12. Your own learning path and professional community¶
A learning path for teachers¶
You do not need a degree in data science to teach this curriculum. A realistic path:
| Stage | Time | What |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Before teaching Grade 8 | 6–8 hours | read Grade 8 as a student; do the Check questions and ★ exercises; try CODAP |
| 2. Before teaching Grade 9 | 15–20 hours | work through Grade 9 with a computer; free courses: Kaggle Learn "Python", "Pandas", "Intro to SQL" |
| 3. Before teaching Grade 10 | 20–30 hours | Grade 10 chapters; Khan Academy statistics (distributions, scatter plots); CS50P (selected weeks) |
| 4. Before teaching Grades 11–12 | 40+ hours | Grades 11–12 chapters; OpenIntro Statistics (foundations for inference, regression); Kaggle Learn "Intro to ML"; An Introduction to Statistical Learning chapters 2–5 |
| 5. Ongoing | an hour a week | one real-data exercise per month; a professional community (below) |
The one-day training workshop¶
The outline in docs/for-teachers/README.md (PPDAC as learners, teach-back, spreadsheets and cleaning, unplugged and
coded SQL, assessment and AI policy, planning) can be run by a district resource person or a lead teacher. Teachers
experience the lessons as students first — the most effective form of professional development.
Professional learning communities¶
- Meet once a month (in person or online) with other teachers using the curriculum: share a lesson that worked, one that didn't, and student work.
- Co-plan a unit; observe each other's lessons with a simple focus ("How many students made a prediction?").
- Keep a short teaching log per unit (time taken, what confused students, what you changed).
Contributing back¶
The curriculum improves through teachers' feedback:
* open a teacher-feedback issue on the project's repository, or send notes to the maintainer;
* contribute translations, local examples, datasets (with licence checks) and new exercises (CONTRIBUTING.md);
* pilot schools follow the protocol in pilots/README.md and publish results so that CDC and other schools can learn.
Running a pilot in your school¶
- Choose one or two units (recommended first: Grade 8 Unit 1 and Grade 9 Unit 3).
- Record a baseline (a short pre-quiz from
quiz.yml). - Teach the units; keep the teaching log.
- Post-quiz; collect three examples of student work (anonymised); a short student survey.
- Write the pilot report with
pilots/TEMPLATE-report.md.