Teaching Systems Lab Announces 2017 TLIG Recipients

The Teaching and Learning Innovation Grants program, funded by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and administered by the MIT Teaching Systems Lab (TSL), supports projects with the potential to make a significant impact on teacher education and support innovative ideas from the MIT community related to the future of education. “TLIG is a direct collaboration channel to engage the broader MIT community and bring MIT’s innovative models of STEM teaching and learning to the design of the WW Academy. We are very excited about the powerful collaboration that we will have with these groups, with regard to both research and immediate application to the Academy,” says YJ Kim, a lead research scientist with the MIT TSL and WWA partnership.

This year’s recipients tackle a range of innovations in education from using the Unhangout Platform to support teachers’ professional development to using artificial intelligence to make students’ mathematical problem solving visible to the teachers. The proposals funded this year include: Participant-driven online workshops for STEM educators: Developing strategies and formats to empower teachers and promote teacher retention (Philipp Schmidt, Media Lab), Making Students’ Mathematical Thinking Visible Using Machine Analysis of Visual Representations (Kimberle Koile, CSAIL), and Learning Supported by Making (Kim Vandiver, Edgerton Center).

Participant-driven online workshops for STEM educators: Developing strategies and formats to empower teachers and promote teacher retention. The project, led by Philipp Schmidt, Director of Learning Innovation at the Media Lab, will develop and test a new type of online workshop for pre-service and early-career STEM teachers. The workshops use Unhangout, an open source video-conferencing platform developed at the Media Lab, and are designed to foster a sense of community and connection among teachers. Philipp Schmidt said, “This project aims to use technology to give teachers more agency in their own professional learning, and provide more opportunities for peer-to-peer learning and support in online spaces.”