As we considered the transition to emergency remote learning in Spring 2020, I turned to Twitter and especially to new connections I made at the Winter Institute for Digital Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi earlier this year. Among the many links and suggestions shared in that moment, the NYU Shanghai Digital Teaching Toolkit stood out as a model for reflecting on remote teaching and learning.
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’m so grateful for Dr. Molly Buckley-Marudas, associate professor of Teacher Education and Faculty in Residence at the Campus International High School, who shared my vision of creating 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. We hope to see this community grow as we continue to collaborate in the coming year.
One of the products of the collaborative is a resource referatory (http://referatory.cleteaching.org/) geared toward Cleveland educators and 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.
