Instructional Coordinator’s and Coaches Meeting

1. Instructional Coordinator’s and Coaches Meeting Re-Framing “How We Think” May 10, 2013

2. Presentation Structure ELA PD Focus Areas for 2013/14 – 35 minutes Procedural Updates for Atlas – 10 minutes ELA Events/Winners/Dates – 5 minutes

3. 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

5. Concept Curriculum Requirements Scope and sequence/standards alignment* Designed units (Focus Area 1) Lesson strategies (Focus Area 2) Assessments – (Focus Area 3) Reflection on best practice Communities in collaboration 21st Century skills integration

6. Focus Area 1 - Unit Design Essential questions that focus instruction I can statements in student friendly language Aligned to CCSS standards Targeted strategies meet standards Assessments to measure learning Texts that support your instruction

7. Design Tip • 1. 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?

8. Atlas

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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?

12. 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

13. Big Ideas Defined • Broad and abstract • Represented in one or two words • Universal in application • Timeless • Different examples share different attributes • Provide a focusing conceptual lens for any study

14. Activity 2 - Finding Big Ideas 10 minutes List Brainstorm Confirm Connect

15. 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.”

16. Implications… • Identifying significant concepts/big ideas leads to deep and meaningful learning • Big ideas will help teachers prioritize learning • Essential questions become the doorway to learning • Scaffolding changes to instruction will lead to more differentiation • Units will have more design/composition

18. 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)

19. And some text… Poem 1 Poem 2 According 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.

20. “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

21. Atlas ELA Template Changes

22. 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

23. ELA Professional Development 2013/20014

24. Professional Development Areas of Concentration • Atlas – procedural updates and requirements August Orientation • Curriculum -Unit design/lesson composition August Orientation • Instruction Strategies – Reading for Information Regional 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

25. ELA Event Dates 2013/2014 Spelling Bee – December 7, 2013 Writing Contest Deadline – February 2, 2014 Speech and Spoken Word Competition – April 12, 2014

26. Overall Success • Reflection is essential for continued improvement. As a result there will be changes to next years programs: • Dates • Times • Venues As well as attention to: • Adherence • Fairness • Consistency • Application • http://english.conceptschools.org/

27. OTHER 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

29. 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.)