What computing and digital literacies should teacher candidates know and know how to do by the time they graduate from your program? Document these program-specific CITE learning goals to complete the CITE visioning process.
Draft clear, meaningful, equitable CITE learning goals
The following activities might be helpful if the team has engaged in the visioning process but has not yet written down program-specific CITE learning goals of what teachers candidates should know and know how to do by the time they graduate.
✅ Learn about indicators and ‘ask yourself questions’ for clear, meaningful, and equitable CITE learning goals
CITE Program Learning Goals Checklist
CITE Program Learning Goals can take many forms – as long as they’re clear, meaningful and equitable. For example,
- some teams are making modifications to their existing program learning outcomes (PLOs),
- some teams are creating “stand-alone” CITE learning goals and examples of what they might look like in practice, and
- some are creating sets of aligned course objectives.
Any format is acceptable, as long as the learning goals meet the criteria outlined in the checklist provided here.
💼 Browse select CITE learning goals produced by CUNY teacher education programs, organized by major areas of teacher education
Examples of CITE Program Learning Goals
Review examples of CITE learning goals to learn about ways that CUNY teacher education programs envision meaningful, equitable computing-integrated teacher education.
This tool provides examples of learning goals as well as a suggested discussion protocol for groups of faculty.
📋 Review any drafts or finalized CITE learning goals that may have been produced by other program teams at your college
🕹️ Review complete learning goal documents that have been drafted by CITE planning teams and approved by CUNY Central
Examples of Finalized Learning Goals
Drafting, submitting, and finalizing learning goals documents is a significant undertaking. Check out a few examples of learning goal documents drafted and finalized by programs across the CUNY system.
🚀 Draft your program-specific CITE learning goals!
Build on institutional structures to support future adoption of CITE learning goals
The following activities might be helpful if planning team members have not yet identified the existing program learning objectives, institutional structures, rules, or norms that will have implications for your program making CITE-aligned instructional changes.
📜 Review documents that articulate your program’s general learning goals and expectations for Teacher Candidates. If none exist, consider distilling your program’s general learning goals and expectations from course descriptions, syllabi, etc.
✍🏼 Moving from values to CITE learning goals
Spotlight on one CITE journey
This spotlight document shares the process of one CUNY college department that began with general departmental values, moved to a CITE-specific mission, and then finally to generate implications of those values for Teacher Candidate CITE learning goals. Read through this spotlight and consider if a similar process might be useful for your department or program.
🏢 Making connections to accreditation-related activities that might be ongoing at your college
Insights on alignment between CITE and accreditation
We know colleges are constantly juggling many different priorities, so it always helps when efforts can overlap or be combined.
One way to approach this challenge is by aligning your school’s accreditation processes with the development of CITE learning goals and course scopes and sequences. This way coursework, assessments, etc. developed for CITE purposes can also help colleges pass accreditation. As explained by one college faculty member:
You know the the department is preparing for its accreditation process. But I think how we’ve been working…to make that process align with this work so that we’re not making our CAEP work separate and apart from our CITE work. That would be busy work. And it’s a very small department. So we use every opportunity, including this one to also be doing that as well.
– Sherone Smith-Sanchez, York College
Another faculty member from the same college described their CITE and accreditation processes as very well-aligned:
We’ve been very very successful over the years in being seen to be a really highly effective program. And we want to have that happen again. But what we are looking at is, how do we use CITE and the objectives and goals? How do we make sure that as we are preparing for our reaccreditation, that that’s a positive? That that’s something that is used positively to help define who we are and present who we are in a way that is saying that we’re moving forward into the next century, preparing our candidates and ourselves… It all is, I think, supportive of our work in CITE. And it encourages us to be free to do what we feel is necessary. I don’t feel at all inhibited. I don’t believe anything that the college is doing, or even the accreditation that would de-incentivize what we are attempting to do. If anything, it’s consistent with where those entities are.
– Lindamichelle Baron, York College
🧩 Aligning with existing internal conceptual frameworks, mission statements, strategic plans, etc.
Overview of one department’s process
After spending time surfacing their Department’s values and deriving implications for potential CITE learning goals, one team began drafting CITE learning goals.
The team generated a list of five core CITE learning goals, with some sub-goals. To help the team understand whether the goals they had drafted would help Teacher Candidates meet expectations of their School of Education, the team reviewed their college’s Conceptual Framework, looking for connections between the goals they had drafted and each of the principles in the framework.
Solicit input from stakeholders outside of the planning team
The following activities might be helpful if most perspectives bearing influence on the program’s CITE work are limited to people on the planning team.
📈 Conduct surveys and focus groups with Teacher Candidates about your CITE values and goals of the larger initiative
Ask faculty to administer a student survey
Administer the following survey with students to understand their experiences with CITE activities and assignments. CUNY Central will share the data back with participating faculty and teams after the semester is over.
Organize a focus group of students or recent graduates
Is your CITE team looking to surface Teacher Candidates’ input, feedback, and voice in a qualitative way?
CITE teams and faculty gather nuanced information about students’ CITE experiences in many ways. To support your efforts, CITE has created a battery of prompts and activities that teams might select from, remix, and choose to facilitate with small groups of Teacher Candidates in “focus group” style engagements or workshops.
📩 Engage a range of stakeholders (adjuncts, clinical fieldwork supervisors, cooperating teachers and school principals) to share feedback and perspectives
Real-world insights from different stakeholders
Adjunct faculty, clinical fieldwork supervisors, cooperating teachers, and school principals are often at the forefront of emerging technological integrations and policy changes in school districts and classrooms (such as P12 students using iReady platform for standardized testing or high school teachers trying out generative AI to support the design of lesson plans).
These folks may be especially privy to how P12 students actually (rather than ideally) interact with technologies integrated into classroom activities, to how P12 teachers navigate the multiple demands of using various data systems (for tracking attendance, assessment, etc.), and how school-wide issues such as cellphone policies impact teaching, learning, and student’s social interactions in practice.
They can also share their own visions for CITE-relevant learning goals such as goals that support teacher candidates to support their future P12 students’ meta-cognitive skills around identifying and reflecting on their interaction patterns with technology so that they can learn to focus themselves on technologically-mediated tasks, rather than distract themselves by multitasking and going down rabbit holes.
These unique perspectives and up-to-date ground truth are invaluable for informing CITE visioning work. Folks should be invited to share their experiences and ideas should feel valued. Show adjunct faculty, clinical fieldwork supervisors, cooperating teachers, and school principals that they are valued by understanding that they have additional jobs and by providing them with high flex opportunities for participating virtually or in-person in planning meetings (even if that means a paid dinner meeting instead of a lunch meeting), and with adequate compensation for their time.
📲 Invite faculty and adjuncts that haven’t been on the planning team to review and give feedback on draft learning goals
Package CITE learning goals into a legible format for specific audiences and purposes
The following activities might be helpful if the team has a good sense of the heart of their CITE initiative, but is still identifying the relevant audiences and key strategic purposes for their CITE learning goals.
✨ Gather inspiration for formatting styles, lengths, and features by reviewing approaches that other programs have taken
Formatting inspiration for learning goals
It is important to package CITE learning goals into a format that is legible to relevant audiences for specific planning and coordination purposes. Browse through the following slide deck for inspiration on different approaches your planning team might take.
