PACE-HS Fellowship Project
The PACE-HS Fellowship Project is a researcher-practitioner partnership between school districts, MIT Teaching Systems Lab, UMass Boston, and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents to develop exemplar programs of equitable CS curriculum pathways, professional development, and ongoing evaluation.
About the Project
As opportunities for computer science education expand across schools, a central challenge is to ensure that opportunities to access computing education expand in ways that are inclusive of all students. In states with strong traditions of local control, such as the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this means working with diverse districts of different sizes, different student demographics, and a heterogeneity of approaches to curriculum and instruction, to embrace a shared goal of expanding computing education while reducing opportunity gaps for all.
The Programming the Acceleration of Computing Education in High School (PACE-HS) Fellowship Project is a researcher-practitioner partnership between five Massachusetts school districts, MIT Teaching Systems Lab, UMass Boston BATEC, and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents (M.A.S.S.) to develop exemplar programs of equitable K-12 computer science (CS) curriculum pathways, professional development, and ongoing evaluation. Anchored in the Massachusetts Digital Literacy and Computer Science Standards (DLCS), this partnership aims to support the simultaneous growth of CS education opportunities and achievement outcomes in high schools, while addressing and reducing opportunity gaps that can emerge along the lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language, and disability.
The researchers and district partners (including CS teachers, guidance counselors, and school and district administrators) in this collaboration will build upon participating schools’ curriculum pathways to target issues of equity in CS education. This will involve: 1) participation in district-level scoping exercises to identify key strengths, challenges, and goals; 2) co-designing scalable professional learning experiences for school and district staff; and 3) the development of strategies for maintaining district-level dashboards of key indicators of CS inclusion and expansion. This work aims to galvanize the key stakeholders in MA to test and scale new approaches to CS teacher preparation that can contribute to a road map for a state-wide strategic plan.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1917668. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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