To talk about CLASS, you have to start with kids. Beginning anywhere else just doesn’t capture what’s at the heart of CLASS: interactions that help children grow and improve their outcomes.
That’s why Teachstone’s newest teacher PD series in myTeachstone is organized around teacher’s real experiences with children. Created with the learning experts at Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that brought you Sesame Street, the courses open by asking teachers to think about a specific interaction with a child:
"Think of a recent interaction you’ve had with a child who worked hard to solve a problem.
How did the child initially respond to the challenge?
How did you support this child’s effort to think through and plan for possible solutions?"
From the course “Social & Emotional Concepts: Problems & Solutions"
Given all that we ask of our teachers, CLASS can feel like something new or extra and can often feel overwhelming. But teachers are already interacting with their students in ways that help them grow. And they already think about how they can better support children’s development within specific content areas.
Instead of talking about CLASS as something new that teachers need to “do” and change, the tool provides a teachers a way to build on and dig deeper into the work that they are already doing. For example, the new course on problems and solutions capitalizes on teachers’ desires to help children shift from just reacting to difficulties to identifying and resolving them.
At the start of each course, teachers are asked to keep a child and specific learning outcome in mind as they see the ways in which the effective interactions described by CLASS help children grow. The course then exemplifies the value of CLASS and the proven content-specific strategies with real classroom footage or a vignette. Finally, teachers are given an opportunity to reflect on their current practice and making a plan for how they’ll use what they’ve learned to help their students.
In order to be meaningful for teachers, we can neither separate CLASS from the specific children in their care, nor can we isolate interactions from teachers’ value: that they help children grow. These courses regard teachers’ number one priority, to improve child outcomes, and help them use CLASS as a language and lens to help them meet this priority, everyday.
It’s now been one year since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school facilities and forced educators across the globe to shift how they engage learners. At Teachstone, we too made shifts to ensure we met the moment, while remaining steadfast in our commitment to improving the interactions that matter most to children’s development and success.
In today’s world, there isn’t much technology can’t do. It can help you stay connected to family and friends, keep you on track to achieving your fitness goals, and can even adjust your thermostat while you’re away from home.
And now, with myTeachstone, it can promote positive child-outcomes through facilitating on-going, meaningful, and continuous improvement efforts.
Practice and feedback is the key to CLASS® success. Even the most experienced certified CLASS Observers need practice and feedback to make sure their classroom observations remain fair and accurate. The best way to provide this is to use our Calibration product. Calibration protects your investment in reliable data collection.
Online Calibrations are available for Certified CLASS observers at all 6 CLASS levels. When you purchase an individual calibration, you’ll receive a video to watch and code on your myTeachstone dashboard. After submitting your codes, you’ll get an automated score report and a prerecorded webinar discussing the master codes.
When I first learned about CLASS Group Coaching—a training for early childhood professionals about building relationships with children—I was more than a little interested. This, I thought. This is what teaching is all about. It seems to be an obvious concept, but once we dig deeper, we are able to identify the whys and hows of our interactions. CLASS Group Coaching allows us to identify the benefits of our classroom relationships with our students and helps us be intentional in our daily practices. It allows us to utilize each moment we have with our students to deepen our understanding of their perspectives and genuinely connect with them as people. It helps us see the world from their view and guide their learning in a way that is relevant to them.