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=Teacher to Teacher: Charting a Course for a Successful Semester=

= = Course Description:

This course will be designed to support 1st year teacher within the school district of Braintree, MA. The course will introduce new teachers to this public school system and provide strategies that help them as they navigate their way through the 1st semester of the school year. Areas that will be addressed include classroom management, lesson planning, policy and procedural issues, technology implementation, special education and ELL students. The content will be tailored to this particular school district and to middle school educators, though the aim would be to create a framework that could be followed by other school districts and other grade level groups looking to use online courses to support 1st year teachers in their respective districts.

Intended Learners:

This specific course is aimed at those educators who will be teaching general education courses in a middle school. Since these teachers need to participate in a mentoring program during their first year of teaching, this course will be designed to include interactions with mentors in order to satisfy the state and district mentoring requirements. The intended learners may have a wide range of ages, but likely will be between 22 and 26 years of age. All will have attained a bachelor’s degree and fulfilled DOE requirements for initial licensure. Some will additionally have completed a master’s degree in Education. Since they must be licensed in their field, they should possess strong prior knowledge in the content area in which they teach, and will also have some training in pedagogy. They will likely be display a high level of autonomy as learners, but may have varying degrees of experience with distance education. Additionally, since mentors are not always available during the school day, they will also need to utilize the discussion features of this online course.