Instructional Strategies

This course was developed for teachers who see test scores whip in like a tornado—leaving them feeling as if they’ve been suddenly transported to a brand new world; this world is definitely not a place they want to call home.

This presentation takes a humorous, yet thoughtful look at the next steps districts must take to build a thinking models for students.

Participants examine systemic changes that successful schools are making to encourage change in student achievement and higher test scores.

Special focus is placed on the research of Marzano, Pickering, and Pollack, and the work of Bloom and Associates.

What’s the latest trend in education? The newest fad?

This seminar for teachers and instructional leaders looks at trends in education as the field moves from an art to a science. Participants will learn that best practices represent a blend of the art of teaching and the science of learning.

Gain high-yield strategies that guide curriculum alignment, instructional alignment, and classroom practices.

Demonstrate various ways teachers and administrators have made the best use of the meta-analysis work on instructional strategies by educational researchers and specialists: Marzano, Pickering, and Pollack.

Learn powerful research demonstrating how effective flexible, purposeful grouping can be. Participants are flexibly grouped over five different ways throughout the workshop.

Be prepared to have fun, move often with a purpose, and have the tools to implement this highly differentiated process in a classroom the next day.

Ultimately gain a deeper understanding about how daily data collected through the formative assessment process can guide instructional decisions all day long.

Providing students with effective, engaging, and varied teaching materials and approaches is key in making sure each student is actively engaged, regardless of their individual learning styles.

Join this workshop to:

• Learn how to maximize engagement by incorporating research-based best practices into a framework for high levels of learning for all students
• Explore techniques to reconfigure the classroom for academically diverse students
• Receive materials to help maximize student achievement
• Discover strategies that maximize classroom engagement
• Incorporate research-based strategies for processing, constructing, and developing differentiated eaching materials
• Receive robust, technologically-rich materials for immediate classroom application

The session places teachers in the students’ shoes so they can experience how important differentiation is for success.

Teachers will also explore and learn the most important ways to differentiate content, process, and product based on students’ readiness, learning profiles, and learning preferences.

Upon completion, teachers will be able to implement simple steps for building a highly differentiated classroom so every person can be successful.

This course is recommended for schools looking for teacher-wide acceptance of the differentiation model.

Putting teachers into teams isn’t enough.

Thanks to technology, innovations in brain research, and the study of human performances, it’s possible to employ strategies that help every school work more effectively.

This session focuses on using tactical, research-based strategies to unleash the untapped individual and team brain power available in every school. Attendees will get connected, creative, and innovate.

This highly interactive session equips participants with tools that can be implemented immediately.

Digital and social media are the tools of time and the language of age. However, with every step forward, there are accompanying problems and challenges.

Some of these problems and challenges are anticipated and others a complete surprise.

This session identifies and examines the major challenges faced by children living in a digital world, plus those faced by educators teaching them.

Though none of these challenges have simple answers, an informed, proactive approach can improve behavior and reduce dangerous situations for students and schools.

The goal of this workshop is to empower traditional classroom teachers with the tools and techniques needed to effectively blend active learning online with dynamic learning in the classroom.

In this three-session workshop, attendees will gain the skills needed to cultivate a community of inquiry online to complement and enhance the work done in the physical classroom.

Explore: the power of discussion as a learning tool, techniques for using mobile devices to encourage problem solving, research, and collaboration, the flipped classroom as a vehicle to create time and space in the classroom, and strategies for weaving instructional mediums together.

This session offers:

• Support materials and concrete strategies for creating a community of inquiry online.
• Discussion on how to establish and maintain a virtual safe space, build an online community, support students in saying something substantial, and choose a realistic facilitation role for work done online.
• Tips for designing discussion questions, assignments, and online tasks that produce dynamic conversations, engage higher-order thinking skills, and empower students to drive their own learning.
• Opportunities to explore the flipped classroom model (with emphasis on engagement around content) and brainstorming on how teachers can create student-centered learning opportunities to build on work online.
• Time to explore project-based learning in a blended model.
• Hands-on practice with QR codes and mobile devices, Google docs, Collaborize Classroom, Linoit, and Socrative.
• iNACOL’s Blended Learning Teacher Competency Framework. https://www.inacol.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/iNACOL-Blended-Learning-Teacher-Competency-Framework.pdf
• Creating content for blended learning.
• Pedagogy and best practices for blended learning.

Argument writing requires advanced reading, analyzing, synthesizing, and organizing skills as well as other traditional writing skills.

In this session, participants receive and practice using scaffolding templates and other resources to help secondary students write arguments on a variety of topics.