Booting the system
Leadership practices for initiating and infrastructuring district-wide computer science instructional programs
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21728078 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rafi Santos (0000-0002-1525-5618, UC Irvine Health, corresponding author), Leigh Ann DeLyser (0000-0002-9556-6888, UC Irvine Health), June Ahn (0000-0003-0987-8410, UC Irvine Health) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-15 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Policy Futures in Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1478-2103 • E-ISSN: 1478-2103 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/14782103231178069 |
| OpenAlex | W4380878691 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
While a small number of school districts across the United States are well into the process of implementing system-wide computer science education (CSed), most districts are only just getting started. But what does it look like to “get started” on CSed for a whole district? This manuscript presents a single case study of a district’s process of initiating their CS instructional initiative, highlighting a distinct set of instructional leadership practices and the institutional conditions they were responding to. Early implementation research around CSed shows that in some districts, leadership practices are less often the focus of early activities. This study sheds light on what such leadership practices can look like in the early stages of a district’s CSed initiative. Our analysis, based on qualitative data collected longitudinally over 18 months of the district’s work, identified eight intertwined leadership practices that aimed to support instructional coherence, and in our findings, we share a narrative of the district’s initiation of its CS initiative around them. The case begins with the (1) initial leadership team formation and details how that team engaged in (2) content-specific instructional capacity building for its members and (3) sensemaking of ideas around CS with their relationship to existing district activities. It moves on to the team’s (4) development of an instructional vision and an (5) associated implementation strategy, which fed into processes of (6) sensegiving to foster buy-in among teachers, and providing encouragement to engage in (7) instructional piloting. Finally, leaders engaged in (8) landscape analysis activities in order to understand existing district resources and teacher perceptions related to CS. Throughout the case, we highlight the motivations behind these practices, what resources they drew on, intersections, and dependencies among them. We close our analysis exploring a number of tensions and unintended consequences associated with these leadership activities
Educational leadership · Instructional leadership · Leadership development · Mathematics education · Narrative · Pedagogy · Political science · Public relations · School district · Sensemaking · Sociology · Teacher Leadership · Child Development and Digital Technology · Computer Science · Engineering · Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research · Psychology · Teaching and Learning Programming
Instructional Program Coherence
Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation
Infrastructuring as a Practice of Design-Based Research for Supporting and Studying Equitable Implementation and Sustainability of Innovations
The case for alternative endpoints in computing education
Computational Thinking in K–12
Studying Teachers’ Sensemaking to Investigate Teachers’ Responses to Professional Development Focused on New Standards
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |