NYC DOE – Godot Creative

NYC DOE.

Teaching to a most demanding audience.

We’ve created a lot of training over the last 17 years. It’s an underserved space, and we really enjoy it. What made this client unique was the audience.

With about 75,000 teachers in the NYC school system, we were faced with a population roughly the size of Scranton, PA who had committed themselves to education.

Our task was to provide elements of a common framework focused on assessment in the classroom in an interactive, asynchronous format that would model sound pedagogy, provide a baseline framework across all classrooms, and give strategies and output that would be usable immediately for the field.

GODOT.

Anchored in academic rigor.

Roughly following the guidance from Charlotte Danielson’s “A Framework for Teaching,” Godot began with modules exploring the role of assessment in learning.

Users navigate the roadmap of our lesson while thinking about their own classroom, analyzing examples and applying that methodology.

A adult approach to teaching kids.

The structure of the learning embraced a fairly sophisticated approach to content and visuals, with a slight nod to the storybook images of our youth mixed with real messages from other teachers and photography from public schools in Brooklyn and Queens.

Usable content creation rewards learners.

Throughout this training (and others) we allowed the learners to create usable material as part of the process.

From a gamification standpoint, this serves as an “earned badge.” From a learner standpoint, by creating something immediately usable — in this case, a downloadable and sharable assessment-based lesson plan — they are anchored in application and feel that their time is valuable because they are making something useful and tangible.

Personal management styles for educators.

In addition to the instructional guidance, Godot created a virtual personal evaluation series, tackling high-level personal planning of time and relationships. As with the instructional portion, these exercises were anchored in tangible output created by the learner.

In these examples, we see branching conversations measuring communication style and self-assessment of desired growth areas.