Workshops

Differentiation is not just today’s buzz word; differentiation is a tangible teaching style that brings engaged learning and achievement to everyone in your classroom. Creating a rhythm between whole-class instruction and small group exploration, students share learning opportunities shaped to meet their instructional needs. This workshop will provide practice and extend ideas for differentiating through content, process and product. Dea’s interactive approach will allow teachers practical engagement with activities such as Open and Closed Word sorts, Admit & Exit Slips, Productive Thinking, and Generative Mental Models. A variety of differentiated assessments will be explored and all of the day’s activities will be used in an application of highly personalized differentiated assessment. Even if your school has sponsored a differentiated workshop before, this one is sure to offer new and fun, but challenging and educational teaching tools.

Illinois PSAE: The Key to Higher Scores is Reading Skill
The ACT and the accompanying WorkKeys® assess students’ abilities to use reading as a tool for thinking and learning. The reading test explicitly assesses reading skills through four passages—a passage from social science, science, humanities and literature—and the science test, too is essentially a reading test, a critical literacy test. Really, you ask? ACT’s 2009/2010 Preparing for the ACT booklet states that “[a]dvanced knowledge in [scientific] subjects is not required” (p. 9), the science questions “require you to recognize and understand the basic features…and concepts related to, the provided information; to examine critically the relationship between the information provided and the conclusions drawn or hypotheses developed; and to generalize from given information to gain new information, draw conclusions, or make predictions” (p.9). This workshop will provide strategic methods to teach reading as a tool for thinking and learning in all reading areas tested by ACT focusing primarily on nonfiction reading skills necessary to science and social science.

Best Practices in Content Reading-
We know how most middle and high school kids read—when they read: from the first letter of the first word in the first sentence to the last letter of the last word of the last sentence. Book closed. But can they tell you what they read? Can they connect the new information to information they already possess? One reason our students are not good readers is simply because they don’t know what good readers do to better understand content materials. Oftentimes, they are not motivated enough to persevere through challenging content. This interactive workshop will model best practices in how to teach students reading skills and offer some cutting edge ideas on how to increase student motivation while raising the bar on expectations and student outcomes. Bring your content textbook and a laptop. The goal is to turn Friday’s information into Monday’s lesson plan. Laptops will be available to borrow, but some of the ideas we share you may want to download for immediate use!

Twelve Effective Activities for Building Vocabulary-
Grades 3-6
Vocabulary skills are the most significant indicator of academic achievement (Nagy, 1998). Why? Because word knowledge is essential to comprehension and comprehension is essential to success in life and academics. Every encounter we make, written or oral, is an encounter of language…vocabulary. This cross-content workshop will be two-pronged. First the presenter will share instructional strategies guaranteed to increase student word banks in all content areas; second, time and materials will be provided for you to customize two strategies for immediate use in your classroom: one a game format and the other, a digital teaching tool. Join us for a day that will provide great ideas and the real stuff of teaching. Bring lists of both past and upcoming vocabulary words and a laptop if you have one available. Resource materials will be provided and additional laptops will be available.

Twelve Effective Activities for Building Vocabulary-
Grades 6-12
Think about this…the average kindergarten student arrives at school with an oral vocabulary of 10,000 words, yet needs to master a 50,000 to 60,000 word reading vocabulary by high school graduation (Graves, 2006). How can we get them there? Research clearly shows that dictionary work is the least effective method of building long-term vocabulary. This cross content workshop will allow you to explore new ways to teach vocabulary and experience engaging vocabulary building activities. Materials will be provided for use in customizing two strategies for your classroom use. Bring your own class word lists and a laptop to turn the Friday’s instruction into Monday’s vocabulary lessons. Resource materials will be provided and loaner laptops will be available.

Writing can be intimidating, to teachers and to students! This workshop will introduce and model approaches to writing instruction that will positively affect attitudes towards and outcomes of the writing process. Invention (prewriting), reading like a writer, crafting a draft, and polishing to high gloss will be among the day’s topics. Additionally, the workshop will address writing on demand, an important assessment tool in all content area course and state tests, ISAT and PSAE.