As it became clear that Cleveland State University and institutions across the globe would transitiont to emergency remote learning in the spring of 2020 I turned to both new and old networks of colleagues for ideas and support in my classroom. One of the resources, NYU Shanghai’s Digital Teaching Toolkit stood out among the crowd. NYU faculty in Shanghai had begun their spring semester remotely due to the outbreak of coronavirus and their case studies of remote learning buoyed educators in North America as we considered platforms and tools for our own courses.
CSU’s semester drew to a close and I realized that it was our turn to reflect on a semester of emergency remote learning and prepare for a future which would inevitably include remote and hybrid teaching and learning. I approached Dr. Molly Buckley-Marudas, associate professor of Teacher Education and Faculty in Residence at the Campus International High School, with a plan to create a community of educators from Pre-K to higher education who would reflect on the semester, prepare for the fall, and most importantly support one another as we navigate this new territory in education.
Thanks to support from our departments and colleges, the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative (http://cleteaching.org/) was created in May 2020. Our first cohort is an interdisciplinary group of educators from across Northeast Ohio. Each participant wrote a case study reflection on their experiences in spring 2020 and met with a focus group of 4-6 people to discuss challenges, successes, and plans for the future.
One of the products of the collaborative is a resource referatory (http://referatory.cleteaching.org/) geared toward Cleveland educators but open to all audiences. We hope that this will serve as a crowdsourced toolkit for educators as we move into various stages of teaching and learning in Fall 2020.
