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Our Mission

WIDE World (Wide-scale Interactive Development for Educators) is an innovative professional development program based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. At WIDE World, we've successfully combined 30 years of research and practice to address the top educational challenge of the 21st century - helping schools implement sustained, systemic improvement in teaching practice and student performance.

WIDE World collaborates with school systems to support and engage teachers as instructional leaders and mentors within their school or district through highly customized, interactive, online and in-person professional development experiences that both teach and model best practices.

Our Goals

First, WIDE believes that educators need to develop understanding of four main concepts: reflection, experimentation, design, and learning communities. Reflection, because that's how we keep our journeys aligned with our intentions. Experimentation, because that's how we advance our understanding of how things work. Design, because better designs lead to better practices and clearer thinking. And Learning Communities, because it's too important and too hard to do the work of teaching on our own.

Second, WIDE sees educators as needing to be life-long learners who make strategic decisions that drive their own professional growth. We believe that educators need regular opportunities to learn incrementally over the entire span of their professional lives, both on their own and in collaboration with others. With support, educators maintain their focus and deepen their understanding of how to help students learn. Through regular and rigorous reflection, experimentation, and design in learning communities, individual educators maintain focus and purpose which are easily lost in the dizzying array of responsibilities teachers have to take on in schools. WIDE intends to offer teachers that support.

WIDE also believes that reflective educators need to understand how to use a variety of on- and off-line forums for communicating educational ideas. And it's not just learning skills for using them, but, rather, it's developing understanding of what the tools are designed to do and how to take advantage of that. In each course, we use online tools to make teachers' thinking visible to themselves, their online colleagues, and their coaches and instructors.

How it all works

WIDE courses model ways that professional educators can find and use resources (texts, videos, photographs, student work, outsiders), reflect regularly in various ways (written, conversational, on- and off-line), experiment with their educational practice (in thought and action, including systematic recording and interpreting of efforts and results), and participate regularly in communities of learning (on- and off-line discussions of ideas, problems, experiments, resources). All of those methods are toward the goal of advancing individual and community understanding.