Achieving Equity Through Common Core and Technology

Description:  Do you and your department colleagues need help standardizing your teaching practices? Are you trying to align more with the Common Core writing standards, but you aren't sure how to do so?
Are you in the process of developing a department-wide or school-wide assessment at your school site? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. 

This year, the English Department administered and scored our first-ever common writing assessment at JLS Middle School. In order to prepare our students and ourselves for the Common Core, we purposely modeled our prompts and rubric after the Smarter Balanced performance tasks. We will share our process and findings with you, so that you can implement a similar school-wide or department-wide assessment at your own school site.

Take-Aways:  Teachers will be able to view our JLS writing prompts, but they will NOT be able to remove them from the room.  They will take away the knowledge of how to lead a calibration session for their own departments, and they will have an understanding of the steps we took to develop this assessment. They will also have human resources (us!) to contact if they need help. 

Please Bring:  A laptop and an idea for what kind of department-wide or school-wide assessment you may want to create in the future. 

Description:  This session will show teachers the power of collaboration through a multidisciplinary approach. The session will be to share a sixth grade statistics lesson where students had to collect and analyze numerical data. Students graphed their results which yielded predictable and unpredictable data. To understand the meaning behind the numerical data, the English teacher had students collect additional written data through a survey in a focus group. Students graphed their results of their survey and wrote a new analysis explaining why the original data was difficult to predict. The session will have teachers go through the lesson and share strategies about creating a multidisciplinary lesson using Common Core State Standards.

Take-Aways:  Participants will get a copy of the math lesson and handouts.

Please Bring:  Laptop

Description:  Edmodo, Schoology, Flipped Classroom, Wikis and Apps – we are witnessing a revolution in the realm of availability and potential of technology use in our classroom discourse and within the adult learning paradigm. Common Core, more than ever before in education, necessitates the creation of a collaborative learning environment with its focus on college and career readiness. How do we prepare ourselves for facilitating such learning? How do we find ways to bring about effective 21st century change within a 20th century mindset and how does technology fit into the equation? How do we collaborate with each other in real-time when we don’t want to be pulled away from the classroom to learn tools that we can use in the classroom?

Take-Aways:  This interactive workshop will explore these issues in depth within a ‘what works’ framework of promising practices to address these challenges. Participants will be introduced to and experiment with a variety of tools meant to make collaborating easier and accessible at all times. We will also engage in a conversation rich with strategies to lead/ implement/experiment with at your school site and across school sites.

Please Bring:  Please bring your laptops and readiness to explore the world of Web 2.0 with your peers.