What is a Take Two Residency?
A Take Two Residency can be delivered both remotely and in-person, during the school day and after school, and either enrichment or academically focused. All residencies start with 2 days of media literacy training customized to complement K-12 units of study by grade and learning objectives. Students learn how to analyze what they watch in order to become smarter digital citizens.
Then we launch into production. For 10 days, our teaching artists take over the classroom by guiding students through a project based learning (PBL) workshop using google classroom and cloud based editing software to write, shoot, and edit their own films that connect to learning objectives and assessments. Our residencies culminate in a community wide film festival that empowers students to present their work, foster a healthy dialogue fueled by their newly gained media literacy skills, and showcase their learning.
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Teachers are on hand to help fact checking against their lessons, but other than that, we do all the work!
Snapshot of a Residency: West End Secondary School
How do you bring the challenge of pollution to life for a classroom of 6th graders?
Take Two worked with 140 students to create 30 short films around "What Goes Down the Drain." The films had a distinct call to action: to clean up the Hudson River.The documentaries were customized to augment the work they were doing across their Social Studies, ELA, Math and Science classrooms.
These 6th graders came up with a campaign on change.org, enlisted their community to become educated around this issue, and inspired one another to become environmental advocates in their own backyard.
Creating Tomorrow's Leaders​
Students develop “soft skills'' like research and source analysis, along with “technical skills” like video and audio editing, not only preparing them for success later in their academic journeys, but also setting them up to thrive in their future careers.
Students proceed into their educational and professional careers with a new type of literacy making them confident in their ability to research, determine fact from fiction, and to responsibly and effectively share informative media.
“Take Two has been an instrumental partner in our historically struggling school’s re-branding and rebirth. The Take Two team invigorated dormant ELA and Social Studies curricula by immersing students in dynamic residencies that challenge every student across the ability spectrum to apply critical reading, writing, and speaking skills in the formation of film. Media literacy has become an indispensable component of our instructional core. We recorded the second highest gains, as far as growth, throughout the district in both ELA and Math.”
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- David J. Vazquez, Principal of Bronx Academy for Multi-Media