Hi Everyone! My name is Ken Akiha and I teach at Old Town High School. Next year, I will be teaching AP Computer Science Principles for the first time. Tuesday at TeacherCon featured some great experiences, including getting to teach our first lessons from the Code.org curriculum.
At TeacherCon, much of our time is spent in our Teacher Learner Observer rooms with the all of the Maine CSP teachers along with some others from around the country. In these sessions, we get to practice teaching the Code.org lessons and experience them as a student. After seeing some lessons modeled by our facilitators Kaitie and Rachel on Monday, my group was in charge of teaching the first lesson on Tuesday. Our lesson involved an activity which had groups of students (in this case teachers playing the role of “learners”) develop their own number system using three different shapes. Working with groups as they developed their own systems gave me an insight into the diversity of thinking that I should expect from my students. After reflecting on our lesson, we felt like we missed a chance for greater amounts of differentiation, but overall we felt it was successful. Planning, executing, and reflecting on an actual lesson from the curriculum made me feel much more at ease and confident about teaching these lessons with my students this year.
I appreciate that the structure of TeacherCon gives us all a chance to practice teaching and many chances to experience the lessons as learners. Looking forward to the rest of the week!
