While you’re attending the show for education and inspiration from your peers, it’s important to get out and explore Daytona. With that in mind, our team put together their top five plus must-see and must-do lists in no particular order.

#1 The Beach, Boardwalk & Pier

Who doesn’t love a beach? And when you add in fun activities and yummy food, the Daytona beach area is a good time if you go solo or with a friend!

#2 Shopping

Whether you want to do a little window shopping or pick up something festive from a boutique. There are many options if you explore the shopping district, Volusia Mall, Tanger Outlets, and ONE DAYTONA. Shop till you drop!

#3 Daytona Speedway Tour

While you just missed DAYTONA 500, you should stop by and get a tour. It’s a great opportunity to go behind the scenes of the world center racing epicenter.

# 4 Golfing

The savviest golfers know that Daytona Beach area golf is truly one of Florida’s premiere destinations. There are nearly 20 golf courses to choose from. If you have time, make a special trip to LPGA International, a highly-acclaimed 36-hole facility.

#5 Galleries & Museums

While we have to visit MOAS (Museum of Arts & Sciences) any time we are in town, there is no shortage of places to stop. Explore news collections, see interesting artists, support the local community, and, most importantly, take in the culture.

Bonus Meet with TORSH

Ok, we had to add this in; after all, we are on tour! We’d love to connect with you if you plan on attending FASA and/or ALEC events this quarter.

Stop by our table, or if you want to schedule some time to talk with an EIC specialist today, sign up here.

The post From Daytona with Love appeared first on Torsh.

“[TORSH Talent] has been really helpful for me… [Even though] COVID means that our plans are changing, we’re still getting to coach and develop our teachers.”

Reilly Blackwelder serves as the Assistant Principal of Instruction at the Rundberg campus of IDEA Public Schools.  We sat down with her to discuss the ways in which adopting virtual video platform TORSH Talent has accelerated the professional development of new teachers and expanded the leadership capacity of instructional leaders, despite pandemic struggles with staff shortages and increasing administrative loads.

IDEA Rundberg is a K-12 campus of IDEA Public Schools located in Austin, Texas.  A network of tuition-free public charter schools, IDEA was founded on the radical belief in the unlimited potential of all students and has a long history of democratizing excellent education.  Rundberg is committed to a mission of “College for ALL children,” ensuring more students from low-income backgrounds, students who would be the first generation in their families to attend college, and students who come from groups historically underrepresented in higher education have access to realizing their dreams by first completing their college degree on the path to becoming the future leaders of tomorrow.  To achieve this mission, Rundberg sets high expectations for every student and is committed to being a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and anti-racist organization.

Reflective Video Tools Help Educators Improve, Especially New Teachers

“The outcome that we’re seeing is that… now that [teachers] are watching instead of just listening to us, [they] are able to start getting better, faster.”

Reilly Blackwelder, Assistant Principal of Instruction for IDEA Rundberg

Rundberg’s four instructional leaders work with their 50+ teachers.  Each coach manages a caseload of educators grouped by department but which also includes a couple teachers that cross boundary lines.  This is “for our own coaching and development…,” Blackwelder explains, so that coaches “become… better leader[s] by coaching all subjects.”

Talent provides an exceptional framework for collaborating, performing observations, and delivering evidence-based feedback.  The time-synced commenting feature allows mentors and mentees to mark a moment in a recorded video observation with a text or audio comment.  The natural meticulousness of this feature heightens focus by documenting precisely what happened and when, creating freedom for an educator to concentrate on what they can learn from that specific event or scenario.  Teachers have more “AHA!” moments, Blackwelder explained.

Check-in meetings with teachers are typically weekly or bi-weekly, depending on where an educator is at in their professional development.  Blackwelder said that their system focuses on teachers implementing assigned “action steps.”  When the educator successfully achieves an action step, a new one is given.  If a teacher needs more help, coaches will provide more real-time coaching and model-teaching until the educator has achieved the goal.

New teachers have particularly benefited from the use of video.  “I can speak specifically to one of my teachers, who is pretty new and wants to get better.  Having coached her last year without using any video, it took a long time for action steps– for her to become proficient at doing certain things,” Blackwelder shared. “And as soon as we got TORSH… [now her] action steps are being turned around so quickly.”

Rundberg’s teachers at all levels feel a greater sense of ownership over their development with the use of Talent.  Blackwelder has noticed that her teachers have become more thoughtful, reflective, and engaged in the whole process – and it’s showing results.

“The outcome that we’re seeing is that… now that [teachers] are watching instead of just listening to us, [they] are able to start getting better, faster.”  

Video Platform Expands Leadership Capacity During Pandemic Struggles

“Something that’s been really great with TORSH is that I can just go and set up my phone in somebody else’s classroom, leave it there, and let it record.  And then I can watch and observe at a different time and give them feedback.  So they’re still growing and developing, even if I’m not able to physically be in the room.”

Reilly Blackwelder, Assistant Principal of Instruction for IDEA Rundberg

Using TORSH Talent has expanded the leadership capacity of instructional leaders at Rundberg, allowing them to invest in the professional development of their teachers despite pandemic struggles.  

It’s no secret that the pandemic has exacerbated issues that education has been grappling with for years.  Educators and administrators are exhausted, overworked, and overwhelmed.  Pre-existing staff shortages have gotten worse.  Building a growth mindset in a school or district becomes difficult when administrators feel as if they are stuck in survival mode.

Blackwelder confirmed that staff at Rundberg have been facing these same stressors.  “This year has been incredibly challenging, for many reasons.  And one of the things that we’re finding very hard as admin is, every single day, we come in and we think, okay, am I subbing today?  Do we need people?  Because there’s been so many people that are out.”

Talent facilitates classroom observation through video, meaning that instructional leaders do not have to be physically present at the back of a classroom when their presence is required elsewhere.  Instead, educators record and upload videos of classroom teaching to the platform.

“Something that’s been really great with TORSH is that I can just go and set up my phone in somebody else’s classroom, leave it there, and let it record.  And then I can watch and observe at a different time and give them feedback.  So they’re still growing and developing, even if I’m not able to physically be in the room.”

These videos can be watched and re-watched by the teacher and their coach(es), administrator(s), and selected peers.  Self-reflection, collaboration, and feedback can be provided through a suite of tools, including time-synced video commenting, customized rubrics, and resources in an exemplar library.  Coaching and professional development is available at any time and from anywhere with the flexibility of using either the website or the mobile app.

From a leadership perspective, Blackwelder shared that “[TORSH Talent] has been really helpful for me… [Even though] COVID means that our plans are changing, we’re still getting to coach and develop our teachers” through observation and feedback cycles.

Let Us Help You, Too!

Reach out to our team to learn more about how TORSH can support your organization’s efforts in K-12 education!

In the meantime:

Read about how The Center for Transformative Teacher Training (CT3) leveraged TORSH in order to continue their coaching and professional development work amid the pandemic shift to virtual learning.  CT3 has been empowering schools to be bold, act in anti-racist ways, and eliminate some of the policies that led us to the current inequitable state of our educational system.

The post TORSH Talent Accelerates New Teacher Professional Development with IDEA Rundberg K-12 appeared first on Torsh.

To view the letter online including reader comments, click here to visit NOLA.com.

Letter to the Editor, published June 23, 2017

In 2015 I relocated Torsh, my edtech startup, from New York City to New Orleans. I was not only seduced by the cultural milieu that is this 300-year-old city, but I was also drawn by the promise of a thriving tech entrepreneurial ecosystem and one of the most generous tax incentive programs in the country. 

What no one told me, though, was how hard it would be to find highly-skilled and qualified professionals to help my team grow.

As a black entrepreneur with a strong interest in contributing to the revitalization and continued growth of post-Katrina New Orleans, I am deeply committed to hiring locals and people of color. Since people of color make up approximately 65 percent of New Orleans’ population, I assumed that a diverse workforce would be relatively easy to achieve.

Yet, here I sit with multiple open positions at my company and seemingly no one to fill them. Admittedly, we are not a big company — we are a growing team of 12. However, what’s striking is that not a single member of my team was born or raised in New Orleans and only two are from Louisiana. Besides me, only two are black. We’re all essentially outsiders.

We often speak of the “brain drain” that happens in poor countries, where the best and brightest leave to pursue education and careers elsewhere. It feels like we have a similar problem right here in our own backyard.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely.  Are we the problem? Has the tech community done a poor job of making students and young adults aware of the many high-paying jobs that are available right here in New Orleans? How do we find these young adults, many of whom are people of color who are graduating from our high schools and universities, and let them know we have jobs for them and want them to stay here?

New Orleans is a rising city. Over the past few years, we’ve become a technology hub on par with, and in some cases, ahead of Charleston, Raleigh and Austin. But a future as a tech hot spot is not guaranteed. Unless skilled New Orleanians pursue careers here, New Orleans’ days as a thriving tech hub may be numbered.

The future of New Orleans rests in the hands of the people who are from here and have a vested interest in securing its future. If you are out there, and you are reading this, your city needs you. I need you. And my fellow tech entrepreneurs need you. Stay here, or come back here, and put your skills to work for New Orleans.

The post Dear New Orleans Graduates, Tech Companies Want to Hire You appeared first on Torsh.

This organization, which has evolved into a national nonprofit, was formed in 2001 after the first Massachusetts charter school saw poor academic outcomes. The founders of BES, then called the Massachusetts Charter School Resource Center, knew that we could, and MUST, do better. The organization was formed to ensure that new charter schools would be “truly excellent, founded by talented leaders and grounded from the start in proven strategies and design elements.” 

To accomplish this lofty goal, BES takes talented leaders who plan to establish and manage their own urban charter school, and provides them with a rigorous one-year training fellowship. In addition to a stipend and benefits, these highly-motivated and passionate future school leaders receive world-class training in how to design, launch and lead a high-performing school in an urban environment. After the fellowship year, BES offers continued coaching, support and training throughout the school’s start up phase and early operation. 

Our relationship with BES began in the summer of 2014 and to date, we currently work with over a dozen BES schools. The school principals, former BES fellows, use Torsh TALENT as a valuable tool for their teacher professional development.  With TALENT, they can ensure that their teachers are reflecting on their own practice, and are likewise receiving regular feedback from colleagues and school administrators. TALENT is also used by these principals as a means to receive ongoing coaching from BES, as they work through the many leadership challenges inherent in the management of their schools. 

Most recently, BES  has provided Torsh with an interesting challenge: all of their schools operate independently, but want to share resources. For example, they’d like to have a shared exemplar library, where all BES teachers can log in and see videos posted and shared by BES teachers at different schools. 

Never ones to shy away from a challenge (or a client request), our developers are currently building a network to connect all the schools, while still allowing them to maintain their own separate accounts. We hope to complete this framework by the end of the upcoming school year. 

By 2017, there will be 127 BES schools nationwide, located in 30 cities. All are tasked with closing the achievement gap, and outperforming their district counterparts. These schools will serve 35,000 students, 87% of whom qualify for free lunch. It’s not lost on us that the mission of BES, which is to help level the playing field for low income kids in cities across the country, is closely aligned with our primary mission here at Torsh. As BES continues to grow and thrive, we hope to partner with more of their amazing charter schools, which provide a true example of excellence in education. 

The post Client Spotlight: Building Excellent Schools appeared first on Torsh.