Cooperative Freedoms and Practical Inquiry in an Online Course for Teachers

Abstract

This chapter will describe a graduate-level online teacher education course titled “CS for Teachers,” which exposed novice teacher candidates to the key concepts of computational thinking, especially abstraction, mostly for the first time. This asynchronous online course was designed to introduce these teacher candidates to these concepts through increasingly challenging projects or “challenges” and to provide the highest levels of autonomy and freedom in meeting these challenges. Student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions were examined to explore the content and tenor of such interactions throughout the course. This analysis revealed that during the hardest part of these challenges, student-to-student interactions dramatically increased and increasingly focused on asking for and providing support to one another in authentic and meaningful ways. Implications for teacher education are explored.