Teachers College and CTL launch School Tales: Online Research and Repository Initiative

by | Jul 18, 2016 | Announcements, For Faculty, For Graduate Students

Teachers College, Columbia University and the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) are pleased to announce the launch of the School Tales: Online Research and Repository Initiative (STORRI). STORRI is a website designed to attract, share, unpack, engage, and reflect on stories of “wobble” that teachers tell about the complexity of contemporary classrooms.

Bob Fecho, professor of English Education at Teachers College (TC) and a key partner on the STORRI project, defines the term “wobble” as a moment of self-reflection in a teacher’s experience. “A wobble is something that happens in the classroom that compels you to pay attention, to stop and think, to raise a question, to open yourself to other perspectives,” he says.

Through STORRI, teachers and teacher educators will have opportunities to write about moments in their practices when their belief systems wobbled. Any teacher is welcome to submit stories. TC graduate students help select stories and prepare them for publication on the site.

By collecting these stories, Fecho hopes to provide other angles on classrooms, ones that illustrate the range of transactions that occur between teachers and students and the context in which they engage.

“Beyond using these stories in my own classroom, the stories on this site might be used for serving the professional needs of pre-service and in-service teachers, for creating learning communities, for advocacy research, and for informing the general public,” Fecho says.

STORRI was developed as the result of a partnership between Professor Fecho, TC English Education Student Lora Hawkins, TC Director of Instructional Technology Debbie Beaudry, the TC Academic Computing Department, and Paul Joseph Stengel, Learning Designer at the CTL. TC students and faculty members will continue to maintain the website.

Related Links

School Tales: Online Research and Repository Initiative (STORRI)

Teachers College