CS Educators: You’re Not Just Teachers, You’re Recruiters!

This week, I attended a CS educator webinar hosted by Code.org and ISTE.  The webinar focused on ‘5 Tips For Supercharging Your CS Teaching Practice’.

One of the tips highlighted how CS educators need to think about what equitable access really means and work to make it a reality. The webinar leader, Brook Osborne, shared that educators have a responsibility to ensure that the demographics of their CS courses mirror that of their school population. Brook suggested that educators can make this happen by actively recruiting a diverse set of students into their CS courses. She offered these helpful tips on how to recruit…

• Go to students where they are and actively pitch your courses to them.
• Leverage current CS students to talk to their peers about the benefits of taking CS courses.
• Have students set up a table at lunch to display the projects they worked on in your CS classes.
• Speak to school counselors to understand who they are advising into (and out of) your CS classes. Help counselors to understand the broad set of students who are a good fit for CS. Code.org has resources on its website to help with these conversations. Also, NCWIT has a program called Counselors for Computing that can support this effort.

Do you actively recruit students into your CS courses? If so, what methods have you found most successful? Share your ideas via Twitter (@couragion).  And to get the remaining 4 tips shared in the webinar, check out the recording!