Opening the door of the computer science classroom: the disciplinary commons

  • Authors:
  • Josh Tenenberg;Sally Fincher

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Washington, Tacoma, Tacoma, WA;University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The Disciplinary Commons project had two primary objectives: to document and share knowledge about teaching and student learning in Computer Science (CS) classrooms, and to establish practices for the scholarship of teaching by making it public, peer-reviewed, and amenable for future use and development by other educators. The mechanism for achieving these goals was through a series of monthly meetings involving Computer Science faculty, one cohort of ten CS faculty in the US and one cohort of twenty in the UK. Meetings were focused on the teaching and learning within participants' classrooms, with each person documenting their teaching in a course portfolio. Surveyed on completing the project, participants discussed the value of the Disciplinary Commons in providing the time and structure to systematically reflect upon their practice, to exchange concrete ideas for teaching their courses with other CS educators in the discipline, to learn skills that apply directly to course and program evaluation, and to meet colleagues teaching CS at other institutions.