, sit there, pretend you're interested, it's boring as anything, you look at your watch and hopefully by the end of the day you get to go home. Well, this is not like that at all. We couldn't believe how much fun it was, and time just flew; when they said the day is over we were disappointed; every day we were looking forward to getting back into it, it was really great, compelling, exciting, we were really excited about it. We came back to Chicago determined to try this as a model for a new CS course in Chicago. So we started thinking about how to do that, so we started spreading the word.”

Don Yanek explains how ECS curriculum is inclusive and accessible for all students:

…The great thing about the curriculum is that it has a low floor, so there's an entry floor for every student no matter what their experience level is, and how comfortable they are using a computer. There are wide walls, so there's room for everyone to contribute, and there's a high ceiling, which means it's going to be challenging for everybody, they're going be challenged in the curriculum. So the idea of starting with human-computer interaction and one of the things that drew me to the curriculum in the first place is that for the first 8 weeks of the curriculum you don't have to use a computer at all.

Baker Franke was also struck by the inclusiveness of the ECS curriculum:

The ultimate goal of the Exploring Computer Science curriculum is to make every student in the room feel like, not only feel, believe, and actually have, a stake in their learning, and in the field of computer science. Everyone has a voice. Everyone can contribute. Because the curriculum was developed based on the Stuck in the Shallow End research which said, look, anybody's who's not a white or Indian male in these classes, even if they take the risk of taking the class, they're sidelined because it's not part of their culture, their social group, their belief systems around what computer science is, the teachers' belief systems around what computer science is, and who is talented at it, or gifted, who gets it and who doesn't. Those are so ingrained that that's why computer science is a turnoff. The research question for Stuck in the Shallow End is why don't students, especially women and students of color, ‘choose’ to take computer science, even though the course is offered. Why aren't they in there? Well it turns out it's not just about having access to the course, it's about other things. So that's a serious meta-layer on what we're trying to do, we're not just trying to teach computer science, we're trying to make sure every kid in the classroom has a stake.

Identifying a Need: After two NSF proposal rejections, the Chicago group looked for “ins” with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) that could lead to increasing CS education opportunities in Chicago. At the same time, the CPS career and technical education (CTE) program was being revamped, led by Brenda Wilkerson of CPS. The group recognized that CTE would be a good doorway into CPS and partnered with Wilkerson to tailor the ECS curriculum to the needs of the Chicago public school system. CPS required Microsoft Office certification as an outcome of their CTE pathway, and the group was able to customize ECS curriculum to include material on Microsoft Office. This allowed ECS to become CTE’s foundational course.

Wilkerson on the ECS curriculum:

When I found out about LA and Jane Margolis and Gail Chapman, before I met them I listened to several speeches they had given; I was so inspired by the thought process that they had gone through to reach the conclusions that came up with the curriculum. It wasn't "oh, let's try this," it wasn't about "let's do this for this small group of students," it was specifically about our demographic; it's the same demographic, it's the same mammoth of a school district, all the political issues, all the demographic shifts, things that we faced. So to me that gave the curriculum more of an emphasis for us to look at.

Third Time’s the Charm: The group, now including Lucia Dettori, an Associate Dean at DePaul University, submitted a third NSF proposal, this time with a course and a plan in place. They made up their minds, however, to accomplish their goals with or without the funding. Lucia explains,

So then when we did have that final grant application, we were able to say, "if you give us the money, we'll be able to do it better and faster, but we're already doing it and we're going to continue to do it." So I think that's the other part, to not look to NSF to solve our problems, but we have to think, what is the right thing to do in Chicago? Really just from a moral and a justice perspective. What is the right thing to do, and we have to be committed to doing it for us, the teachers and CSTA, regardless of what happens with the funding. So we started before the funding and I think we'll continue after the funding for that reason.

Brenda Wilkerson also remembers the powerful attitude of conviction held by the group after their third proposal was submitted.

…It was one of those things where we looked around the room at each other and said "if we get this money, we can do wonderful things with lots and lots of teachers, but if we don't get this money, we're doing it anyway. We're going to figure out how to do it." And it seems like that attitude is what got us the money this time. Before it was like we need the money, we need the money, and then we said no, this is something that the time has come, let's do it.

The NSF grant was funded, creating A Taste of Computing – a modified ECS curriculum specific to the needs of CPS.

Taste of Computing Today: Today, with the support of NSF funding, the effort is at a new beginning. Taste of Computing is the foundational course for the CPS CTE program, which is present in 35 high schools. Taste of Computing is also taught in the CPS STEM schools. There are nearly 900 students enrolled in the STEM school Taste of Computing course, with another 900 scheduled to enroll for the 2013-14 school year. Nearly 75 teachers will have participated in the ECS professional development by the end of summer 2013.

Stakeholder Representation: It became clear that making sure everyone’s needs were addressed was essential. It was important that each person’s unique resources and viewpoints were able to synergistically contribute to moving the effort forward. Having university people involved, such as Reed, Greenberg and Dettori, allowed them to assure school and district leaders that students with computer science experience was something that universities desired. Teachers such as Franke, Yanek and Solin were able to provide input on the needs of other computer science teachers. District people, such as Wilkerson, were able to understand and articulate the needs of the district, and communicate the desires of the group to other district leaders.

Yanek explains it this way:

Build a coalition of stakeholders in your community, people from every group. When I look back at the success we've had, it's been because we've had somebody in our group that represented some individual stakeholder. We got the university teachers that are involved, we have somebody at the board of education, in CTE, that is really involved, and then we have our group of high school teachers, our pilot teachers as well as some of our CSTA members that are really energized. So having a broad coalition, somebody that can speak to each constituency is important.

Group Commitment: The Chicago group decided that they would make a change happen in any case and it was this attitude that carried them through to earning the final grant. Each member of the group worked to achieve the goal of bringing ECS to Chicago outside of their day jobs, and leveraged all of the resources available to them to accomplish this. Having support for the high school CS teachers through the CSTA was also critical in an environment where many were the only CS teachers at their school.

Lucia remembers how this drive and commitment helped them preserve:

…When the second one was not funded, we grouped with the bad news around the table at Northside College Prep and we said "can we make a pact that this is too important to wait for someone in Washington to bless us? And can we just make it happen." We were determined after this second proposal was not funded to make it up somehow.

Lucia also cautions that you need a coalition of diverse stakeholders:

It is very important to have a champion of your cause. One person that is in your team, in your core, committed, that's not going say "this could be a solution, but I don't know..." Someone that really gets it. Unfortunately that's not enough, so I think you want to try to diversify and have contacts at different levels in the district.

University Support: DePaul University provided logistical support and facilities as well as credit for teachers. It was critical to the Taste of Computing effort to have a large central location that could accommodate teachers for professional development. Professional development is a critical component of the ECS curriculum. Terry Steinbach of DePaul University was responsible for the logistics of the ECS PD and she explains some of the benefits to the teachers of partnering with a university.

…Also we offer participants for the summer, if they attended all five days and stayed all five days, then they could receive two semester hours' worth of credit, and if they attend all four of the PDs, they get another credit hour, at no charge to the participants.

Appropriate Instructional Materials: The Chicago effort focused on working within the district system, which necessitated quality foundational instructional materials. ECS served that purpose while also addressing the issues of a large, urban school district

As Brenda Wilkerson explains, it was critical to find examples of curricula in other large cities to know that the same challenges could be addressed.

It's the same beast and the same size, and we're smaller than they are, so I thought we get to be the little sister this time instead of the big sister. Normally people look to us and go, ‘wow, if it works in Chicago then we can do it!’ So I looked at LA, and said ‘if it works in LA, it's something that should work for us, so let's give it a try.’

Scale and Communication: Large urban school districts present unique challenges of scale and communication. CPS is one of the largest school districts in the country, and it is difficult to make widespread change because of the complicated nature of such a system.

Gail Chapman explains how the diversity of teachers and their school environments, combined with the large size of the school district, can present challenges for growth:

PD and teacher learning is a process, and good teaching never rests. You have to constantly grow and change, and so I think there's just -- none of the challenges were unexpected; they're all normal, no matter what the size of the population is, it's just that because there were so many, we didn't have that core advocate group in place yet, other than the leadership team, who don't all share characteristics that the majority of the teachers have. This is one of the things that we're working to change, which is to get some of the teachers that are currently teaching who are in more challenged school environments to be part of the leadership, because it's evident from me observing classes that this works in the schools for which it was originally intended, not just the Northside College Preps. But teachers need to believe that, and they don't necessarily completely believe it. So the more teachers we can get that are in challenged environments, being leaders and speaking up, the more likelihood of continued success there will be.

Appropriate Instructional Materials: It was challenging for the group to find a curriculum that would address the unique needs of CPS, including goals of equity and access, and the possibility of customization to meet the needs of the district. Brenda Wilkerson explains the importance of finding a good fit for your district:

So you just have to take a look at your environment and figure out how change is made. And then go after it that way. Don't carbon copy what someone else does, because it may not work that way in your environment. It doesn't mean it won't work, it just means you have to figure out who are the stakeholders, and how do you institute change.

Finding a Place in the District: Initially, the group tried to convince individual principals to add their CS course to their schools. This piecemeal approach proved difficult. Fortunately, CPS was revamping their CTE pathway and adding new STEM schools to their district. This created places for the CS course to fit into the school day across the district. It seems likely that the group would have had a much harder time impacting as many students if they had to convince each principal to include the course at their school.

Teacher Communication: One challenge common among computer science teachers is that they are often the only ones in their schools. This, coupled with the large, sprawled nature of Chicago public schools, contributes to challenges of staying connected. It has proven difficult for the PD providers to stay in touch with the CS teachers, and for the CS teachers to stay connected to each other, and rely on each other for support in-between PD sessions. Baker Franke explains how he might keep teachers connected if he could start over:

We never assigned that task, a community maintenance task. It was added on to someone, made a website, that no one really uses. So maintaining not just the community, but a pool of resources that teachers develop including things like the PD agenda and pictures from the PD. Because at the PD, a lot of people say ‘oh I have a really good thing that I use for that,’ how do you actually get it, how do you collect that? If I could do it again, that should be someone's major task. It's just to maintain a community, a growing community of teachers and nurture them better.

Build Trust and Community: Take the time - years, not months - to make real connections in your community and build trust, both in planning and in the professional development itself. It is crucial to have a clear understanding of the common goals of stakeholders. Everyone involved should feel as though they are part of a community and know that they are supported.

Gail Chapman explains the importance of community building and addressing the needs of stakeholders:

The first thing that I would tell people is get your partners together and decide what your goals are and make sure everybody has the same goals. One of the things that I think made what we did in LA to start with somewhat unique, and it's what has carried on into Chicago and the other places that are so far funded to do ECS, is that partnership between the university and the district and often other partners as well, but including district personnel as well as teachers as well as the university faculty so that it's not someone coming from on high and saying "this is what you must do." Often university faculty don't understand what's going on in the school district; they don't understand the needs of the district, and when they go say "we're going to do this" they miss the boat entirely, because it turns out the district needs X. We had to navigate this whole Microsoft certification issue in Chicago. It existed; we did not have a choice but to navigate it or not be there, so how do you do that? And what goals do you have? In this case one of the goals was to recreate CTE in Chicago and recreate it with a better foundation. It turns out that was a very synergistic goal, but there was also the -- the district has this group of needs related to that, and these schools in mind, and the university has these schools in mind and these sets of goals; how do you bring those together in ways that end up being good for kids?

We really need to be very, very strict about allowing enough time, especially in that first summer, to do the community building, to do the reflection, make the connection, because then they go back to their classrooms and the doors close and what happens now? There needs to be some level of comfort that if they struggle, there's somebody they can go find.

Reach out to Others: Others may be struggling with the same issues that you are. It only takes a small number of people bringing their resources, expertise, and experiences to the table to make big changes happen. When asked what advice he would give to others, Don Yanek explains:

I guess it would be get out of your local environment, go find out what other people are doing. Ask for help, ask questions, because they may be in the same situation wondering I really would like to change things but I don't think there's anyone else that's interested in change and you'll find there are other people. And it really just takes a small number. For us it started with just 5 people. I think of my coworker just standing up at this meeting and saying "is there anyone here that wants to work with us?" and there was. Just from that simple request, I like to say that we're involved in systemic change in the CPS, that ultimately will affect thousands of students, tens of thousands

Be a Salesman: To convince the district that ECS was the right choice for a foundational CTE course, the group had to sell the course to district leaders. Here, the representation of all stakeholders worked in their favor, since these stakeholders were able to explain to district leaders why the ECS program was a good fit not only for the district, but also for the larger community. Brenda Wilkerson explains the finer points of being a salesman:

You have to sell it, but you have to sustain the sale, and you sustain the sale with a variety of different things. Don't hit them with everything all at once, hit them with it gradually, and use your university partners for that and use your corporate partners for that and grab those students who've gone through the program and have wins, and make them poster children.

Find Logistical Supports: In any case, holding PD for groups of teachers requires space, food, and logistical support. For the Chicago group, these came in part from DePaul University. As Lucia Dettori explains, logistics must be considered:

One advice is, PD costs money. So our time is free, with some of us, but that would not be the issue, we would do this anyway. Feeding people for a week costs money. So find a way to find the basics. Parking downtown, $14 a day, costs money, times 30. So there are some things that even if you have the best intention will cost money, room and things like that, so that's something. In terms of making it worthwhile, it's critical to have a team of people that involves not just high school teachers, not just faculty from schools, you really need to have a variety of people that are committed to the cause. There need to be high school teachers, there need to be faculty from schools, some administrators; we do not have representation from counselors, but I think for the PD it's not critical, but these would be people you'd want to fold into your PD; otherwise it's very difficult to recruit students. Timing. I'm going to be very practical; you've got to put your dates out there months in advance. Everybody gets busy in the summer, so it's very difficult to get last minute commitments. Follow-up PDs are proving to be harder; attendance is not as good as we would like.

Build Real Relationships: The relationships built over time by the Chicago group were crucial to their eventual success, and will continue to be crucial as the effort evolves and scales.

When asked what the biggest challenge in CS was, Gail Chapman explained:

Trying to keep the folks who want to scale yesterday under control. Seriously. There's a lot of momentum right now, a lot of folks that feel that online is the answer to everything; we'll just put PD online and life will be good. We'll go directly to the students, teach them to code, and life will be good. You don't want to dampen enthusiasm, but at the same time, you want to channel that enthusiasm in appropriate ways. So, for example, online can be really good for some things. But it can't substitute for face-to-face on the ground connected to teacher classroom stuff. So how do we balance that, how do we manage the enthusiasm in ways that both help us to scale things that are hard to scale, like mentoring for example. We can't have face-to-face mentors in class every day. That's not sustainable or scalable, so how can we leverage online tools to do those kinds of things perhaps, while saving the things that need to be face-to-face and connected to local community? And still scale. Scale smartly.

Be Open to Improvement and Reflection: Gail Chapman explains some practices of teaching that she considers crucial to the ECS curriculum:

People ask all the time, "what are the qualifications for an ECS teacher?" and my number one qualification is that this person is reflective about the practice of teaching. Because if they are, then all this other stuff can come; if they're not willing to acknowledge that perhaps they have something to learn and work on that, then it's going to be really tough, no matter how much content knowledge they may come with.

Change the perception that CS courses are only for students that want to become computer scientists: When asked what her vision for the future of CS was, Brenda Wilkerson said that she hoped to see a change in the perception and culture of CS. When asked what that would look like, she explained:

The culture is when CS is respected as a discipline, that it's something that is college prep, and yet it's something everyone can do. And that whether or not you're going to be a programmer, you still would benefit from CS education. That's the big shift. It's okay that I took for years of chemistry in high school; I was pre-med at the time, but you take four years of chemistry, you take AP chemistry, and you may never be a chemist; there's no assumption that when a kid takes AP chemistry, that he's going on to be a chemist. There's no assumption that when I took all the AP Englishes, that I was going to teach English, or become a poet, or whatever you do with that stuff. I love Shakespeare, got the whole segment, never used any of it in my jobs. That's okay, I don't feel it was a loss, I feel like I got something from being culturally literate in Shakespeare. We don't have the same attitude about CS yet, the culture doesn't say, oh you can take this and this is valuable, they say oh, you're not going to be a programmer, so why would you take that? So the culture has to come to say, this is a normal part, a critical part of literacy. So in the buildings where that is true, we thrive.

Integrate computer science into other disciplines in the classroom, and begin CS experiences earlier in student’s school lives: A potential way of sidestepping the issue of finding a place in the school day might be integrating CS into other subjects. This might also lead to rich, substantial CS experiences earlier in the lives of students.

Dale Reed explains how CS experiences might be integrated into students’ lives earlier and more often:

I think there are pieces of computer technology that are accessible and relevant to what teachers such as language arts teachers are doing in the classroom, so that it should be used starting in elementary school. Not necessarily as a main separate topic, but certainly by middle school, kids should be using something like Scratch. And having significant programming experiences, because in our lives, technology is the interface with which we connect to information and other people, and we want to be able to control the technology and not the other way around. This is of critical importance to our kids. I think it should start in elementary school, definitely by middle school, it could be something that's clearly defined, and certainly in high school, and this is my mission for us in Chicago -- every high school student should have a compelling experience with CS and understand what the field is before they graduate. How can they choose it when they don't even know what it is?

Increase participation in CS for all students: To meet the country’s needs for skilled CS workers, all students must necessarily be engaged and invited to participate in CS. As Don Yanek explains, this issue cannot be left out of conversations about the future of CS education:

we still need to be talking about how do we get all students involved, no matter what their gender or their ethnicity, and that we have students coming from a variety of backgrounds and we need to make sure that all of them are welcome and that they all feel that they have a place in the classroom and that they can all contribute. I think that's a very important conversation that we can't leave out.

Gail Chapman explains her vision for how CS education could include all students:

In five years, I would like to see every student have access to real CS in schools. Notice I didn't say required, notice I didn't say it was necessarily a core subject, but I want all students to have access to such a course. That's got to be the -- I don't want to be cynical here, but I think that... there are some realities that we need to just keep in our minds in terms of the way schools work. Short of overhauling the entire school system, we're not walking into a school district and saying "you have to offer CS instead of art," or "you have to offer CS instead of calculus." That's not going to win. I think we think that CS is totally unique in that if you go to conferences where there are people who are in arts or people who are in engineering or music or pick your random subject, anyone who's not part of the core is fighting for the same piece. And while I think that CS is really important for students to have in the 21st century, I’m not sure I can argue that it's more important than something else for some students. But I want all students to have the choice, and I want all students to be welcomed and find a place in a CS course. If we do that, then I think the demand for the courses will be such that it will do as much for helping the problem as a lot of the policy things might do. Not that people shouldn't continue to work on policy, but I think we have to recognize when we're winning battles and continue to win those battles and not throw the baby out with the bathwater, not be so hell-bent on computing in the core that we lose sight of here's an opportunity over here, where it's an elective but we can get it in.

Leverage success in large urban areas to raise the importance of CS education across the country: As noted by Wilkerson, successful programs in Chicago can inspire others to attempt similar efforts. Baker Franke hopes that changes in CS education in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other large urban areas, will inspire others across the country.

That would be my hope, that in five years, that these implementations in Chicago, LA, NY, DC, that we could have some publicity, maybe it's generated from some published report or some series of presentations or PR campaigns, saying that these schools have changed CS education, you should too.

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