In 2014, the UK government introduced a new National Curriculum for state schools in England with a greater emphasis on computer science and computational thinking. Teaching this new curriculum presented challenges to many primary school teachers and led to a demand for professional development and exemplar teaching resources. This paper argues that many of the resources created in response to the revised curriculum are ‘recipes’ for lessons that fail to prepare teachers to teach challenging and purposeful computing lessons. It argues that, instead of providing recipes, we need to develop teachers’ ‘repertoire’ of strategies for teaching computing and that our approach to doing this should take account of the context in which primary teachers now work.
The paper describes professional development practices designed to help less confident teachers take their first steps away from model lessons and towards computing projects that reflect the needs and interests of the pupils they teach.
In particular, this paper will focus on two aspects of these practices: a teaching sequence intended to scaffold teachers in planning and teaching computing, and an approach to meeting the needs of the range of learners in a primary classroom through self-directed challenges. These were intended to support primary school teachers in improving their confidence and capability to plan and teach computer programming.