Project Goal: Front of the Class is an idea/strategy exchange program through which teachers from Delaware help other teachers succeed. When visiting schools across the state, Delaware Lt. Governor Matt Denn found that general education teachers consistently requested techniques for working with children with special needs in their mainstream classrooms. Simultaneously, he discovered that there were amazing special education teachers, in both the public and private settings, who had developed wonderful techniques for their students with learning differences. Based on this, Matt Denn commissioned a video series entitled Front of the Class.
Organization: The Office of the Lt. Governor of Delaware Matt Denn
CANCAN’s Participation:
- Collaborated with Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, the Delaware Autism Program, the Red Clay Consolidated School District, the Christina School District, The Pilot School and Centreville Layton School.
- Interfaced with administration and teachers to plan topics to be covered.
- In 12 shoot days, we filmed 20 interviews of teachers and educational experts including those with a specialty in autism spectrum disorder.
- We also filmed live instruction in 16 different classrooms.
- For one of the segments on Video Modeling, it was deemed necessary to create a sub-series of five staged interactions. Under the guidance of a speech pathologist, we wrote scripts, cast actors, and filmed in a high school.
- In addition to the videos, CANCAN created the Front of the Class website to contain all of the videos for viewing and distribution, www.frontoftheclassDE.com.
Other Notes:
- In total, we created 23 videos, including 17 educational lessons in topics ranging from “What is Autism?” to “Making Word Connections and Using Mnemonics to Enhance Retention and Retrieval.”
- The running times range from 8 to 25 minutes.
- To see all of the videos, visit www.frontoftheclassDE.com.