instructional coordinator’s and coaches meeting re-framing “how we think” may 10, 2013
TRANSCRIPT
Instructional Coordinator’s and Coaches Meeting
Re-Framing “How We Think”May 10, 2013
• ELA PD Focus Areas for 2013/14 – 35 minutes
• Procedural Updates for Atlas – 10 minutes
• ELA Events/Winners/Dates – 5 minutes
Presentation Structure
Activity 1 – Defining Moment
10 minutes• Think about an event, time, place or
experience that defines who you are?• Front of card – write down the date and
time • Back of card - listen to your partner and
write down important details about their defining moment
Concept Curriculum Requirements
1. Scope and sequence/standards alignment*
2. Designed units (Focus Area 1)3. Lesson strategies (Focus Area 2)4. Assessments – (Focus Area 3)5. Reflection on best practice6. Communities in collaboration7. 21st Century skills integration
Focus Area 1 - Unit Design
Essential questions that focus instructionI can statements in student friendly languageAligned to CCSS standardsTargeted strategies meet standards Assessments to measure learningTexts that support your instruction
Design Tip1. What are you doing? 2. Why are you being asked to do this? 3. What will it help you do? 4. How does it fit with what you have
previously done? 5. How will you show you have learned
it?
Atlas
Questions Matter
“And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 in Letters to a Young Poet
Essential Question
• Assume you want to move beyond knowledge to understanding• Knowledge = Facts• Understanding = Meaning of Facts
• Signpost to big ideas – significant concepts, themes, theories, issues, and problems
• Get at the heart of things – the essence• Enduring Understanding
Sample Essential Questions How are stories from different places and times about me?Different stories represents
different aspects of me.When error is unavoidable in measurement, what margins of error are tolerable?
What’s the big idea?Behind a good essential questions is a big idea:
How form and function are related in systems
The challenge of defining justice
Big Ideas DefinedBroad and abstractRepresented in one or two wordsUniversal in applicationTimelessDifferent examples share different
attributes
Provide a focusing conceptual lens for any study
Activity 2 - Finding Big Ideas
10 minutes• List • Brainsto
rm• Confirm• Connect
2 Big Ideas…
“The meaning of a text is not in the text but between the lines, in the interaction between the active reader and the text.”• How does our thinking change
depending on our perspective?“The importance of arriving at conceptions (cannot be overestimated) that is, the meanings that are general but applicable in a great variety of different instances in spite of their difference.”
Implications…Identifying significant concepts/big ideas
leads to deep and meaningful learningBig ideas will help teachers prioritize
learningEssential questions become the doorway
to learningScaffolding changes to instruction will
lead to more differentiation Units will have more design/composition
A Painting…
RL.9-10.7. Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g., Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus)
And some text…Poem 1 Poem 2According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
“I must define the unit, the lesson in a way more engaging than engorging, countering my tendency to inundate students with data, and allowing them instead to encounter the subject, each other, and themselves… I must create exercises that invite students to probe the unknown, as well as exercises that reveal what they have learned.” ~ Parker Palmer
Atlas ELA Template Changes
Process Changes…Atlas Updates• Color codes• One essential
question• I Cans to
match standards taught (Teachers must select)
• Activities and targeted strategies in body of unit plan
• Current research and attachments
• http://conceptschools.rubiconatlas.org/Atlas/Authentication/View/Login
ELA Professional Development 2013/20014
Professional Development
Areas of Concentration• Atlas – procedural updates and requirements August Orientation• Curriculum -Unit design/lesson composition August Orientation• Instruction Strategies – Reading for InformationRegional PD• Assessments – categories/creation Regional PD• Writing Workshops – all grade levels Regional PD
Curriculum Teams - Development and Design
• 3 Day teacher planning session Summer 2013• Webinar/progress Checks October 2013• Two day teacher update meeting December/January 2014• Webinar follow up April 2014• Spring Summit – writing event May 2014
Spelling Bee – December 7, 2013Writing Contest Deadline – February 2,
2014Speech and Spoken Word Competition –
April 12, 2014
ELA Event Dates 2013/2014
Overall Success Reflection is essential for continued improvement. As
a result there will be changes to next years programs:DatesTimesVenues
As well as attention to:AdherenceFairnessConsistencyApplication
http://english.conceptschools.org/
• Book explanations/lists provided in April• Atlas explanations provided in April• Non-negotiables:
• Atlas for planning of lessons/units• Core units are used for scope and
sequence/modified from the master• 2 new instructional strategies added from our
targeted Reading for Information list• Assessments are diversified
OTHER
Morning Glory The faces of the teachers know we have failed and failed yet they focus beyond, on the windowsill the names of distant galaxies and trees. We have come in dragging. If someone would give us a needle and thread, or send us on a mission to collect something at a store, we could walk for twenty years sorting it out. How do we open, when we are so full?… But the teachers don’t give up. They rise, dress, appear before us crisp and hopeful. They have a plan. If cranes can fly 1,000 miles or that hummingbird return from Mexico to find, curled on its crooked fence, a new vine, surely. We may dip into the sweet Together, if we hover long enough.
—Naomi Shihab Nye (from Fuel, 1998 Boa Editions, Ltd.)