Addressing Student Variance in the Heterogeneous ELA Classroom:
Tiering for Student Readiness
(Grades 3-8)

While the Common Core calls for greater text complexity, more advanced academic language, higher-level comprehension skills, and increased independence, the reality is that many of our students will struggle to meet these goals.

Despite all the rhetoric, teachers will continue to face the challenge of helping ELLs, students with disabilities, and other learners who just need a different approach to the same outcome. We will need to meet these learners where they are, not where we’d like them to be.

Explore how “tiered” activities in your ELA/English classroom can help a single teacher manage a mutli-leveled classroom in a time of Core Standards. Join national instructional expert Judy Dodge in this interactive workshop as she demonstrates and guides participants to “tier” writing tasks to address variance in learner readiness.

**Part of the cost of this workshop covers a copy of Heinemann’s new book,
Core Instructional Routines, so that participants can leave with this valuable new resource.
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Core Instructional Routines
(Social Studies/Science/ELA Focus-Grades 4-8)

Routines are the backbone of well-run classrooms. The common core classroom will require routines that integrate language and literacy across content areas, stressing student independence, not just the ability to accomplish tasks with the teacher.

If the standards describe “what” students must know and be able to do, it is the teachers who must determine “how” to accomplish these goals. Undoubtedly, they will need a repertoire of effective routines to help them manage such a classroom.

Join national instructional expert Judy Dodge, as she shares her expertise and demonstrates from her forthcoming book routines that support the integrated literacy demands of the common core classroom, including (among other routines):
Using and Designing Anticipation Guides
Researching a WonderQuest
Taking a Part in a 4-Square Rotation (for Science and Social Studies)
Going on a Field Trip
Writing Like a Historian
Writing Like a Scientist
Planning an Interactive Notebook
Writing with Appropriate Language and Sophisticated Structure

Teachers should bring a Science or Social Studies text with them.

**Part of the cost of this workshop covers a copy of Heinemann’s new book, Core Instructional Routines, so that participants can leave with this valuable new resource.
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Differentiating Instruction in the General Education Classroom
For English Language Learners and Students with Disabilities
(General Education Teachers and Administrators – Grades 3-8)

The Common Core classroom will require more reading and writing than ever before, with an emphasis on informational text and text-based evidence. It calls for greater text complexity, increased knowledge of academic vocabulary, and much higher-level comprehension skills. The Common Core classroom stresses student independence, not just the ability to accomplish tasks with the teacher.

Despite all the rhetoric about increasing rigor, general education teachers know they will continue to face the challenge of helping ELLs, students with disabilities, and other learners who just need a different approach to the same outcome. Any practitioner with experience knows that many of these students will struggle even more to meet the new standards.

Come explore how to manage these diverse learners in your heterogeneous classrooms. Learn how to group flexibility for instruction, so that you can attend to one group’s needs while the rest of the class in engaged in meaningful work. Leave with numerous ideas for scaffolding and supporting ELLs and SWDs while they are sitting in your gen ed class. Learn what Tier I RTI actually looks like in a differentiation classroom.

**Part of the cost of this workshop covers a copy of Heinemann’s new book, Core Instructional Routines, so that participants can leave with this valuable new resource.
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Fostering Reading and Writing in
Music and Art Classrooms:
Supervising Core Principles
In a Differentiated Classroom


This workshop is designed to better familiarize Music and Art supervisors of all grade levels to help their teachers address the Common Core State Standards while differentiating instruction. Participants will leave with a toolkit of strategies to share with their staff. Emphasis will be on providing students with tools to organize information, respond to and analyze works of art, and use appropriate content, as well as academic vocabulary, when writing or speaking about the arts. Resources and activities that enhance instruction and student engagement will be shared. Connections to the Danielson Framework will be explored.
(This workshop does not address performance classes of chorus, band, or orchestra)
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Interactive Notebooks for Science – The Ultimate Tool For
Differentiated Instruction
Grades 4-12 (Science Teachers and Supervisors)

Do you find yourself assuming students should know how to take notes by the time they arrive in your classroom, only to be disappointed by their lack of skills?

In this workshop, teachers will learn strategies for increasing student interest in developing better notebooks and making them an integral learning tool in their classrooms. Participants will create their own IN for Science and leave with a keen sense of what makes interactive notebooks such a powerful tool for addressing the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards.

The format presented will help teachers foster their students’ critical thinking skills while developing the ability to write for understanding about content. Left-side pages of the notebook will be used to record information (input) from lab activities, demonstrations, class discussion, textbooks, PPt presentations, or informational text. Right-side pages of the notebook will be used to help students process information, note connections, and wonder about possible outcomes and alternative solutions.

Used in this way, interactive notebooks become the ultimate differentiated tool and the proud possession of their owners. Seldom are they misplaced or lost. The “illustrated manuscripts” that are developed through this process serve as powerful study tools for students and provide excellent opportunities to teach organizational skills, as well.

***Please note- teachers should
bring a Science textbook they use in class in order to develop examples for use in their own classroom.
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Interactive Notebooks For Social StudiesThe Ultimate Tool for
Differentiated Instruction

Grades 4-12 (Social Studies Teachers and Supervisors)


Do you find yourself assuming students should know how to take notes by the time they arrive in your classroom, only to be disappointed by their lack of skills?

In this workshop, teachers will learn strategies for increasing student interest in developing better notebooks and making them an integral learning tool in the classrooms. Participants will create their own IN for Social Studies and leave with a keen sense of what makes interactive notebooks such a powerful tool for addressing the Common Core State Standards and New York Social Studies Framework.

The format presented will help teachers foster their students’ critical thinking skills while developing the ability to write for understanding about content. Left-side pages of the notebook will be used to record information (input) from class notes or discussion, textbooks, PPt presentations, or informational text. Right-side pages of the notebook will be used to help students process for understanding, note connections, and to use academic vocabulary, as well as content-specific language when communicating about Social Studies key ideas, concepts and/or themes (output).
Used in this way, interactive notebooks become the ultimate differentiated tool and the proud possession of their owners. Seldom are they misplaced or lost. The “illustrated manuscripts” that are developed through this process serve as powerful study tools for students and provide excellent opportunities to teach organizational skills, as well.

***Please note- teachers should
bring a Social Studies text (or set of documents) they use in class in order to develop examples they can use in their own classroom.
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Look-fors While Supervising:
Differentiated Instruction in a Common Core Classroom
(K-12)


Supervisors walk in and out of classrooms every day observing the teaching and learning process. But, having a common vocabulary and a clear understanding of what differentiated instruction is and is NOT, is critical to empowering your teachers to actually embrace DI and to put it into action. Being able to articulate the difference between a traditional classroom and a differentiated one is where we will begin. From there, we will discuss the reality and frequency of observing various components of a differentiated classroom.

Join national instructional expert Judy Dodge, as she shares her expertise in differentiated instruction and demonstrates from her newest book on core instructional routines what to look for in an effective classroom.

This half-day session invites administrators and supervisors of any discipline to discuss and explore a set of Look-fors as they observe their teachers. They will leave with A Checklist of Look-Fors in a Differentiated Classroom and the understanding of how to encourage these behaviors in their staff. They will also leave “Coaching Sentence Stems” for making coaching conversations more productive.

****Participants are asked to bring with them one writing assignment that they normally assign to their whole class.
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Reading and Writing in the Secondary Classroom-
Core Challenges to Overcome
(Grades 6-12 Social Studies, Science, Health and Technical Subject
Teachers and Administrators)


So, you graduated from college with a degree in Social Studies, Science, Health or a technical subject. But, now you are being told that you must join with your English teacher colleagues in teaching literacy skills in your content-area classroom.

No worries. Come learn reading and writing strategies for your discipline that are easy to implement. More importantly, relish the notion that time spent teaching these literacy strategies will actually help your students learn your subject matter better.
(Research shared by Doug Reeves)

Leave with lessons your English teacher colleagues are learning in their reading courses: that powerful pre-, during, and post-reading strategies can improve reading comprehension in any discipline. Learn how writing frames, an understanding of informational text formats, and a focus on academic vocabulary can boost your students’ literacy skills while increasing their knowledge of your content-area.

****Participants are asked to bring a content-area text (a textbook, non-fiction article, technical journal, written lab report, magazine article, etc.) so that they can design meaningful activities to bring back to their own classrooms.