One Year Later, Same Commitment to Innovate to Strengthen Interactions

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. 

New Challenges Brought New Solutions

• Educators quickly had to figure out how to teach virtually.  For years, Teachstone has studied and worked to improve in-person interactions between teachers and students. But, how can we work with educators to ensure that students receive meaningful interactions in virtual settings? In response to this challenge, we created a new training that shows educators how to apply CLASS concepts to these new learning environments.  We also created a series of free COVID19 resources and tools to support educators in navigating ever changing circumstances.
  
  
• Children who experienced trauma needed social-emotional and well-being support. We quickly saw how COVID-19 exacerbated the negative circumstances many students faced outside of the classroom. Students, more than ever, needed nurturing, supportive interactions from educators. In support of that work, Teachstone developed a series of free webinars from experts and leaders in the field of trauma-informed care. And, we created a new comprehensive training, Interactions at the Heart of Healing, to support development of best practices and strategies to effectively address trauma and social-emotional needs.
  
  
• In-person events were canceled, but the need for support remained. To ensure the health and safety of you and our staff, we reimagined our in-person events as new virtual experiences. We transformed our in-person InterAct Summits to virtual, engaging events and we moved all of our in-person and face-to-face trainings to an engaging virtual experience.
  
  
• Quality interactions remained vital to students’ learning and development. To allow for continued support and focus on quality interactions we added new content and features. We built new features in myTeachstone to allow for video upload, informal observation functionality, and a new service to promote quality engagement with the Learning Resources.

Continuing to Innovate in Order to Support Teachers at Scale

The last year has accelerated the use of technology in education. A shift to new learning formats that may have taken years to fully adopt was suddenly a necessity. Coaches shifted how they engage with teachers by using digital platforms. However, sometimes programs struggled with leveraging technology to properly connect teachers with a certified coach.

To help coaches and teachers connect more seamlessly, we  are excited to announce a strategic partnership with Torsh Inc., the company behind TORSH Talent. For the past 8 years, TORSH Talent has been a leading online professional learning platform that, among other things, enables schools and organizations to support educator growth throughout the entire development cycle of assessment, observation, feedback, goal-setting, and coaching. While Teachstone has been offering distance coaching for years, this new partnership with Torsh introduces a new and exciting offering to the field by bringing together a unique and innovative technology platform developed by Torsh  with our expertise in CLASS-based coaching. And, as a result, it will reimagine the ways in which you receive coaching and support to drive improvement, quality, and student outcomes in your programs. 

Our partnership with Torsh allows for our coaches, expertise and research-based coaching to be accessible to all through an on-demand virtual  platform. At our  InterAct CLASS Summit next week we will unveil this powerful new product that is poised to transform coaching practices across the country.