Content Area Teacher Skill Enhancement Training Series
We provide seminar-style trainings to meet the specific needs of teachers across a variety of grade levels and content specializations. The common threads throughout all our intensive and practical seminars are:
A focus on building urgency for adopting new methods and teacher behaviors
The use of a simple and effective set of instructional principles
Linking new learning to solving current instructional challenges
A representative list of recent seminars and their descriptions are below.
Content Area Teacher Skills
Grouping for Success: Using Content-Based Ability Groups to Focus Instruction and Increase Achievement
Description: Empirical studies show that small-group instructional practices and intervention services have a greater impact on student achievement than whole-group instruction. These specialized periods of the day pack such an incredible punch because students are grouped by common needs and instructional goals. This session shows teachers how to organize, question, re-organize and Push! students during whole-group and direct instructional periods to work at higher levels of complexity during every interaction – doubling and sometimes tripling the effectiveness of the teacher.
Teachers will:
1. Implement three classroom organization structures that group students by their content-area ability to ensure that students are taught according to their individual needs;
2. Implement an effective questioning protocol that meets the needs of each group without separating each group from the day’s learning objectives.
Beyond the Wall: The Power of Learning Objectives
Description: Though teachers have heard about objectives for years and written them in various forms, a closer look shows that subsequent instruction links only loosely to those objectives. This session gives teachers three specific ways to structure any lesson around a clear learning objective, shows them how to align their questioning to the objective, and provides specific methods for monitoring students in real-time.
Teachers will:
1. Plan and implement lessons that focus teacher questioning and student language production on the skill targeted by the clear learning objective;
2. Ask or elicit questions that engage students to produce answers that link directly to the learning objective, or on an antecedent or subsequent skill related to the objective.
Communication is King: The Complete Sentence
Description: We live in a Twitter world where students are often reinforced for truncated and incomplete thoughts that can easily be misinterpreted by others. Paradoxically, state and national testing requirements require students to academically articulate their thinking with greater levels of complexity than ever before. This session shows teachers why the complete sentence is the basic unit of human communication and how to elicit complete sentences at all times from learners of all levels…even from the first days of kindergarten.
Teachers will:
1. Monitor and elicit for complete sentences during both written and oral communication across all subject areas throughout the instructional day;
2. Push! students to produce sentences that are parallel in length and complexity to the academic text there are expected to comprehend for their grade level or class placement.
Error Correction: Improving Future Responses by Addressing Errors Now
Description: If we are never asked to identify and correct our mistakes we will be doomed to repeat them. In most cases however, if we knew exactly what mistakes were made, we would likely not have made them in the first place. This session explicitly shows the difference between getting to the correct answer and correcting an error in a way that ensures the error is less likely to re-occur in the future.
Teachers will:
1. Learn to listen in new ways to identify, categorize and prioritize student errors in language and content facts;
2. Implement a three-step error correction system that models desired outcomes and quickly moves students to learn and implement the system autonomously.
The Productive Progression: From Simple Repetition to Creative Inquiry
Description: Moving students from the simple repetition of facts and simple sentences to the formulation of complex inquiries and statements is critical. This session demonstrates how to Push! students through 12 distinct phases of student production in a hierarchical system known as the Productive Progression. Teachers will return to their classrooms excited to get students who have traditionally struggled to respond to complex questions or formulate simple questions of their own to producing academic discourse with greater complexity and sophistication.
Teachers will:
1. Increase total student oral and written production within their lessons;
2. Be able to restructure their questioning practices in ways that place more of the language production responsibility on students.
Push!: It’s Hard to See if Students Are Learning More…But We Can Easily See Them Learning More Often!
Description: Learning is the one goal embedded in almost every interaction teachers have with students. Unfortunately, many teachers struggle to identify conclusively whether or not learning is occurring n their classroom without waiting for a summative test to compare with prior results. This session defines learning as the intersection of three components; success, support and the reach beyond independence. In short, this session shows teachers how to ensure that students are constantly working successfully, with support, and at a level that maximizes their independence.
Teachers will:
1. Ask follow-up questions that spur students to increase the academic complexity of their responses;
2. Push! students to continuously work at a level of productive discomfort that results in new and more complex ways of saying and writing content-based answers.