The Woodrow Wilson Graduate School of Teaching and Learning (WWGSTL, formerly known as Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning) is dedicated to leading innovation in the field of teacher education. We believe teachers are one of the greatest drivers of change in ensuring all students have access to high quality and high supported learning environments. We strive to ensure that our graduates will co-create learning environments where all students can develop and grow to be life-long learners, active, civic-minded global citizens, and can be producers as well as consumers in evolving economies.

In response to our initial application (June 2016) to become a sponsoring organization, WWGSTL was approved to endorse candidates for licensure in Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics. For many districts in the Commonwealth, particularly noted by our identified partners, it is often hard to find highly qualified teachers in these content areas. Additionally, we believe as our world continues to evolve, building student capacity in these areas will be critical to their access to jobs.

Over the years our partner districts have shared another emerging need around building students’ computational thinking. For example, one of our partners reported to us that they currently run six AP sections of Computer Science with nearly 250 students enrolled. They added that the teachers facilitating these classes are a mix of a history teacher, mathematics teacher, and an educator from the school's vocational program. Similar to the program areas WWGSTL already serves, it has been hard for our partners to find qualified teachers to teach these classes.

We are excited to pursue a licensure path in DLCS not only to meet the needs of our districts to hire qualified teachers to meet the demand for these courses, but because we believe this license path is relevant to our existing programs. The knowledge and skills demonstrated through the DLCS license not only connects to our vision of preparing teachers and students for the evolving economy and world, but we believe that computational thinking will be part of the core sets of knowledge and skills for all future educators. Moreover, we acknowledge the content areas of the programs we already serve - biology, mathematics, and chemistry - are evolving such that computational thinking knowledge and skills are integral to these disciplines.

Our design of this particular licensure path builds on the WWGSTL’s competency-based program whereby learners engage in scaffolded learning experiences to learn, practice, and demonstrate the competencies. Building on a novice-to-expert learning spiral, we believe our model offers a deep approach to project-based learning. The program of study, learning through engaging with core questions, that we've designed for the DLCS license path is similar to how teacher candidates learn through Challenges to engage with real problems of practice that organize learning in our other programs. These approaches require teacher candidates to demonstrate the PST and SMKs by producing artifacts that are rooted in practice. Both approaches increase the complexity of scope and gradually increase what candidates demonstrate over time. The Core Questions approach as outlined in this submission, is an extension of the Woodrow Wilson Graduate School’s challenge-based learning and is conceived of as a way to deepen our commitment to project-based learning by centering the candidates’ experience as a project-based learner. Candidates in this licensure program will learn, practice, and demonstrate key knowledge and skills by progressing through increasingly complex levels of project-based learning experiences that we refer to as - projects, collaborations, and programs.

As our team designed, built and implemented our program over the past three years, we have identified and collaborated with a number of innovative educators, including the founders of Powderhouse Studios, part of a network of XQ funded schools working on developing models of what schools of the future might look like. Educators at Powderhouse share many of our core values and beliefs about teaching and learning, they bring expertise in computation, narrative, and design. Additionally, they bring experience facilitating the use of these skills as a tool across disciplines as well as a project-based approach to learning. Moreover, Powderhouse is rooted in the Somerville community, one of our key district partners. We anticipate that if approved, the licensure program in digital literacy/computer science, will be first offered to Powderhouse educators to test and refine all elements of the program after which we will offer to teachers in our partner districts and new cohorts of teacher candidates.