Learning Collaborative - Course / Workshop Descriptions

course / workshop descriptions

Best Practices in Science Teaching
This course focuses on the development of confidence with inquiry-based teaching and assessment skills and strategies to help K-8 students understand and use the concepts of science and the skills of inquiry appropriate for their grade level. Popular features of the course are the development of science unit frameworks including desired outcomes, performance tasks and formative assessment strategies, and learning opportunities for students that feature inquiry. This is an active, hands-on offering with strong connections to literacy goals for students.

Note: This course can stand alone or be taken as a part of the VSI Tier II program. For further details, visit the VSI website: www.vtscience.org

The dates and times shown here relate to Springfield's professional development schedule, but the course is open to anyone who can participate on these dates .

Dates and Times: August 23 and 24, September 29, October 22, November 11, 8:30am – 3:30pm
Location: Halifax School, West Halifax, VT
Fees: $680; optional two graduate credits, additional $250
Instructors: Maura O'Brien
Register: Online with the Learning Collaborative

Classroom Communication, Technology and Reading In Process
Educators across all curricular areas and grade levels are finding that students are having increased difficulty with reading comprehension and fluency. The mysteries of reading can be revealed to struggling readers through classroom communication, with a little help from technology. This course will emphasize three things:

    1.) The reading strategies used by skilled readers.
    2.) Proven classroom conversation techniques that make these hidden strategies explicit.
    3.) How social networking applications (blogs, wikis, chat, podcasts and vodcasts) can be used
         to support classroom conversation and the explication and learning of reading strategies.

Communication is key to reading comprehension and literacy in the classroom. Technology can help educators facilitate that communication, but it is not the complete answer. Literacy initiatives that promote explicit classroom teaching of reading strategies K through 12 are now nationwide. The emphasis of these strategies is communication.

We live in the age of technology and our students will increasingly be required to not only show a deep understanding of content, but also communicate that understanding to others using a variety of communication technologies. We need to prepare our students for these expectations with explicit teaching of both reading strategies and communication technologies.

This class will focus on integrating the technologies we commonly use for social and work related communication with communication based reading strategies, AKA Transactional Strategies Instruction (TSI). TSI focuses on the explicit teaching of reading strategies to promote the transaction between reader knowledge and text content.

We will explore lots of fun and instructive technologies that we as educators can utilize to enhance communication between students, and between ourselves and our students, with the goal of improving literacy skills and reading fluency, and communication skills.

This class will:
    — Give you a basic understanding of the recent developments in reading, fluency, content fluency,
       and literacy research.
— Help you effectively integrate a variety of technologies into your literacy instruction to help
       facilitate the classroom communication that is so important to the success of these strategies
       and the success of our students in a technological age There is a paradigm shift in classrooms
       in terms of how we look at learning, literacy and the role technology plays in our classrooms.
       This course will explore these changes and their implications for our teaching.

Dates and Times: July 6-8 and two additional fall sessions; 8:00am-4:30pm
Location: Learning Collaborative, Dummerston
Fees: $850; optional three graduate credits, additional $350
Instructor: Kate Hudson with special guest Jane Wilde
Register: online with the Learning Collaborative

Co-Teaching: Regular and Special Educators Partnering in Vermont Schools
Co-teaching is two or more people -- a general education teacher and a special education teacher -- sharing responsibility for teaching some or all of the students assigned to a classroom. It involves the equal distribution of responsibility among teachers for planning, instruction, and evaluation for a classroom of students.

Recognizing that good relationships are at the heart of successful co-teaching teams, this course will examine and explore strategies for working cohesively and effectively as a team. While learning about different elements of and approaches to co-teaching, we will observe our individual teaching and planning styles, and learn how to integrate styles and skills with those of other teachers. In particular, we will develop communication and collaborative skills through a variety of activities and exercises that can be used in the classroom.

The goals of this course are to prepare the participants to:

    • Know, understand, evaluate, and practice co-teaching models and approaches
    • Analyze communication and teaching styles of self and others
    • Analyze and challenge assumptions and beliefs about the philosophy of inclusion
    • Practice collaboration, communication, and interactive skills
    • Learn and practice group leadership skills for an inclusion classroom
    • Learn and practice effective strategies for dealing with conflict
    • Apply concepts and effective collaboration strategies to classroom practice
    • Create a method for reflective practice and continuing self-evaluation

Please read our Frequently Asked Questions sheet about these courses.

Dates and Times: July 20-22, 8:30am-4:00pm, follow-ups: Sept. 22 & Oct.13, 3:30-6:30pm
Location: Learning Collaborative, Route 5, Dummerston
Fees: $550; optional two grad credits, additional $230
Instructor: Teri Young
Register: Online with the Learning Collaborative

The goals of this course are to prepare the participants to:

Please read our Frequently Asked Questions sheet about these courses.

Dates and Times: Aug. 3-5, 8:30am-4:00pm and follow-ups: Sept. 23 & Oct.14, 3:30-6:30pm
Location: Hartford School District, White River Junction
Fees: $550; optional two grad credits, additional $230
Instructor: Teri Young
Register: Online with the Learning Collaborative

Current Topics and Research in Adolescent Literacy with Practical Applications to the Classroom Setting
This course is designed for professionals who are involved in teaching literacy to students in grades 4–8. The main goal of the course will be to develop the knowledge needed for effective classroom instruction with struggling readers.

Using research and materials from the Center on Instruction, The National Reading Panel, The RAND Reading Study Group, Institute of Education Science, various related research articles, and multimedia sources, the participants will develop a robust command of current educational research in word study, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, spelling and assessment. Teachers will gain the philosophical and research background of these big ideas in adolescent literacy, and begin to link research with their own practice.

Teachers can expect a moderately paced course that will cover:
    • The current state of literacy in the nation, state and in the local supervisory union.
    • The 4-processor model and the role it plays in understanding how children learn to read.
    • Why teachers of adolescent readers need to have some background in early literacy.
    • Big ideas in adolescent literacy: What is it? Why is it important? How do you teach it?

This includes:
    • Advanced word study
    • Comprehension
    • Vocabulary
    • Fluency
    • Spelling
    • Motivation and engagement
    • Assessment Tools
    • Practice interpreting reading and spelling data and developing appropriate interventions based
        on assessment

Dates and Times: August 10-12, 2010 and two additional fall sessions; 8:00am-4:30pm
Location: Learning Collaborative, Dummerston
Fees: $850; optional three graduate credits, additional $350
Instructor: Brian Buettner
Register: Online with the Learning Collaborative

Making Meaning of Operations
Participants will examine the actions and situations modeled by the four basic operations. The seminar begins with a view of young children's counting strategies as they encounter word problems, moves to an examination of the four basic operations on whole numbers, and revisits the operations in the context of rational numbers.

About DMI: Developing Mathematical Ideas is a professional development curriculum, designed to help teachers think through the major ideas of K-7 mathematics and examine how children develop those ideas.

DMI seminars are designed to bring together teachers from kindergarten through middle grades to:

   • learn mathematics content
   • learn to recognize key mathematical ideas with which their students are grappling
   • learn to support the power and complexity of student thinking
   • learn to appreciate the power and complexity of student thinking
   • learn how core mathematical ideas develop across the grades
   • learn how to continue learning about children and mathematics

At the heart of the materials are sets of classroom episodes (cases) illustrating student thinking as described by their teachers. Participants have the opportunity to explore mathematics; to share and discuss the work of their own students; to view and discuss videotapes of mathematics classrooms; to write their own classroom cases; and to read overviews of related research.
School systems that have adopted innovative mathematics curricula have found DMI to be an important support.

Dates and Times: Aug. 18-19 and two additional sessions in the fall, 8:00am-4:30pm
Location: Learning Collaborative, Dummerston
Fees: $850; optional three grad credits, additional $350
Instructor: Elizabeth Van Cleef
Register: online with the Learning Collaborative

Reading the Landscape Just announced: $150 stipend at completion!
This course will focus on the tools and skills needed to read, interpret, and tell the stories of landscapes. Over the course of one short week we will explore a variety of frameworks (including vertical structure analysis, natural community concept, dynamic timeline, and phenology) for practicing field science, interpreting natural history, and sharing landscape ecology with students in an engaging way. During the week we will visit 5 unique Vermont landscapes to explore the pieces, patterns and processes that characterize each site. By the end of the week, participants will feel more comfortable reading landscapes and giving voice to their rich stories.

The goals of this science course include:

Understand and use four landscape analysis frameworks including 1) phenology,
2) dynamic timeline, 3) vertical structure analysis, and 4) pieces, patterns, processes

Understand the concept of natural communities and develop skills in classifying and characterizing them

Understand basic geological processes as recorded in Vermont's bedrock

Understand Vermont's glacial history and how these events have shaped surficial geology

Analyze sediments to interpret glacial history

Gain proficiency in map interpretation (including geology, topographic, soils, etc.)

Gain appreciation for the complex interactions between abiotic and biotic components of ecosystems

Explore teaching strategies and principles that will make landscape analysis applicable and translatable to students of all ages, including: journaling and observation, inquiry-based learning, quantitative and qualitative field research methods, map interpretation, and engagement strategies

Feel confident in their ability to use the landscape as an integrated context for teaching science

The course is one component of the Vermont Science Initiative (VSI). For a participant it can be a stand-alone course or it can be combined with other VSI courses. For further details on these options, visit the VSI website: www.vtscience.org

Dates and Times: August 2-August 6, 2010; 9:00am-5:00pm
Location: Learning Collaborative, Dummerston
Fees: $810; optional two graduate credits, additional $250
Instructor: Matt Kolan, with assistance of Teage O'Connor and guest presenter Tom Wessels
Register: Online with the Learning Collaborative

Summer Science Assessment Institute
Students in this course, in conjunction with colleagues and with feedback from the instructors, will develop a science performance assessment task for classroom use and local assessment. This task will be aligned to the Science GEs and have a completed scoring guide before being piloted in the classroom. At the final follow-up session, student work from the assessment task, will be shared, and the task will be modified appropriately according to the student work. This task will be reviewed and used by the Southwest Vermont Science Partnership and become part of a data bank from which other teachers can choose assessment tasks.

Course Objectives: Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:

Identify the components of an effective science performance assessment task.
Understand the use of cognitive complexity (DOK) in building a science performance task.
Be able to develop a local science assessment task which includes a scoring guide.
Evaluate a science assessment task using student work, GE analysis, DOK analysis, and peer review.
Conduct a curriculum topic study.

Dates and Times: July 19-23 with a Saturday follow-up to be determined by the class participants; 8:00am-3:00pm
Location: Hartford High School
Fees: $745, includes 3 grad. credits (non-credit option not available)
Instructor: Lynne Blair, Jean Ward
Register: Contact Myriem Moody at 802.295-8600 or email her at moodym@hartfordschools.net by May 1, 2010. Enrollment is limited to 20 participants.

Writing in Science: Using Science Notebooks in the K-6 Classroom In Process
Scientific writing is a distinctive genre. This course investigates the criteria of scientific writing and best practices for teaching scientific writing in K-6 classrooms. Participants will engage in inquiry science investigation and maintain their own science notebook, practicing the skills of scientific writing such as: stating and revisiting a hypothesis, data representation, scientific drawing, analysis of data/formulating a conclusion based upon qualitative and quantitative data, and comparing and contrasting science concepts. Participants will have the opportunity to view samples of quality student work and make plans for the use of science notebooks in their classrooms.

Participants will demonstrate understanding of how to write effectively in science and the best practices involved in science writing instruction.

Course Objectives:

Participants will participate in science writing as part of the process of science inquiry.
Participants will learn how to scaffold and model scientific thinking skills and expository writing in their science instruction.
Participants will learn how to use science notebooks to deepen conceptual understanding and develop scientific skills.
Participants will develop a plan to incorporate inquiry science and writing into their science programs.

Dates and Times: June 24-25, 8:00am-2:00pm; Nov. 20, 8:30am-12:30pm
Location: Hartford School District
Fees: $315, includes 1 grad. credit (non-credit option not available)
Instructor: Jean Ward
Register: Contact Myriem Moody at 802.295-8600 or email her at moodym@hartfordschools.net by May 1, 2010.