“Had there not been a pandemic, would we have experimented with things that felt innovative? I don’t know,” Rebecca Lebowitz says of how City Connects has spent the last months coming up with new ways to provide professional development for educators both inside and outside our network.
Lebowitz is City Connects’ Senior Manager of Learning and Development, and when she was hired last year, no one was worried about a global pandemic. Lebowitz was busy developing professional development programs.
When the pandemic hit, she had to move all of our training efforts online.
“This summer, we had all hands on deck, we had an amazing team working together. We all put our heads together and everyone played a role. We really focused on refining our objectives.”
The work started with responding to a crisis.
It grew into developing innovations that will permanently change what we do.
“In our conversations about planning and rollout and implementation, we think a lot about the relationships that we’re building with participants,” Lebowitz says. Her PhD dissertation at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education looked at the impact of early childhood instructional coaching both on teacher performance and on children’s outcomes.
How do you promote strong professional development relationships in a shoreless ocean of Zoom calls and online chats? By rethinking everything. Continue reading