Chapter Leaders

This post documents CSTA Washington's work to enable Washington educators to use online PD hours provided by CSTA national as "clock hours" for teacher re-certification in Washington state:

1. CSTA Washington files to be a Washington clock-hour provider annually.   See attached PSCSTA Application 22-23.pdf.   Legally, we are still the Puget Sound Computer Science Teachers' Association although we now DBA as "CSTA Washington" with the merger of the four Washington CSTA Chapters.
   
   
2. For each event/course that CSTA Washington wants to provide clock hours for, it must document and approve the event/course before anyone starts it.  See the approval form for the Identity Inclusive Computing course on Coursera from CSTA  
   
   
3. CSTA Washington must collect evidence that the educator has attended/completed the event/course and collect feedback from the educator regarding the event/course.
   
   
4. The educator must sign a Continuing Education Clock Hour Credit form.   A sample one is attached.   CSTA Washington uses Adobe Sign to manage the process.
5. After signing, the educator must go to the OSPI (Office of Supervisor of Public Instruction) online portal to register the clock hours themselves   CSTA Washington provides instruction on how to do this.
6.  CSTA Washington must keep all relevant documentation for 7 years.
7. What is your chapter doing to make online PD hours provided by CSTA useful for teacher recertification in your state? Teachers are busy, and other things being equal, would rather take professional development that they can use toward recertification than otherwise.   In Washington, some teachers will not even take PD unless the hours can be used for recertification.

Every state has its own regulations regarding professional development for teachers and recertification. But I believe that unless your chapter is doing something like CSTA Washington, the professional development hours provided by CSTA national are not nearly as valuable (or desirable) as the PD could be.

I'm also interested in seeing how chapters in different states are using professional development/clock hours that can be used for recertification to make their chapter more desirable to join.   I'll share some of our learnings in Washington in updates to this post, but I would be interested in learning what others are doing. 

I was asked to start this post at the recent Chapter Leaders Committee.

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Lawrence Tanimoto
Treasurer/Advocacy Lead, CSTA Washington
Winner, Men's and Women's Brackets
2024 CSTA Chapter Leaders March Madness Challenge
Bellevue, WA
K-12 Teacher CTE (retired)
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