Using Teach 21 For Professional Development WV Institute for 21st Century Leadership

Objectives To demonstrate strategies found on the Teach 21 site To familiarize instructional leaders with the content on Teach 21 To explore ways Teach 21 can be used as a resource for individual, as well as total staff, professional development

TIMMS Video Clip We are going to view this two minute video clip twice. The first time I want you to focus on what the teacher says and does. The second time we view the video we will focus on what students are doing. We will do this by making a ‘T” chart in which we write our observations about the teacher on the left and our observations relevant to the students on the right. You can do the same type of activity using some of the video clips on the Teach 21 site. I did not want to be dependent upon the internet to download and buffer a video today so I used this TIMMS clip.

If you go to the Teach 21 home page and click on Professional Development.

And then click on Model Classrooms…..

You will arrive at this page with links to Language Arts, Math, Elementary Math (eventually 50 model classroom lessons and videos covering grades 1-5 and each of the 5 strands of mathematics at each grade level.), Science, Social Studies and Interdisciplinary Lessons.

And this is the page where you can find the current elementary mathematics model lessons with accompanying videos. Dan Blackwood is still in the process of editing video for these lessons. We should have this project finished by the end of first semester of the coming school year.

Susan Hardy Kindergarten http://wvde.state.wv.us/professional-development/model-classrooms/videos/?vid=susanhardy.flv This kindergarten video is found under Numbers and Operations in the Elementary Math Video link on Teach 21 and illustrates how one of our master teachers designs a lesson on a difficult concept for students that age. Show the video. Remember to click on the video to make it full screen. Discussion: How might these videos be of use to your teachers?

Another powerful professional development tool on Teach 21 is Strategy Bank.

On this slide you see the key components of strategy bank: Strategies, with content focused examples, are given to illustrate ways we can activate prior knowledge, develop student vocabulary, improve comprehension, summarization techniques, strategies for writing across the curriculum, Getting to know our students (readiness, interests, learning profile), and the use of technology tools.

If vocabulary development is an area of focus in your school, and I believe we all need to have that focus, you see on the screen the current resources relevant to vocabulary development, K-12.

The focus of Teacher Leadership Institute this summer is standards-focused PBL Unit design. If you click on Curriculum button on the home page and then Project Based Learning in the drop down menu, You will arrive at the page on the next screen.

The opening page defines Project Based Learning and provides you with a link to the search page for online PBL units. We currently have 70+ PBL units posed online. These PBL units have gone through an extensive peer review process and are used in professional development conducted by the Office of Instruction. After seeing some of the great PBLs participants during the first week of TLI created, we are anticipating MANY more additions to Teach 21 by second semester—after the PBLs have been taught and the authors have participated in two peer review sessions—one at the county and one at the RESA level.

Clicking on the Search for PBL button, takes me to this search page and I can search by subject and grade or course to find a standards focused PBL unit I may want to implement in my classroom.

For example, if I click on Reading English Language Arts, Grade 10, I find 5 standards-focused PBLs aligned to the content, learning skills and technology tools standards for my 10th grade English course.

This is a PBL written for Sonjia Richardson’s 10th grade English students. I had the pleasure of sitting on the evaluation panel for student presentation of their documentaries and we were able to debrief the students following those presentations. You see the Title, Author, Project Idea, Entry Event, Power Standard (written by clustering a group of content standards and integrating learning skills and technology tools standards within). Then the author must identify the content standards to be assessed in the unit

You cannot see it here, but Sonjia’s unit targeted three content objectives. You will note that the template requires the teacher to focus on the learning skills to be assessed as well as the evidence that will be accepted to document achievement of the identified learning targets.

From there, the author targets the 21st century skills or the learning skills and technology tools objectives students will master within this project. Sonjia targeted 5 Learning Skills objectives, one under Information and Communication Skills Standard, one under Thinking and Reasoning Skills Standard and 3 uner Personal and Workplace Readiness Skills standard.

The teachers are required to identify the performance objectives –What the students will know and be able to do. On this slide you also see her Driving Question: How do teens influence popular culture? Following the driving question you see the beginning of the Assessment Plan which is continued on the next screen capture….

Note that Sonjia has major group product as well as individual products. Reflection is also part of the Assessment Plan. For every X, there must be an accompanying rubric. Teachers have a wealth of carefully thought-out rubrics at their disposal on Teach 21.

And our final PBL screen capture shows us a list of Resources, a link to Manage the Process which for her is her project calendar. Some people will link to a storyboard. She has provided the links to Project Evaluations and resource files that have been uploaded. All of the PBLs on Teach 21 follow the same template and go through pretty extensive peer review prior to publication on the site. The same is true of instructional guides and standards based units found on the site. How might you or your staff use any of these resources for professional development?

Time to Explore the Site http://wvde.state.wv.us/teach21/