Teacher Education
Enable teachers and mentors to support each other, regardless of distance
Hear how Bowling Green State University enables peer support and makes remote observations easier, while reducing both costs and travel time.
Cindy Ross:
Specifically about our alternative licensure, which is where Dawn and I use GoReact quite a bit, we have over 300 teachers that are enrolled in that program and they come from all areas of the state of Ohio. The state of Ohio requires us to do observations, but you can imagine that that’s very challenging. We are up in northwest Ohio, which is at the very top of Ohio. You’ll see that little red mark on that map is approximately where we’re located, Bowling Green State University. So for us to travel all the way down to the Cincinnati area on a regular basis to do teacher observations is very difficult and very time consuming and very expensive. So that is why we needed to look for something else to help us with our observations. So the travel costs were challenging.
We are an online program, so peer support in an online program is very difficult when you’re not coming together as a class on a weekly basis to discuss the challenges of education. So we needed to find something where our teachers could support each other and then the opportunity for teacher reflection and how that fits into classroom observations. And so again, those were our challenges to try to figure out how we could improve what we were doing.
