Purpose
This is your final small group meeting. There is no new content to prepare for, no Competency Demo looming, and no checking-for-understanding questions to work through. The structure of this session is intentionally lighter than previous weeks.
The goal is simple: close out the course together, honestly and thoughtfully. You have spent eight weeks building a foundation in computer science with a group of educators who share your professional context. That is worth taking a moment to reflect on before it ends.
This session has three parts: a debrief on the AI post-reflection, a synthesis conversation about the full course, and a closing exchange about what you are taking with you.
Before You Meet
Complete the AI post-reflection and the Final Reflection on Blackboard before this session if at all possible. The post-reflection in particular is most valuable to discuss while it is fresh. Also complete any outstanding Competency Demo retakes — the deadline is end of day on the last day of the course.
This week's 3-2-1 is course-level rather than week-level. Spend about 5 minutes on it. Write 1–2 sentences for each item — not a paragraph.
- 3 ideas from the whole course that genuinely changed how you think — about CS, about teaching, or about the technology around you
- 2 things you plan to actually bring into your classroom or teaching practice
- 1 question the course raised that you are still sitting with
During Your Discussion
Part 1 — The AI Post-Reflection Debrief (15 minutes)
At the start of Week 6, each of you wrote down what you believed about artificial intelligence. You have now spent two weeks studying it seriously.
Go around the group. Each person shares:
- The single biggest shift in their thinking from the pre-reflection to the post-reflection — one thing they believed before that they now understand differently.
- One thing from their pre-reflection that held up — an intuition that Weeks 6 and 7 confirmed rather than challenged.
- One question the AI content opened that the course did not fully answer.
After everyone has shared, spend a few minutes on this: did the course change how you think about AI in your classroom? Not in theory — concretely. What will you do differently, or say differently, or teach differently, because of what you now know?
Part 2 — The Full Course (15 minutes)
Step back to the beginning. Week 1 was bits and bytes. Week 8 is large language models. That is a lot of ground. Share the ideas from your 3-2-1, then discuss whichever of these generates the most genuine conversation:
- Which week or topic surprised you most — either because it was harder than you expected, more relevant, or more interesting?
- Which topic do you most wish you had more time with? Which could you have spent less time on?
- If a colleague asked you what this course is about in two or three sentences, what would you say?
Part 3 — What You Are Taking With You (15 minutes)
Go around the group one final time. Each person shares the two items from their 3-2-1: the things they plan to bring into their classroom, and the question they are still sitting with.
After everyone has shared, spend whatever time remains however feels right for your group — continuing a thread someone raised, asking questions you did not get to ask during the course, or simply wrapping up a conversation that has been going on for eight weeks.
After You Meet
Submit the AI post-reflection and the Final Reflection on Blackboard if you have not already. Complete any Competency Demo retakes before the deadline.
It has been a genuine pleasure designing this course for you. The questions you bring to it — about how to explain binary to a third grader, about what your students already believe about AI, about where the ethics of data collection starts and stops — are exactly the right questions. Keep asking them.