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WIDE World (Wide-scale Interactive Development for Educators) was developed in 1999 as a joint project of Project Zero and the Education Technology Center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, connecting educational research on teaching and learning to the improvement of practice.

The Early Years

Co-principal investigators David Perkins and Stone Wiske had long been involved in such endeavors and had, since the mid-90s, explored the use of the Internet to fortify them. Dr. Perkins and Dr. Wiske directed work creating online learning environments to help educators apply research-based pedagogies, sharing some infrastructure and staff for both.

During this period Dr. Perkins and Dr. Wiske developed websites to support a range of pedagogies developed at Project Zero (PZ) and work conducted at the Graduate School of Education's Educational Technology Center (ETC). These websites examined Teaching for Understanding, the use of multiple intelligences, and thinking dispositions, and using the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework to support the use of new technologies to improve teaching and learning.

WIDE World's Genesis

WIDE World grew from those early websites and began to offer semester-long professional development courses to a larger audience. A pilot course was developed in 1999 to test the idea and was so successful that the project was expanded. Since that initial pilot course, we have grown our offerings to include courses focused on Teaching for Understanding, Technology Integration, Differentiated Instruction, Multiple Intelligences, Reading, Writing, and Math, and Leading for Understanding.

In each course participants learn about research-based pedagogies, discover how to apply these principles to designing and enacting new approaches with their own students, receive frequent support and feedback from a coach, and engage in regular reflective exchanges with fellow participants in the course focusing on the development of new practices in the classroom.

Our New Direction

In 2006, WIDE World embarked on a new phase in our growth, looking to introduce Teaching for Understanding into the educational journey of a school and/or district. It begins when large groups of teachers are introduced to the Teaching for Understanding Framework through our online courses, in tandem with their administrators.

As teachers and administrators learn about and apply the framework in their teaching and leading, we start to introduce the first wave of educators to our coach development pathway. In coach development, teachers can train to become online coaches to their peers, instructing the next wave of a school/district's enrollees. By fostering a shared language of understanding and an opportunity to build local networks of involved educators, we are creating a quiet revolution in education.

To date, we have worked with approximately 6000 educators throughout the world to improve teaching practice and student performance. Through the power of online communication and learning, we intend to spread the goal of Teaching for Understanding to many more.