SCHOOL NEWS the teaching channel film shoot at fairmont

On July 13, 2011, Wingspan Pictures, the production company working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create programming for The Teaching Channel, visited Fairmont to film two teachers.  The footage from Fairmont is slated to appear on The Teaching Channel website, You Tube and Facebook pages, and could be included in a television episode on the PBS program “Great Lesson Ideas” this fall.

Wingspan began by filming two Kindergarten lessons at the Fairmont Anaheim Hills Campus taught by Heather Lopez. The first lesson incorporated an interactive white board to teach students about ordinal numbers in an engaging, dynamic way. The second lesson focused on identifying and understanding consonant-vowel-consonant words through sounding out and then acting out the words as a group. Mrs. Lopez led the students in jogging in place and mopping the floor while the camera crews captured the learning process in action.

Transitioning from Kindergarten to high school, the production company then traveled to Fairmont Preparatory Academy to film math teacher Mark Hassoun teach “The Fundamentals of Triangles and Quadrilaterals” to his summer school geometry class, which is taught in a hybrid online/in-class format. Wingspan cameras captured close-ups of the students using cut-out triangles to represent the angles of a quadrilateral and then followed as Hassoun’s impeccable handwriting filled the white board to visually explain the lesson.

“Being neat and organized in your lecture and using colors to make the white board notes visually appealing are two ways to ensure the success of this lesson, and any geometry lesson,” Hassoun explained to the Wingspan Director during his follow-up interview. He and Lopez had the opportunity to share their teaching tips and tricks along with the story behind their passion for teaching in their individual interviews filmed after the lessons.    

Fairmont Private Schools and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation share a dedication to supporting innovations in learning. Through this participation with The Teaching Channel, Fairmont hopes to demonstrate that belief in innovation by showcasing integrated technology in the classroom, and to support the channel’s founding principle that “inspired teaching, like any great art, should be seen.” 

Contributed by Alyssa, Fairmont Private Schools