The California Collaborative for Educational Excellence (CCEE) has launched a new site dedicated to providing simple instructional strategies for educators of all levels. Organized around short film clips, the new CCEE platform is providing “words of wisdom and practical tools shared by experienced teachers.” The videos are designed to help substitute teachers, paraeducators, and even new teachers who want to learn teaching strategies from seasoned educators. The best part? Each video is shorter than ten minutes to ensure that educators can learn quickly about practical concepts, tools, and resources that can quickly and easily be applied in a variety of classrooms.
These videos are engaging and identify the essential parts of teaching strategies. In one example, Kate Bowen, a retired elementary school teacher for the Davis Joint Unified School District tells us about how she guided her students through the Word of the Week (WOW) activity. The WOW activity encourages students to be creative in making their own art that visually represents course concepts. Bowen explains that in her classroom, she had students three-hole punch their weekly WOW pieces in a binder so that they could reflect on them over the school year. If you have five minutes, you can watch the video yourself and apply this to primary classrooms! For older students, Chris Mullin, a high school history teacher at the Santa Ynez Valley Union High School District, shares how to leverage the strategy of "Concept Circles.” In this exercise, students work collaboratively to become specialists on a larger piece of curriculum. They are divided into groups, assigned their slice of curriculum, and encouraged to determine four key ideas, using words and drawings, that reflect the larger course concept. Each team has a different course concept, but each is connected based on the unit. Students discuss and determine their four key concepts, place them in a graphic organizer, and return their Circle so that each team can see their work. Then students will try to identify the other teams’ respective course concept based on what they see in the Concept Circle. In Mullin’s experience, this makes the students negotiate with each other, share their understanding, and then ultimately engage in a debrief about what they learned. Like the previous video, this one is also less than seven minutes long and can be easily applied.
If these videos sound like something you might be interested you, you can microlearn and take advantage of the CCEE’s videos on their website, here. By the end of the year, they hope to have about twenty videos posted across multiple subject areas. Additionally, if you would like to stay connected with the CCEE and learn more about the resources they offer, please share your contact information on their About page.