Intensive Professional Team-Building Bootcamp For Educators

The breakthrough approach to fostering learner-teacher collaboration.

From one-day to two-week boot camp for a team of teachers, education specialists, students and parents.

Based on the fundamental principles of Lev Vygotsky’s theory of learning, constructivism of Jean Piaget, and educational pragmatism of John Dewey.

This recent review “Vygotsky’s Principle “One Step in Learning — One Hundred Steps in Development”: From Idea to Practice” includes a short description of such a bootcamp (the direct link; click here to download from the mirror; the link to the magazine).

Quote:

“In our Summer Schools for children with special needs and learning difficulties, which based in a summer camp called “Gagarinets” in the Nytvensky District of Perm Krai, Russia, we frequently witnessed dramatic improvement in many children as early as during first days in the camp. For example, the first Summer School gathered different specialists (teachers, psychologists, artists) who were aware that there hardly was any chance to achieve significant outcomes for these children as far as bridging gaps in academic knowledge and coping skills was concerned, during 18 days (with only 13 days of academic training). Therefore, they set a major goal to endow every child with an opportunity to feel him/herself successful in something and regain their self-confidence. As Margarita Gordon, one of the Summer School organizers, noted, “The collaborative fulfillment of this goal brought about “miracles” when buds which seemed sleeping or even faded, opened to form bright and beautiful flowers. Nearly all children in the Summer School acquitted themselves well during a lesson or some activity. Should such breakthrough occur during one lesson, all the other teachers noticed at once that the child started to work better, to show interest or even active engagement. Furthermore, his/her status among classmates improved”

The author of the article, Viktor Kirillovich Zaretskii, is one of my mentors and close friends. As a member of those Summer Schools teams, I was a witness, a moderator, a consultant, and an initiator of such “miracles”.

Later, this experience was used as one of the foundational blocks of my PhD work in the field of teacher professional development: “Conditions which are necessary and sufficient for teachers to become proficient in advancing their own professional development”.

The main chapters from the dissertation have become a chapter in a recent book: “Professional Designing as One of Key Competencies of Modern Teacher”.