Empowering Teachers to Raise Career Awareness in Computing: Lessons Learned

Giti Javidi, Ehsan Sheybani

Students’ attitudes towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) has been a topic of enduring interest in the field of STEM education over the past decade – but why? After all, there is no sense in which people are concerned about students’ attitudes towards the learning of English or history. So what drives the interest in these topics? Previous research has suggested a relationship between teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards a subject area. In order to increase student representation in STEM, we need teachers who have positive attitudes and can serve as role models to encourage their students to pursue STEM careers. In this paper we argue that in order to engage students’ interest in the technical career paths, we must start with inspiring and training teachers to instill such interest in their students at early age. We present our experiences and outcomes from a teacher training program. Through the training, we were able to help teachers explore ways to incorporate programming into their curriculum, gain STEM career awareness and develop an understanding of importance of soft skills in STEM. The results show that teachers were able to gain confidence in incorporating their subject matter into Scratch-based classroom activities and teaching this material in a classroom setting and gain a better understanding of careers in STEM.

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