Core Value #5: This Movement Belongs to All of Us
It takes a village to raise a child. It’s going to take a mighty community to ensure that every day, in every classroom, every child feels appropriately challenged and supported.
Kareem and I started the Modern Classrooms Project to train teachers we knew in the DC area. They were a diverse group - as you can tell from the picture above! - and they taught us, from the beginning, that each of their unique perspectives made our movement stronger. To meet their needs, we had to make our approach to training flexible, accessible, and personalized.
To this day, we still aspire to create training materials that can empower any educator, anywhere - because this movement belongs to all of us.
Here are a few of the ways that we’re building an inclusive movement:
Making our materials free.
We will always ensure that any educator can learn our model for free. That’s why we put all of our content into our free online course - and it’s why educators in 150+ countries have been able to access it. We want educators to benefit from our work regardless of their ability to pay… and we hope you’ll help us by spreading the word!
Supporting administrators and families.
We’ve found that teachers are most successful when their communities buy into their work. To educate and support administrators in our partner schools, we’ve launched a Leadership Collaborative that offers year-round support; to inform families and caregivers, we have a dedicated FAQ and Communication Toolkit. If there are other ways in which you think we can support stakeholders in your community, we hope you’ll let us know!
Building responsive communities.
Educators learn best from one another. To facilitate this kind of peer communication, we’ve launched a Facebook Group that is open to all educators worldwide, and currently has over 10,000 members. We also host monthly chats on Twitter, and regular free webinars. We hope you’ll join one of these communities soon!
Here’s a message from our Facebook Group Moderators, who are educators like you - and whom I hope you’ll meet in our Facebook Group soon:
To better serve every student and teacher, we cultivate an intentionally diverse and inclusive community of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds. Education impacts every person, and every person has something to contribute. We are all in this together.
If you share these values get started on the Free Online Course to begin implementing in your Modern Classroom.
