CONVERSATIONSConversation with a prominent propagator

T he CS education community has many good ideas about how to improve our teaching, but an often-overlooked piece is getting these innovations adopted by other instructors. Research has shown that pedagogical, curricular, and education technology changes are not readily adopted by instructors without deliberate planning and effort on the part of developers [11]. We believe that our community must embark on a sustained effort to learn more about evidence-based strategies for propagating educational innovations and to use them in our own projects. To support this goal, we have written a report summarizing current research on propagation [12], much of it from other STEM fields. We also hope to more fully capture the knowledge within the CS education community with a series of interviews of prominent propagators, i.e., people in the community who have successfully encouraged faculty to adopt an innovation that they created or one they themselves adopted. In our first interview, we talked with Leo Porter, Associate Teaching Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Leo is best known for his work as an earlier adopter, researcher and propagator of Peer Instruction [2,4,5,8,14], and other work on best practices in CS education [6,7,10,12,13]. Along with Beth Simon, Mark Guzdial, and Cynthia Lee, Leo developed the New Computer Science Faculty Teaching Workshop, aimed primarily at research-focused faculty in their first three years of teaching. Participants in this workshop make explicit their teaching philosophies and explore how to incorporate active learning strategies into their teaching. We asked Leo about the success of these workshops and his work to encourage broader use of Peer Instruction (PI). Below are highlights of the interview, which ran approximately an hour. After the interview, we communicated with Leo to seek clarification or to allow him to elaborate on certain items.