I'd like to know your reflection of what you did today during your PD session. Please pair up with someone in your department and post a brief but descriptive reflection of what you learned and what you can take away and use immediately in your classrooms (if anything).
Rogers, Cuthbertson, Buchheit
ReplyDeleteWe were given a lot of useful resources that we will be to pull from to get our students' minds rolling when it comes to writing in the classroom. We also know that we have to think about writing differently in our classrooms, in that writing does not have to be an essay, it can be anything that gets the students communicating their thoughts and understanding.
We acknowledge that this can be a lot of prep work, but we are ready to take one step at a time, and start small and work up from there.
Ms. Richey did show us several sites that could possibly be useful for encouraging our students to write in math class. We believe the most useful of these sites was one created by teachers in the state of Utah and shows how they aligned their curriculum with the Common Core Standards.
ReplyDeleteWe were given a demonstration of the 7 steps to pre-teaching vocabulary by our very own Ms. Youngberg. Melanie also helped us tier words that we felt were important for our students to understand in order to grasp the content of the lesson.
ReplyDeleteCasto and Swain
English Department Presenters
ReplyDeleteThe English department gave an overview of literacy strategies that Social Studies can use in their classrooms. Ms. Staten introduced with literacy strategies overview and the role of ERG last year and what their role will be this year. We liked the 3-2-1 triangle graphic organizer for summarizing that Ms. Lamb presented and feel this would be a valuable formative assessment in the class. Allison presented questioning and provided a detailed example of how to ask questions explicitly while reading informational text. Ms. Hopkins gave examples for making inferences by using political cartoons with historical figures and allowed the Social Studies department to interact. Ms. Willet covered making connections and gave graphic organizers to the department. Ms. Miles presented determining importance and allowed the whole group to participate in a live debate. Dr. Bowlin summed up the presentation by emphasizing the importance of text level and background information.
The 7 steps for pre-teaching vocabulary will be really useful and easy to incorporate into my lessons. Our students aren't reading enough on their own and arrive in our classrooms needing help with their vocabulary...not just content but overall. I hope these new strategies will help the students enjoy the content more.
ReplyDeleteTeam Poly See Muss had a very informative ExC-ELL session. We reviewed polysemous words, Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 designations and shared how we were starting to adjust our thinking in our lessons to incorporate our new knowledge.
ReplyDeleteAllison came in and demonstrated a 7 step lesson for vocabulary. After the first meeting we thought that the 7 steps while they might be effective seemed a little childish. However with the demonstration of how to use the technique properly we quickly realized that this was a valuable tool to use for vocabulary retention. The instructors emphasized how each person can modify the 7 steps to their own style of teaching while keeping the 7 steps method intact.
We then practiced Tiering our vocabulary words for a future lesson. This allowed us to immediately have a readily identifiable 7 step vocabulary for a soon to be given lesson. We can immediately use the identification of our tier vocabulary words in all lessons to help us identify what words may be standing in the way of student learning. Just the identification of these can improve how we approach the organization of lessons and how we teach them.
Wheatley
Defender of Mispronouncers of Wordage Users Everywhere
The Social Studies Department attended a PD meeting with the English Department hosting. Each of the English teachers took turns explaining a particular literacy strategy, any of which we can use immediately.
ReplyDeleteSome of the literacy strategies included: the 3-2-1 triangle graphic organizer, how to ask questions explicitly, making inferences using political cartoons, and the importance of text level.
Ms. Allen and I also participated in a debate on the draft, which was informative and appropriate. We enjoyed this session of professional development and are excited at the prospects of being able to use several of these literacy strategies in the future.
The session began with discussion regarding how teaching practices have changed since we were initially introduced to this program. We agreed that we are collectively more conscientious about the choice of words we use and are more likely to discuss words the students may be less familiar with. Ms. Youngberg gave a demonstration of the the seven step process to be used while integrating the program into the classroom and we finished the session by "tiering" words in our personal lesson plans.
ReplyDeleteSedlock & Burris