As an IWitness regional consultant, Brandon Barr sees firsthand the impact testimony can have on both students and teachers.

Barr teaches eighth grade reading and writing at Nightingale Elementary in Chicago, where he uses IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation’s educational website, to teach about the Holocaust. As an IWitness regional consultant, he is responsible for leading IWitness teacher training programs and introducing IWitness to schools in his area.

Barr and fellow consultants Michelle Clark and Liz Bommarito attended a seminar at the USC Shoah Foundation offices in Los Angeles last week, which Barr said gave him new ideas for his presentations and outreach.

Since he was first introduced to IWitness through the Holocaust educational resources of Facing History and Ourselves, Barr said he looks forward to using with his students every year.

He said he believes that one of the most effective forms of teacher professional development comes from teachers training other teachers, and that IWitness works well within the changing landscape of education and pedagogy that teachers must navigate.

“The regional consultants that work for IWitness are practicing teachers that understand the difficulties and challenges that teachers face each day,” Barr said. “We work to help the colleagues we train to be better equipped to deal with some of the difficulties they face by sharing the benefits of IWitness as a teaching tool.”

When he uses IWitness to teach his students about the Holocaust, it is often the first time they learn about the Holocaust, and many say the unit is so moving that it permanently changes how they view people and treat others.

“When I interact with teachers, I get the same response,” Barr said. “I love starting out sessions with an activity that gets people discussing testimony. It is interesting to hear adult responses to testimony. The sharing of thoughts and feelings creates a different sort of atmosphere than many of the professional development sessions that most teachers normally attend. It is open and free to share ideas. They are equally moved.”

Outreach can be difficult because teachers are busy and are often hesitant to incorporate too many new activities or methods all at once, Barr said, but in his presentations and trainings he attempts to show teachers that IWitness is not “just another website about the Holocaust”; it can be used in many different ways across many different teaching situations.

“The website is filled with so many wonderful activities, a searchable collection of testimonies, links to other resources, and operates as safe platform for children to interact with one another. It is an efficient tool that can make a teacher’s life easier,” Barr said. “It is rewarding when other teachers see the value of the site and find it useful.”