Page 60 - Getting the Picture Modeling and Simulation in Secondary Computer Science Education

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Chapter 2
2.3.4 Teaching Materials for Elective Themes
In this section we describe the project in which teacher teams develop teaching materials for the elective themes. We first provide the general description of this project and then focus on one particular team — the one working on Computational Science.
2.3.4.1 Teacher Teams Developing Teaching Materials
The curriculum specifies only high-level learning objectives and does not provide further details about them, nor about the instruction or assessment. In line with the Dutch tradition, this is left to the educators and authors of teaching materials, usually employed by publishing companies. In the Netherlands, there are three publishers of teaching materials for the CS course. With 11 to 12 percent of the students in HAVO and VWO schools electing to take this course (DUO, 2018), the market for the publishers is rather small. This situation, combined with the fact that elective themes in the new curriculum will inevitably be chosen by even smaller numbers of students, means that the publishers have no financial incentive to develop teaching materials for the elective themes and are only interested in developing teaching materials for the core domains. To alleviate this problem, the Ministry of education provided financial means and asked the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development (SLO) to coordinate a project where teams of teachers would develop teaching materials for elective themes. SLO developed a procedure describing the participants and stakeholders in the project, the guidelines outlining the process they engage in, and finally, the products to be delivered. In accordance with this procedure, for each of the twelve elective themes a team should be formed, consisting of at least two CS teachers, an expert and a teacher educator specialized in didactics of CS. First, the team writes a global description of the module they work on, which specifies the intended learning outcomes, target audience, planning and other relevant details. Then they engage in the actual writing of the module which needs to satisfy the following criteria:
• suitable for self-study because not all teachers are expected to possess adequate expertise for that particular domain
• embed the intended learning outcomes in rich and relevant contexts
• incorporate at least one of the three basic skills in the curriculum, namely: design and development, using CS as a perspective, and
finally, cooperation and interdisciplinarity