Blogs Last month I described the mission and the first goal of Teaching Channel: to drive the content of the channel based on feedback from teachers. This month we will finish creating the feedback tools and creating the advisory board and will report back to you what we learn!
The second goal of Tch is to deepen and facilitate teacher learning. We believe that providing high-quality video of classroom practice featuring teachers and students from around the country enables you to see how other teachers tackle teaching kids, particular standards and complex subject matter. We do know, however, that simply watching a video does not necessarily enable anyone to change his or her practice. So, we are building greater capacity into our site in order to enable you to form “Deeper Learning Groups.”
Right now you can to watch videos, annotate them, and send your annotations to colleagues for discussion. By spring, we hope to enable you to form study groups with both local and distant colleagues, to try out the strategies that you see in our videos, then film your own attempts to use the strategies and approaches, and then upload those videos for the members of their study group to watch, annotate and discuss.
We believe that this new capability will enable you to take charge of growing your own skills with an eye to the needs of the students in you classes. We believe that growing an ever-more sophisticated repertoire of skills and approaches will enable you to be more successful with the students in your classes.
At the moment, we are just building out our site to enable this kind of work. We will be field-testing these groups in the spring and summer of this year and hope they will be ready for you to use in the fall of 2012. We’d love to know what you think, and what features you would suggest we include as we develop our capacity to help you!
All of us at Tch wish you a new year full of spectacular learning!
