I’m fortunate to be a member of an excellent Professional Learning Community (PLC) focused on the computer science pathway at my school. We are given an hour each week to develop formative assessments, analyze data, reflect on our instructional practices, and improve our students’ experience in our classes.

One of the essential standards for all our computer science courses is “Collaborating around Computing”. (Our essential standards are the CS Practices from the K12 Computer Science Framework.) In our PLC, we determined that some students needed additional support when supporting their classmates. Specifically, we wanted to provide students some “tips to support your peers without stealing from them the joy of discovery”. The result was the CS Coaching Card. While creating the card, we realized it was also a useful resource for those students who didn’t want assistance at the moment but still needed some support; so, we added “… or to support yourself” to the heading.

The CS Coaching Card is organized around activities: design, code, test, debug. There are tips for each activity. The tips are coded to reinforce various pillars of computational thinking: decomposition, abstraction, pattern recognition, and algorithm design. For the most part, the tips simply capture the questions and suggestions that we teachers would offer to a student.

Here’s the CS Coaching Card for AP Computer Science A:

We tweaked it a bit for our introductory Python course: