Published in ConnectED Newsletter - Volume 5 - Issue 2 - June 2022
Professor Beverly Falk (B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.S.Ed., The City College; Ed.D., Teachers College) is a faculty member in the graduate program in early childhood education. An alumna of the School of Education, she has been teaching at The City College for over 20 years.
Professor Falk is currently the principal investigator for two grants from the Foundation for Child Development. These grants focus on documenting high-quality early learning practices in urban classrooms that serve children and families from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The High Quality Early Learning Project was launched in 2017 and offers a collection of different video sets that give images of what high-quality early learning looks like in the childhood years from birth through second grade. Each set contains a 12 to 17-minute video that features a particular age group and a particular teacher, and often a particular topic that the teacher is working on. Then there are shorter video clips that go along with that set that go deeper into some of the issues that are presented in the larger video. Along with that, there are focusing or guiding questions that Professor Falk developed for people who are using the videos for professional development or in an educator preparation class. Additionally, there is a collection of related resources that people can reference to learn more about a topic.
The videos and materials available on the The High Quality Early Learning Project website have been used by several hundred thousand users in over 100 countries. When asked about what motivated her to create this website and video repository, Professor Falk spoke about her own experience as a teacher educator. She said, “in my work, when I wanted to show, talk about, and present examples of what high-quality early learning was about and what good pedagogy looked like, I searched for videos to show my students.” The website makes it easy for other educators to access video examples of good teaching they can share with their students. However, the impact of this project goes beyond teacher preparation; as Professor Falk noted, her goal was to find the strengths in good practices, draw the implications, and then use that to influence policymaking. That is the vision that drives all of Professor Falk’s scholarship.
Videographer Meryl Feigenberg and Research Fellow Jeanette Sánchez have collaborated with Professor Falk in this project.
Last Updated: 06/01/2022 15:26