Teacher Education Faculty’s Perceptions About Computational Thinking Integration for Pre-service Education

This paper explores teacher educators' perceptions and overarching approaches to discipline-specific computational thinking (CT) integration in pre-service teacher education courses. To that end, we collaborated with 31 teacher educators from various teaching backgrounds in a university system in the Northeastern United States. As part of the first phase of a year-long professional development, the faculty attended a series of virtual meetings and an asynchronous virtual classroom, working towards integrating CT into their current teaching practices. In this study, we report the findings from the analysis of pre-and post-professional development surveys. The paired sample t-test results suggested a significant difference in teacher educators' CT confidence and ability for CT integration between the pre-and post-PD phases. Qualitative analysis of the open-ended responses indicated changes in teacher educators' conceptions of CT and its role in preparing future teachers. In the post-PD survey, teacher education faculty overwhelmingly framed CT as a new literacy, a form of knowledge that facilitates teaching and learning in technology-enhanced environments, and a cross-cutting concept. Teacher educators also regarded CT as a metacognitive pedagogical skill that could support pre-service teachers' abilities in pedagogy and practice by enabling them to monitor and modify their own teaching practice. We discuss these emergent themes, focusing on the novel and recurring aspects of teacher educators' perceptions and approaches to CT, such as viewing CT as a transdisciplinary metacognitive pedagogical skill and a new literacy practice.