The Teaching Channel

The Teaching Channel, a website used by hundreds of thousands of teachers, offers more than 600 high-quality videos of excellent teaching practices. This project would create an online professional development platform that will allow teachers to watch, upload, and collaborate around video and other resources. Potentially, this will produce an innovative way to scale up professional development aligned with deeper learning and the Common Core standards.

This proposed grant would enable The Teaching Channel and New Tech Network, in partnership with the ten-member Deeper Learning Network, to produce a series of seventy videos illustrating the instructional practices interested teachers can use to develop their students’ deeper learning skills. The videos will be distributed through The Teaching Channel’s existing Web platform, which already houses 600 videos and has 200,000 users per month. This grant would help the spread of deeper learning instructional practices and provide resources for the Deeper Learning Network’s professional development of its own teaching staff.

The Teaching Channel provides a television and Internet video showcase of inspiring and effective teaching practices in America’s schools. It would use this general support to refine and expand its video offerings and professional development platform to more fully respond to teacher needs as they begin to implement the Common Core State Standards. To do this, Teaching Channel would (1) fill gaps in its video library to address key Common Core State Standards; (2) partner with the two testing consortia to create videos, materials, and other professional development opportunities to help teachers implement the new Common Core assessments; and (3) host the teacher instructional materials and tools developed by deeper learning grantees on its platform.