Professional Developments

Emily Kelley
Webinar
The Webinar was an hour long lecture/ discussion about
classroom instructions that work. It was led by Elizabeth Hubble who
is with McRell. McRell has a team of half researchers and half former
practitioners that work together for professional development and
exploring new strategies. Hubble addresses the book "Classroom
Instruction That Works: Helping Students Develop Understanding."
She talks about the rst edition and some things that can be
improved and what will be addressed in the second issue. She
started off by talking about the 9 things that have proven to impact
student learning: identifying similarities and differences,
summarizing and note taking, reinforcing effort and providing
recognition, homework and practice, nonlinguistic representation,
cooperative learning, setting objectives and providing feedback,
generating and testing hypotheses, and cues, questions, and
advance organizers. Hubble talks about how the rst edition listed
them 1 through 9. This was an issue because teachers would
prioritize which strategies to use in the classroom when actually, all
of them were important. So for the second edition they are using a
graphic organizer that shows some a little higher than others, but
how they all tie in and are all necessary. Then they moved in to all
the different ways teachers can develop student understanding.
School used to be a place where teachers gave students
information, but now teachers help students call back information
and nd information. This was a major part of the Webinar and I
learned a lot from it, but I took away some main highlights from it.
Two of my favorite parts were organizers and homework. I didn't
realize graphic organizers could be put into categories but they
labeled them as expository, narrative, skimming, and graphic
organizers. I like how they separated which organizers would be
best for certain kind of information. They also gave an example by
using Voicethread. This could be an amazing resource for me to use!
It gives students the opportunity to tie in multiple strategies: voice,
visual, and facts in one presentation. They also talked about
homework and could not label it as good or not good. It talked about
being aware of your population. I loved this because it is so true!!! In
my inner city placement, a lot of them have obligations at home and
don't have parents helping them with their work but then in my
private school placement in Jan Term the parents were always
willing to walk them through their homework. So I need to be sure of
who I am working with before assigning a lot of homework. The
session concluded by allowing time for questions, clarication, and
feedback. I learned so much from this seminar!
2nd Grade Faculty Meeting
I worked with a second grade class for my clinical at Trace
Crossings. The teaching team always seemed to work very closely
with each other. I attended two 2nd grade team meetings during the
school day and it seems like they all work together as a unit. They all
planned their lessons and what they were going to talk about each
day. But they didn't just share ideas, they all did pretty much the
exact same thing for each lesson. I thought that was very interesting!
I haven't seen many other team meetings, so I don't know if this is
how it normally works. I guess when I thought of team meetings I
thought you share ideas and can use the other ideas if you want, but
you also have the freedom to come up with your own lesson. The
second grade was learning about small machines. The teaching staff
invited me to come back to work on planning the machinery day they
were going to have. When I came back, all of the second grade
teachers were in the meeting room, along with the principle and a
teacher from the partnering high school. We all sat in a circle and a
second grade teacher led the discussion. She opened the meeting
with introducing the participants in the meeting and introducing the
topic of discussion: Small Machinery Day. She opened the oor to
the other 2nd grade teachers to discuss some thoughts they had and
what they wanted the day to look like. Then the high school teacher
took over the meeting and led a discussion of what she could
provide for the teachers and some ideas she had. She wanted to
bring over high school students to help the students and also wanted
the 2nd grade classes to have a competition with building machines.
They all agreed that these were great ideas! The principle added
that she would like this to be documented, so they decided on lming
the event to put together in a video. The 2nd grade teachers who led
the discussion was also in charge of time, so when it was time to be
nished, she concluded by discussing the nal plans and what
needs to happen next. This was a great example of a team meeting
for me and to see how things should be organized, prepared, and
planned.