Professional Learning Teacher Inquiry

Enabling Communities and Collaborative Responses to Teaching Demonstrations

 

Demonstrations are a mainstay of summer institutes, but Janet Swenson and Diana Mitchell noticed that responses to demonstrations lacked the energy and thoughtfulness that characterized other activities in the summer institute. So they created a protocol for responding that elicited perceptive and thorough responses. The heuristic they developed, called Collaborative Responses to Teaching Demonstrations (CRTD), takes the form of a letter to the person offering the demonstration and includes such sections as “Elements of Best Practices” and “Standards and Benchmarks.”