Strategies For Getting Students

Ways To Retain Students/Improve Diversity:

1) Create all girls coding club

2) Get guys in the class to support girls

3) Consider all students interests when planning assignments and make sure there is a diversity of interests covered by they different assignments for a class.

4) Emphasize that the only way to improve and get better is with effort.

5) Provide feedback

6) Praise and Encourage as necessary but be careful not to praise too much.  Work with a growth mindset in mind.

7) Connect students to faculty and have faculty be open and responsive to students.

8) Create a classroom in which collaboration is important and frequent.  Allow students to help each other and learn from each other. 

9) Discuss options, advantages and rewards of computing careers

10) Avoid using or promoting stereotypes such as: The Best and Brightest in Computer Science, The Boy Wonder, All Coders like hacking away at their computer, Coders are gamers, etc.

11) Treat each student as an individual

12) Track student recruitment and retention. Pay attention to trends in your own classes and see if you can pin point reasons for this. 

13) Make your classroom and classroom culture inviting for all. Make sure images and activities are widely appealing and not focused on one sub group. 

14) Find ways to build your students confidence in their abilities.

15) Remind students than when they first learned something such as addition it was not fast or easy but it got better with time. The same is true for computer science. Remind students especially girls that they are doing really well they just need to give themselves time. It may seem like they are behind because they are new but anyone who just starts something is in the same position

16) Actively Recruit. Actively recruit from math and science classes. Actively recruit groups of girls. Actively recruit middle schools before they get to high school, they start planning for high school in middle school.

17) Have students in your class create recruitment tools (such as videos) and work to help recruit other students.

18) Have an open house to inform administrators, parents, guidance counselors, and other teachers.

19) Write something for your school news source or have your students write something!

20) Hold a school assembly about Computer Science, Careers in Computing and why computing is important today

21) Create alliances with other teachers to have them help you recruit students, especially underrepresented students to take your class. 

22) Host a screening of a video like She ++