Instructional Coordinator’s and Coaches Meeting

Re-Framing “How We Think”May 10, 2013

• ELA PD Focus Areas for 2013/14 – 35 minutes

• Procedural Updates for Atlas – 10 minutes

• ELA Events/Winners/Dates – 5 minutes

Presentation Structure

Activity 1 – Defining Moment10 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

Concept Curriculum Requirements

1. Scope and sequence/standards alignment*

2. Designed units (Focus Area 1)3. Lesson strategies (Focus Area 2)4. Assessments – (Focus Area 3)5. Reflection on best practice6. Communities in collaboration7. 21st Century skills integration

Focus Area 1 - Unit Design

Essential questions that focus instructionI can statements in student friendly languageAligned to CCSS standardsTargeted strategies meet standards Assessments to measure learningTexts that support your instruction

Design Tip1. 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?

Atlas

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

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

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?

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

Big Ideas DefinedBroad and abstractRepresented in one or two wordsUniversal in applicationTimelessDifferent examples share different

attributes

Provide a focusing conceptual lens for any study

Activity 2 - Finding Big Ideas10 minutes• List • Brainsto

rm• Confirm• Connect

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.”

Implications…Identifying significant concepts/big ideas

leads to deep and meaningful learningBig ideas will help teachers prioritize

learningEssential questions become the doorway

to learningScaffolding changes to instruction will

lead to more differentiation Units will have more design/composition

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)

And some text…Poem 1 Poem 2According to Brueghelwhen Icarus fellit was spring

a farmer was ploughinghis fieldthe whole pageantry

of the year wasawake tinglingnear

the edge of the seaconcernedwith itself

sweating in the sunthat meltedthe wings' wax

unsignificantlyoff the coastthere was

a splash quite unnoticedthis wasIcarus drowning

About suffering they were never wrong,The old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

“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

Atlas ELA Template Changes

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

ELA Professional Development 2013/20014

Professional DevelopmentAreas 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 upApril 2014• Spring Summit – writing event May 2014

Spelling Bee – December 7, 2013Writing Contest Deadline – February 2,

2014Speech and Spoken Word Competition –

April 12, 2014

ELA Event Dates 2013/2014

Overall Success Reflection is essential for continued improvement. As a

result there will be changes to next years programs:DatesTimesVenues

As well as attention to:AdherenceFairnessConsistencyApplication

http://english.conceptschools.org/

• 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

OTHER

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.)