Establishing Database of Teaching Practices

At the recommendation of the Advisory Council, the foundation decided to deepen the professional discourse in Israel surrounding quality teaching of mathematics and the sciences.  Based on the collective wisdom of teachers, which we gathered from practice and research, we constructed a ‘compass for quality teaching’, which is an ambitious attempt to curate an ideal for best practice. We then discussed it with our partners and grantees in order to encourage the use of a shared language, to align efforts around common goals, and by doing so, to improve practice.

At the 2016 meeting of the Advisory Council, we presented the compass for review. Members suggested taking the compass to the next level of implementation, by creating examples of classroom practice demonstrating its principles, preparing online courses for teachers, and further developing the standards and rubrics. Lee Shulman advised that such steps should be executed by the professional community and not in-house, eventually becoming the responsibility of an Institute for Advanced Teaching.

In order to do so, we approached the Levinsky College, whose President Michal Beller and Head of Mathematics Talli Nachlielli are highly professional and trusted partners. They have a close working relationship with Professor Deborah Ball, a world-renowned education scholar, the dean of education at Michigan State University and the founder of TeachingWorks. TeachingWorks is an organization that attempts to identify core practices of teaching and train teachers accordingly.

Levinsky are proposing to develop over four years an indexed video database of at least 24 movies of teaching practices demonstrating the principles of the compass for quality teaching. The database will include videos, case studies, pedagogic analysis and theoretical background to help teachers deepen the discourse around the principles of quality teaching, and develop practical knowledge on how to implement these principles.

In a first stage, the development team, led by Nachlielli, will recruit eight talented teachers (4 physics teachers and 4 mathematics teachers) and will identify best practices of their classroom instruction. These practices will be filmed and the development team will review the footage and tag its contents according to the principles of the compass. Some of the lessons will be filmed at schools, while others at the simulation center of Levinsky and in meetings of teachers’ professional learning communities.

The database will be fully open to the professional community free of charge, and Levinsky will develop two academic courses which will use the database for teaching students. Additionally, 40 master teachers will be invited to a special course, which will introduce the database and encourage its use in their professional learning communities and mentoring sessions with fellow teachers.

The team will be advised by a panel of distinguished scholars, such as Deborah Ball, Anna Sfard and Meir Meidav.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 235