Community-oriented pedagogy for in-service CS teacher training

In this paper, we examine CS teachers from the aspect of their membership within a community of practice. We show that there is much interaction among the teachers; however, this interaction is merely for exchanging classroom materials and rarely involves a thorough analysis or the design of meaningful pedagogy. Consequently we present, with examples, a community-oriented pedagogical approach for re-designing the interaction to include thorough discussions utilizing a bird's-eye view of the discipline of CS as well as theories of learning in the context of in-class practice. We show that teachers who participated in a course, which was designed according to community-oriented pedagogy, recognized the power of belonging to a community and consequently changed their self-perception of being merely knowledge consumers to being collaborative knowledge producers as well.