Greetings from Phoenix! I’m here for some training, but the travel provided room for reading and relaxing. I do love to read, but it’s also nice to be able to kick back and watch some good tube. I’ve been digging into our new YouTube page. We already have our newest video—the Power of Interactions—up, as well as our recent Infant/Toddler webinar recording and some explanatory videos. I’m excited we have a new social channel, in addition to Facebook and Twitter, where we can post videos and get feedback from you. Speaking of feedback, let us know what you’d like to see on our YouTube channel and be sure to subscribe!
Video: Teachstone and the Power of Interactions
It’s not all tube, and I do have some other good reads to share. Over the past few months, I’ve found myself fascinated with the never-ending stories on online education. With the explosion of MOOCs, the trends around flipped classrooms, and our own online development at Teachstone, it can be pretty overwhelming. I love the variety of opinions about where online learning is headed—it’s a fad, it’s going to end universities as we know them, or maybe, just maybe, there’s some middle ground.
Check out this New York Times article on the disruptive power of online education and its promise to open educational opportunities for people of all income brackets from across the globe. In my past life, I worked on expanding and improving girl’s education in Burkina Faso—a tiny, poor, but truly lovely country in West Africa—and can only begin to fathom what these changes could mean for the children I met at l’Ecole de Garbouogou or l’Ecole de Kofouanou in the tiny villages of Burkina. And to bring it back to my life today, as we’re thinking about how to support coaches and teachers who don’t have the time or funds to attend one of our trainings, the possibilities around online learning are exhilarating. Particularly in early childhood, there’s a need to push the field to adopt more online trainings and professional development, but we must acknowledge the challenges that come along with these changes. What are you doing in your states, programs, and classrooms to encourage online learning? How can Teachstone support that work?
Finally, I just started digging into EdWeek’s series on the Gates Foundation. I’m in the middle of this article which seems to present both sides of the debate—how much the foundation has done for education over the past six years and the criticism that their work is having an outsized impact on education policy. Next on my list are articles about the Effective Teaching Study and the overlap between government policy and the Gates’ work. As you may know, in 2009, the Gates Foundation launched the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project aimed at learning how evaluation methods can be used to give teachers more information about how to develop effective teaching practices and provide districts with tools to identify effective teaching. The CLASS tool was one of the observational measures researchers were testing. Good thing I have a long flight home; lots more reading to do!