What is TEALS?

TEALS (Technology Education And Literacy in Schools) is a grassroots employee driven program that recruits, mentors, and places high tech professionals who are passionate about digital literacy and computer science education into high school classes as part-time teachers in a team teaching model where the school district is unable to meet their students' Computer Science needs on its own.  TEALS work with committed partner schools to eventually hand off the CS courses to the in-service teachers we team teach with so that the school will be able to maintain and grow a sustainable CS program on their own.

Read about TEALS in NY Times | CNN | Geekwire | Harvard Ed School Magazine | UC Berkeley | University of Illinois | ACTE Magazine | 425 Magazine

TEALS videos from YouthSpark (remote teaching in rural KY) | Q13 Fox Seattle | Loudoun County Public Schools |

Why TEALS?

In 2010, only 19,390 students in the United States out of some 14 million took the Computer Science Advanced Placement test. This number represents only 0.6% of all AP tests taken that year. This at a time when five of the top ten fastest growing jobs will be in a computer related field and two of the top three top bachelors salaries are in computer science and engineering.  This problem is more clearly defined by the ACM CSTA study on a policy level.

While there are curricula out there for Computer Science (CS) in K-12, the constraining factor for the proliferation of CS classes in American high schools is the lack of teachers with a CS background willing to take a >70% pay cut compared to an industry job. Due to the unique nature and flexible working hours of the tech industry, it is possible for tech industry professionals to teach one period of CS before work without an impact on their professional careers.

TEALS provides schools with both curricula and highly qualified teachers for technology literacy and CS courses so that the schools can offer these courses without any training or significant development costs to the schools themselves.  Because TEALS teachers always team teach with a school teacher, the school teachers learn the course material and eventually teach the courses by themselves later on in the day.  This way, we are able to grow a sustainable CS program at the school.

President Obama made it clear that “reaffirming and strengthening America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation is essential to meeting the challenges of this century”. Yet we won’t be able to do that without computer science education in K-12.  TEALS places teachers with computer science degrees in the classroom today to fuel the technological innovations of tomorrow.

School Year	Schools	Total Students	AP Students	TEALS Teachers and TAs
2009-2010	1	12	0	1
2010-2011	4	250+	18	10
2011-2012	13	800+	67	40
2012-2013	35 (7 states)	1500+	400+	110
2013-2014	65 (12 states)	2700+	850+	260

Kevin gives a talk at Microsoft about the state of High School CS in the country and how TEALS is getting more CS into the classroom.

The slides can be found here.

Current state of CS education

Microsoft Software Engineer and TEALS teacher Ben grades students' programming projects.



Software Engineer Brett and Software Test Engineer Veneta sharing stories after class.