PREPARING SECONDARY EDUCATION MATHEMATICS TEACHER CANDIDATES FOR AP COMPUTER SCIENCE PRINCIPLES: A Two-Course Design Model

Through a combined inter-disciplinary effort from the College of Education’s Secondary Education Mathematics Teacher Education Program (SEMA TEP) and the College of Engineering’s Computer Science (CS) department, the University of Alabama (UA) is currently developing a curriculum design model that prepares SEMA teacher candidates to teach Advanced Placement (AP) Computer Science Principles (AP CSP). This effort addresses the challenges associated with expanding the teacher candidate pipeline of future CS high school educators in the state of Alabama. Specifically, the project explores a two-course sequence and associated activities that form a pathway for increasing the pool of future educators who are prepared to teach the AP CSP course without deep pre-existing content knowledge. The approach leverages an existing research-practitioner partnership with local in-service AP CSP teachers who support SEMA teacher candidates being trained to offer AP CSP in the future. In this chapter, we discuss our model and implementation with respect to how the project can be adapted for efforts in other states.