Echoes and Reflections Pilots New Self-Guided Online Professional Development Course

December 15 will mark the beginning of a pilot for a new professional development offering from Echoes and Reflections: a three-hour, self-guided course that teaches educators everything they need to know about using Echoes and Reflections to teach about the Holocaust.

Echoes and Reflections is a partnership between USC Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and Anti-Defamation League. It includes 10 lessons that include everything educators need to teach the Holocaust, including survivor testimony clips, primary source documents and discussion questions.

The new program “Teaching about the Holocaust with Echoes and Reflections: Self-Guided Class for Middle and High School Educators” will provide middle- and high school educators with an online delivery of a standard face-to-face program through an online, self-guided format. The course is three hours long and can be started and completed at the teacher’s own pace any time until February 15, 2017. This class will be piloted for the next few months so staff can collect feedback and fine-tune it for a full launch at the beginning of the new year. 

Participants will explore classroom-ready multimedia resources and technologies for use in 21st century classrooms and learn effective teaching strategies to support your students’ critical thinking and understanding of the history of the Holocaust and how it relates to difficult issues they face today.

Educators also learn how to tap into USC Shoah Foundation’s repository of visual history testimony offering first-hand accounts from survivors, liberators, and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Upon completion, participants receive a print-version of the Echoes and Reflections Teacher’s Resource Guide and a certificate of completion.

The free online professional development webinars it currently offers are guided by an Echoes and Reflections-trained moderator, and are organized into three modules that must be started and completed on a weekly basis for one month. There are two-part webinars, three hours total, as well as three-part webinars which are six hours total.