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Am I going to live-tweet @Jared_OLeary's interview with GT Wrobel that dropped today? Yes, because I feel like I end up doing this every week anyway and I might as well make it official 
So the thing that really kicked me off here is the idea of compromise in curriculum design. This is the source of a LOT of angst on my part, and the tension of balancing decentralized nomadic curricula with the needs of students and teachers in the education system is a big deal
It's so nice to hear these folks discuss the tension here, especially given that so much curriculum design seems very rigidly committed to a named lens or approach (e.g., UBD, rhizomatic learning, backwards design, PBL, etc)
One of the tension points I'm hearing here is the idea of curriculum serving what teachers need, especially as it relates to standards, AP testing, etc. It almost feels like designers feel a responsibility to protect teachers from a system that will "hold them to account"
This leads to compromise because much of what radical educators are committed to runs in direct opposition to broader systems of control and accountability. How do I teach in an empowering way when I have to administer a high-stakes AP exam at the end of the semester?
So designers can choose to either create curriculum that reinforces the status quo, or commit to a lens or framework (like rhizomatic learning, for example) at the risk of alienating teachers who may be punished in a material way for pushing against the status quo.
This feels like a false binary, but I don't know that it is. When you compromise on curriculum to accommodate Coll3g3 B04rd, who benefits and who is harmed? No good solutions here, and I don't mean to impose a value judgement on one approach or another. Just thinkin'.
I love the conversation about standards being a vision of what CS is, and how standards -> curriculum -> assessment can be a funnel that betrays our "hidden curriculum", our values that we commit to through practice. Testing is an especially powerful force here.
Jared: Why not have a standard that is inclusive of multiple forms of data representation as opposed to just visualization (for example)?
GT: My cynical answer is that if there isn't a question about different representations on the test, then people aren't going to teach it!
GT: My cynical answer is that if there isn't a question about different representations on the test, then people aren't going to teach it!
Such a clear and concise explanation as to how and why testing is toxic to open-ended and student-driven curricula. Testing is an incredibly effective way of dismantling any nonlinear curricular structure that isn't assessment-oriented.
The discussion around programming pedagogy is really interesting to me. I think that the vision of learning to code that's being discussed here is almost incompatible with the hypothetical contexts it will exist within.
This is my primary tension point when I teach code; I find that students who have been trained for assessment-oriented schooling have a lot of trouble opening themselves up to a context where they are generating the measures of success.
Those skills, which come easily to students who bear institutional privilege, need to be taught and scaffolded in an explicit way when students don't have the advantage of existing outside of a system designed to police you
*them, grammar is hard. The next part of the discussion is really interesting to me--it's centered around the question of what CS teachers need to be good at in order to teach CS. There's often a lot of discussion around helping teachers "learn alongside" students, which is good!
I really like GT's framing of this, that pedagogy and equity are probably more important than content knowledge. I definitely agree, to a point. The problem here is that this lens is sometimes used as an excuse to throw teachers to the wolves a little bit.
I've seen this sort of reasoning be applied to the problem of teacher education, especially in CS. "Teachers can learn alongside students, so we don't need to think about what it looks like to develop teachers' pedagogical <-> content knowledge"
That's NOT what these folks are implying here at all, but I think it's worth noting that being committed to helping teachers develop their own coding skills in an intentional way does help generate curriculum centered around creative empowerment and student-directed learning.
I think the mission of helping teachers understand that they don't need to transmit knowledge from themselves to others is a different mission than helping teachers be good stewards of their learning community (which happens to be easier of you know how to do things)
I don't see this as a gatekeeping thing, but more as a safety net. If you are comfortable as a creator, you offer students the promise of context. This is huge! If you're only learning alongside sts, facilitating the act of learning, you can end up at sea if you're not careful.
Oh man, talking about the widgets on the Code dot org curriculum. This is absolutely my stuff. I love the idea of leaning on a tool to enforce the rules of an unplugged activity; tool-as-heuristic. One of the things I think about all the time is how empowering are these lenses?
Like, if a coding language is a lens (or even better for this instance, the socket API of a language), and an app that simulates how the internet works is also a lens, which of these is more empowering creatively? What's the difference between scaffolding and sequestering?
Something I think about a lot is the degree to which our tools are about protecting students from complexity rather than about empowering students. These two ideas can't exist together, I don't think.
