Introduction
Our first extended sessions were developed for TeachingPartners, a Bay-Area startup created to establish and scale a new kind of professional development for America’s teachers—one that placed teachers at the center of their professional learning.
Though TeachingPartners had developed their pedagogical model by collaborating with teachers convened together in small working groups, their business was something different: they wanted to broadcast a continual series of online workshops hosted by many of most America’s exemplary classroom teachers live, to teachers everywhere.
They wanted teachers everywhere to meet together live and online with the aim of learning directly from these master teachers, and they wanted these participants to receive professional learning credit for their efforts. The also wanted to create an ongoing video archive of these sessions so that—even if they couldn’t attend a live online workshop as it happened—teachers could revisit these sessions later on their own time and at their own pace.
TeachingPartners’ aim was to extend the professional expertise they had curated to an audience that otherwise would never have been able to access it. They wanted to schedule related engagements in an ongoing series of successive, easy-to-access sessions—each of which showcased an individual teacher demonstrating his or her own unique, classroom-tested teaching practice. They wanted to appropriately celebrate each education leader presenting these sessions, and in the process to place their new organization at the center of an innovative, professional learning exchange.
The result: An ongoing schedule that to date has delivered hundreds of individual two-week online sessions, each of which makes it possible for as many as 50 engaged participants to meet together over a sustained period to develop new skills, and to receive professional learning credit for their efforts.
Case Study
TeachingPartners Live Online Workshops
Bringing like-minded practitioners together to share and cultivate practice
AGENDA
We helped TeachingPartners to identify the best of their enlisted presenters, and to develop their proprietary workshop model—one that empower session hosts to introduce a specific teaching strategy and to help workshop participants to personalize all they’d learned for deployment in their own classrooms.
We helped them to sequence and present groups of these workshops in themed conferences focused specifically on related teaching approaches.
COMMUNICATIONS
We helped TeachingPartners to share their aims with each of the online workshop hosts and to prepare these master teachers to offer entirely new, engaging online training.
We helped spread the word across their network about these sessions, and we helped prepare messaging for social media platforms including Twitter and Facebook.
We helped the organization prepare, publish, and distribute communications that announced news about upcoming sessions to their growing membership.
PLATFORM
We provided the digital conference platform upon which each group of themed professional learning sessions was marketed and presented.
Our ExtendedSession Online Conference platform made it easy to register attendees and to enroll them in individual workshop sessions.
We introduced and managed these sessions as they were offered to participants live throughout the school year, recording each as it happened, and then creating a dynamic online archive so that even people who’d missed a session could easily view what they’d missed—all on their own schedule.
COMMUNITY
We also made it possible for TeachingPartners—and for the professional learning partners that formed their professional network—to continue to cultivate online attendee’s interest in specific teaching practices, and to track and measure their engagement in each conference session.
We engaged attendees in online groups that connected like-minded participants in ways that enabled them to keep their connection, and their participation, going.
