Comparing K-5 Teachers' Reported Use Of Design In Teaching Programming And Planning In Teaching Writing

K-5 teachers teach a range of subjects & develop generic teaching skills; when starting to teach computing, particularly programming, practitioners may not realise that they can draw on these other skills to support their teaching. In a small study of K-5 teachers, potential synergies were suggested between using planning in the the teaching of writing and design in the teaching of programming. In this paper, we explore these synergies by surveying a wider group of teachers (n=207) on their uses of planning and design. Teachers reported the usefulness of planning for writing and design for programming as equally important. However, there were significant differences in their uses. The majority saw planning as essential in writing & put this into practice in their teaching. For example, they demonstrated the creation of plans, expected students to annotate plans, required students to refer to plans when writing and used plans to differentiate. By contrast, these uses were implemented less frequently in programming tasks. We also report on differences in the confidence of male & female respondents, & between generalists (who teach programming & writing) & specialists (who do not teach writing). For example, females were more confident to teach writing than programming, with males vice versa. Having revealed opportunities for reuse of successful techniques used in teaching writing for the teaching of programming we recommend further work is needed to explore this transfer of pedagogical knowledge.