RTT/Deliverable
Deliverable
Using the lessons learned from the programs I studied, I will develop:
- a set of attributes of a good rapid teacher training program, filled in with specific examples of how the attribute was fulfilled in specific programs, based on anecdotes from the people I interviewed. This will form the heart of a guide for creating a rapid teacher training program.
- a compact training program, based on this guide, for a group of Olin students volunteering at a charter school. This will include a program syllabus, set of assignments, and teacher's notes.
- a final presentation that summarizes my learning and invites ongoing collaboration and involvement in teacher training at Olin
Both the guide and the example training program will be created on an open wiki for self-accountability, tracking of changes, and future reuse by others. My goals towards openness and extensibility will lead me to thoroughly document my development process and rationale for the decisions I make. I will especially need to defend the components of existing programs I choose to adopt, how much time I devote to it, and why I selected them for the curriculum for Olin volunteers. The documentation of my research and critical analysis of existing programs are also integral parts of the AHS Capstone guidelines.
The training program for Olin students will most likely run on Friday afternoons from 4-5pm after eDiscovery meetings. This is probably the best time because my core group of students will be meeting together before this and have the next hour free due to Olin’s community service time. The course will run 5-6 weeks starting in November, and I will be the instructor. There will be short readings between meetings, on the order of an hour each week. I will post the course syllabus and lesson plans for each session to the wiki as a concrete example of a rapid teacher training program. This deliverable serves my goal of helping Olin students become better teachers. Since it is also a successful output of the process I am designing, it helps clarify to other users what their program could look like given certain starting assumptions.
The presentation will be used partly for reflection on the Capstone experience, but mostly to share the final output of my process for developing a RTT and my pilot program at Olin. I will encourage Olin students to experience the second iteration of RTT at Olin through a weekly session I will offer next semester. For students who know people who are looking to develop a better way to prepare people to teach, I will encourage them to share the wiki URL with them to foster future collaboration.
In addition to the primary deliverables, interview notes and book reviews from all of the major sources I use will be written on the wiki. These writings will serve as a collective rationale that highlights my purpose, bias, and perspective when generating the course, allowing future users a much clearer insight into where to give feedback and how to improve the content of the wiki.
As a final piece, I will create a 3-5 page written reflection on the semester. In this reflection, I will take a second look at my goals and how well I fulfilled them. I will also talk about the things I learned and surprises I encountered during the semester. Finally, I will give some thoughts on where I would like the project to go in the future, as many parts of it will continue to be a work in progress. After the project completes, I will clean up the wiki to partition the AHS Capstone-specific content into its own area. This reflection will be posted to the wiki in this partitioned area.
