Embracing Literacy 2024

Description:
How can to strengthen the consistency and quality of instruction through a coherent and strategic approach to observation and feedback?  By participating in this session, you will have the opportunity to reflect on your current approach to walkthroughs and practices with walkthrough tools supportive of the Common Core literacy shifts:  academic language, complex text and use of textual evidence.  Participants will practice observing and providing teachers with feedback through by oberving actual lessons.

Objectives:

• Determine look-fors for quality lessons aligned to the rigor of the standards
  
• Engage in an instructional observation and practice feedback 
  
• Reflect on your current approach for observation and feedback and teacher development opportunities
  

Credit Reflection Questions:

Review the classroom observation instruments that you currently use at your school.  

• How does the instrument reflect the shifts and expectations in the standards?
  
• How does the instrument focus on what students are doing?  What the teacher is doing?
  
• How specific is the language about the expectations for how time is spent? The types of activities that students and teachers do?
  

Description:

How can to strengthen the consistency and quality of instruction through strategic and intentional cycles of continuous improvement that empowers the use of data as a tool for reflection on professional practice?  How can we strengthen data analysis so that educators are able to draw meaningful conclusions from academic performance data and promotes change in their approach to instruction in service of student needs?  Attendees will identify the key elements of teaching and learning cycles the enables data to be relevant, actionable and impactful.  Participants will examine student work to practice data analysis skills so they will take with them, practical tools and skills to strengthen analysis with their own teacher teams.

Objectives:

• Understand the criterion of a strong Teaching and Learning Cycle 
  
• Notice how strong data/student work analysis practices drive the Teaching and Learning Cycle  
  
• Reflect on the strengths and opportunities of your current teaching and learning cycle
  

Credit Reflection Questions:

• How do you currently approach quantitative and student work analysis?
• How does this process elevate student misconceptions, unfinished teacher and learning?
• How does teacher practice shift as a result of your data analysis process?

Participants will capture an appreciation of clarity around identifying and stating the priorities of the early learning environment. Additionally, they will gain an enhanced understanding of how to use proficiency scale to improving student learning. Presenters will share a two-year story about the success and struggle of developing a professional learning community in a multi-campus center.

Learner Outcomes:
The session will highlight the importance of professional development, growing educators, and coaching the work. Moreover, we will deepen our understanding of why we measure student proficiency, how we can observe and record it efficiently, and what we do with the data once we have it. Administrators and educators experienced and new alike, will benefit from the collaboration around this difficult but incredibly necessary topic. Several templates and protocols will be shared with participants.  

We will focus on what the research tells us about how you interact with children and how those interactions impact a child's learning and development. We will cover in-depth how to intentionally create shared positive experiences with your students. One of the hardest parts of teaching is that the children in each classroom have such varied needs.  We will provide practical strategies for transitions and how to engage in developing the key predictors for literacy outcomes in Kindergarten.

Learning Objectives:
Participants will learn how quality interacations help support and develop the five key predictors of literacy outcomes in Kindergarten. Participants will engage and learn about effective teaching transitions and how brain development and stress impact learning.

Credit Reflection Questions:
1. Describe an activity that can be used for an effective transition. 
2. What is a SEEDS quality that supports quality interactions. 
3. How do brain development and stress impact learning?

In this session, Paul Black (School Psychologist) will discuss the complexities of learning, reading as a trigger to physiological stress and anxiety, and how to identify and manage this stress response so effective learning can take place. Attendees will leave with a greater appreciation for considering the emotional and physiological stressors associated with reading difficulties and simple solutions for managing these stressors.

Come delve into the practice of writing in response to reading, a critical element of a strong writing program. You will explore the Writing in Response to Reading Pathway and gain practical ideas on how to enrich student' engagement with texts, foster critical thinking, and enhance writing proficiency across K-5 standards. By incorporating the Writing in Response to Reading Pathway, teachers will have a clear understanding of where students are in the writing standards progression and what to do to support them in progressing to meeting and/or exceeding grade level standards. This session will address the systematic inclusion of writing in response to reading in daily instruction throughout the day, emphasizing the enhancement of comprehension, writing skills, and critical reflection.

Learner Outcomes

1. Develop strategies for integrating writing in response to reading across the curriculum. 
2. Understand how to scaffold writing activities to honor all developmental phases of writing.
3. Learn to provide meaningful feedback that recognizes student progress in writing skills.
4. Be equipped to set and celebrate achievable writing goals with students, promoting continuous improvement.
5. The effectiveness of this approach will be showcased through case studies demonstrating improved reading comprehension, student engagement, and the overall quality of written responses in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade classrooms as evidenced by improvement on state assessments and meeting grade level reading, writing, and language standards.

This session will provide an opportunity for schools and districts to reflect on their current MTSS structures and practices and to plan ahead for the new academic year. First, the Marzano Research team will share best practices for MTSS-Reading. Then, the team will guide participants through a self-reflection process to determine strengths and areas for improvement. Through this self-reflection, participants will be able to identify components of their MTSS that could be improved.

Many teachers struggle with students who have difficulty comprehending grade-level texts and performing well on assessments. This session will focus on evidence-based practices to support literacy instruction in secondary classrooms, providing solutions for this common challenge.

Many teachers struggle with students who have difficulty comprehending grade-level texts and performing well on assessments. This session will focus on evidence-based practices to support literacy instruction in secondary classrooms, providing solutions for this common challenge.
Objectives”

• Assessments are the key drivers of instruction.
  
• Master evidence-based literacy practices for effective instruction.
  

What three instructional practices will you implement into your literacy instruction and why?

In this presentation, we will articulate a process for writing instruction for a variety of disciplines in middle and high school settings, adapted from the work of leading researchers and writers in writing instruction: Model, Notice, Imitate, Create.  This process allows teachers to focus in on specific traits of quality writing in their discipline and explicitly teach those traits to students. The process also includes opportunities for students to both identity and play with language within the discipline so they can learn to write with the quality traits of that discipline.  In this presentation, we will explain and model the process, exploring how it can be used for any kind of writing that teachers ask their students to do. We will also ask participants to engage in a discussion of the kinds of writing they have students do in their own classrooms so we can discuss potential applications of the process in their specific classrooms.  At the end of this interactive session, participants should have some ways to enact the process in their own classrooms, enhancing what they are already doing in ways that will help their students writing in the disciplines.   

Learner Outcomes
Participants will be able to understand and apply a writing instructional model to their own specific discipline and classroom.  

Initiating and facilitating change can be challenging. Courageous conversations can benefit your staff and ultimately your students. These are not mutually exclusive. In fact, staff and students both need to “win” to create positive learning outcomes. Administrators and instructional coaches attending this session will leave with recommendations to lead conversations that focus on the data rather than people, personalities, or emotions. Presenters will share strategies to determine the root cause of student deficits, as well as discussion starters and protocols to address the facilitate solutions. 

Objectives:
Identify trends in data
Identify solutions based on data -
Choose from discussion starters to initiate conversations with staff

Learn best practices for ensuring that beginning readers grasp the idea that sounds are represented by letters and groups of letters.  You’ll come away with ideas on how to connect phoneme awareness with foundational phonics and handwriting skills and a lesson plan that works for teaching this critical first literacy concept.

Understand current research on alphabetic principle instruction, implement an alphabetic principle lesson plan 

We know what the Science of Reading is and why instruction grounded in its practices are crucial in the classroom, but what does a building look and feel like when the systems are working? What can we look for as we pop into classrooms, and how can we evaluate our current systems to ensure our teachers are set up for success?

Please join us for a session delving into schoolwide sustainability of Science of Reading, and how to identify and monitor best practices through a leader’s lens.

Learner Outcomes
-Learn how school leaders can evaluate current schoolwide systems to determine where change is needed,  -Understand how schoolwide systems grounded in the Science of Reading can be implemented to foster sustainable literacy growth, -Identify the “look-fors” to ensure literacy routines and practices are research-based across all classrooms

Educators at Cody High School in Cody, Wyoming, have established a Literacy Learning Laboratory that serves as a reading intervention course (RIC) (Scammacca et al, 2016) for 9th and 10th grade students who are struggling with literacy. This RIC is designed around principles of disciplinary literacy (Moje, 2007; Shanahan et al, 2011) as they apply directly to the school’s curriculum focusing on English Language Arts (ELA) and social studies-specific vocabulary and morphology instruction (Rainey, 2016; Reynolds et al, 2022; Wineburg, 1998), discussion (Greenleaf & Valencia, 2017), and other instructional strategies chosen to meet students’ needs. The educators responsible for this work are developing a progress monitoring tool to consistently and accurately track student improvement in these areas over the course of the academic year. In our presentation, we will describe the process of developing the progress monitoring tool and the affordances and constraints it provides for monitoring adolescent learners’ progress in literacy. We will also provide a guided workshop supporting teachers in using our model to create a discipline-specific progress monitoring tool that aligns with curriculum in their school.

Understand the role of a progress monitoring tool at the secondary level and the ups and downs of the development of such a tool;  Recognize the constraints and affordances provided by a progress monitoring tool in assessing adolescent learners’ literacy progress; and  Be able to use their own curriculum to draft a discipline-specific progress monitoring tool.

Link to the presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dL8nTrdkzfcoPOebz6vGqdV1fODOf3hloUuFgAn65R4/edit?usp=sharing