CS352: Computer Science Pedagogy - LINQ Partnership with EDUC-350W (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To reflect on interdisciplinary collaboration between computing and education students through our LINQ partnership with EDUC-350W
  2. To connect classroom observations and joint work to the pedagogical frameworks studied in this course
  3. To develop writing as a tool for professional reflection, in the spirit of the W designation of our partner course

The Assignment

This course is a LINQ (linked inquiry) partner with EDUC-350W, and one of the most valuable resources in the room is each other: computing students bring deep technical fluency, and education students bring deep pedagogical fluency. Throughout the semester you have collaborated across that boundary - in class discussions, in curriculum development, and in preparing for K-12 classroom visits. In this reflection, you will write about that partnership.

Reflective writing is itself a pedagogical practice we have studied: it moves your experience up Bloom’s taxonomy from remembering what happened to analyzing why it happened and evaluating what you would change. Because EDUC-350W carries a writing-intensive (W) designation, treat this as a piece of professional writing: draft it, let it rest, and revise it before submitting.

In the spirit of transparent (TILT-style) assignment design: the purpose of this reflection is to consolidate what the cross-disciplinary partnership taught you that neither course could teach alone; the task is the guided prompts below; and the criteria are honest, specific reflection grounded in concrete moments (not generalities), connected explicitly to at least two frameworks from this course.

Guided Prompts

Address at least four of the following, grounding each response in a specific moment from your partnership (a conversation, a joint work session, a classroom observation, a disagreement):

  1. Describe a moment when your LINQ partner(s) saw something in a lesson - yours or someone else’s - that you did not. What in their disciplinary training made that visible to them?
  2. Describe a moment when you contributed expertise your partner(s) lacked. How did you communicate it without jargon, and what science-communication strategies did you use?
  3. If you observed or co-taught in a K-12 setting together, compare what you each noticed about the same classroom. What does the difference tell you about the lenses each discipline provides?
  4. How has the partnership changed your answer to one of our course’s central questions (for example: how do we teach computing equitably to students with widely varying prior experience)?
  5. Where did collaboration across disciplines feel hardest? Was the friction about vocabulary, values, pacing, or something else - and how did (or could) your team work through it?
  6. Writing is a core practice in EDUC-350W. How has writing about teaching (in reflections like this one, and in your lesson plans) changed how you think about teaching?

Joint Writing Component

With your EDUC-350W partner(s), co-author one shared paragraph describing a single piece of advice you would jointly give to next year’s LINQ students about how to make the partnership productive. Include this identical paragraph in each partner’s submission, with all contributors named. (Notice the design of this component: it assesses the collaboration itself, and it produces an artifact that improves the course for future students.)

Looking Ahead

Close your reflection with one commitment: a specific practice from your partner’s discipline that you intend to carry into your own future classroom, project team, or workplace, and how you will know whether you are actually doing it.

Submission

Submit a written reflection document (approximately 2 pages). Include the name(s) of your EDUC-350W partner(s) and the date(s) of any joint sessions or observations you reference.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.