InTASC Standards

The InTASC standards are ten statements of what a teacher should know and be able to do so that every K–12 student leaves ready for college or a career. They come from the Council of Chief State School Officers, through its Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium. It was released in 2011 as a resource for state dialogue, and reissued in 2013 with learning progressions describing how each standard develops over a career rather than arriving all at once (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2011, 2013).

The summaries below are my own wording. The official statements are in the CCSSO document under References, published under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The classroom examples are drawn from my Clinical Practice.

The Learner and Learning

• 1. Learner Development. Learners grow at different rates across cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional and physical lines, and instruction is designed for where they actually are. A student who can trace a loop on paper often still cannot hold a whole program in their head, so the app will gain one moving part per lesson instead of arriving as an architecture.
• 2. Learning Differences. Individual differences and diverse cultures and communities are used to build an inclusive setting where everyone can reach a high bar. The bar will stay “you write working code you can explain.” What will vary is the scaffold: a half-written function for one student, an empty file for another.
• 3. Learning Environments. Environments are built with others to support both individual and collaborative work, positive interaction and self-motivation. An error message is data, not a verdict. Students will type every line themselves and never paste, because pasted code hides the exact confusion the lesson exists to find.

Content

• 4. Content Knowledge. The teacher knows the central concepts, tools of inquiry and structure of the discipline well enough to make it reachable. I have written software professionally for years, which is the smaller half of this. The work of this program is converting that into something teachable rather than something merely known.
• 5. Application of Content. Concepts and differing perspectives are connected so learners think critically and solve authentic problems. The todo list will be the student’s real todo list. They will keep a running list of what annoys them about it, and those annoyances will become the next lessons, which means they will be choosing the problems.

Instructional Practice

• 6. Assessment. Multiple methods of assessment engage learners in their own growth, track progress, and steer decisions for teacher and student alike. The warm-up that opens every lesson will be the formative assessment. It will review the previous session by doing, and if it stalls, the new material waits.
• 7. Planning for Instruction. Planning moves every student toward rigorous goals, drawing on content, curriculum, cross-disciplinary skills, pedagogy, and knowledge of the learners and their community. Planning will mean sequencing the application, not the syllabus. No concept will be taught “for later”; it will be introduced the moment the program needs it.
• 8. Instructional Strategies. A range of strategies builds deep understanding of content and the ability to apply it. Merrill’s cycle will run every session: demonstrate on example data while the student watches, then they practice a near-identical task while I watch and coach by question rather than by answer (Merrill, 2002).

Professional Responsibility

• 9. Professional Learning and Ethical Practice. The teacher keeps learning, uses evidence to evaluate the effect of their own choices on learners, families and colleagues, and adapts. This portfolio is part of that: the modules I have not written up are still marked as placeholders rather than padded out. Computer science adds its own ethics to teach as well as to model: a student’s code and data belong to the student.
• 10. Leadership and Collaboration. The teacher takes on leadership roles and collaborates with learners, families, colleagues and the community to advance learner growth and the profession. Secondary computer science is usually a department of one, so the collaboration will have to be sought out, with the math and science teachers whose content the projects can carry, and with the industry I came from.

How this guides the rest of the program

The standards and the clinical practice rubric are the same claim at two distances. The standards say what good teaching is over a career; the rubric says what it should look like on the one day someone is watching me teach. The risk is treating either as a checklist to satisfy after the artifact is already built. So the standards get named going in: which ones a lesson or artifact is actually reaching for, decided before it is made. The value of writing that down is the gaps it leaves showing: the standards nothing in this portfolio has touched yet.

The 2013 progressions are the part I keep coming back to. They describe teaching as developing across a career, which means a Module 1 artifact is supposed to sit at the early end of a progression. The goal is honest placement on it, not a finished performance (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2013).

References