Towards pedagogical content knowledge learning trajectories: tracing elementary teachers’ infusion of computational thinking

This paper documents the Making CT researcher-practitioner partnership, designed to support in-service elementary teachers in understanding and integrating computational thinking into their disciplinary teaching. Drawing from this collaborative work with teachers, over a sustained time, we describe the shifts in teachers’ integration of CT into their teaching, as well as shifts in their abilities to attend to children’s development of CT skills. In doing so, we have developed a unique construct – pedagogical content knowledge learning trajectories – which draws from literature on learning trajectories, the use of learning trajectories for teacher professional development, and domains of knowledge for teaching. Operationalizing our construct, we propose two specific learning trajectories – first, for integrating CT into disciplinary teaching, and second, for attending to students’ computational thinking – which we describe and illustrate using data from the Making CT teachers. This includes a description of professional learning experiences that supported teacher growth on each of the two learning trajectories, thus explicating the knowledge gained and classroom impact from participation in the Making CT project. Our learning trajectories can be used to plan for CT-specific teacher professional development and our pedagogical content knowledge learning trajectory construct can be applied to additional contexts.