10th Annual Partnership Conference for Educational Renewal

Many educators believe that the only purpose of content area literacy is to provide students with a means by which they acquire information from textbooks (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). However, there are several content areas such as physical education, mathematics, art, and music that may not use traditional text. Teachers of these subjects need to know about literacy strategies, such as anticipation guides, group retellings, read alouds, graphic organizers, and journal writing, that can be effectively integrated into these courses that will allow students to listen, speak, read, and write in order to acquire information.
As a result of attending this session, participants will:
-Know what it means to integrate literacy into the content areas.Recognize that literacy is a critical component in all content areas, even in those that use nontraditional text.
-Be able to integrate strategies such as think alouds, poetry, and graphic organizers into content areas that use nontraditional text

This presentation will address the definition of mental health, warning signs, statistics, impact on academic and behavioral success, as well as evidence based practices including social emotional learning, and preventive programs that can be implemented to support struggling students

A panel of four educators in a Professional Development School will share the ways that coteaching serves a range of inservice teachers' needs. The four have cotaught together in various configurations in several grade levels using a range of models, including team teaching, assisting, using stations, and parallel teaching.

Although the basic tenets of coteaching maintain that coplanning is an essential, nonnegotiable component, these educators have found that experienced teachers with some knowledge of each others' styles can, in fact, shift into a coteaching model that fits the moment. In addition to serving students better by having multiple knowledgeable professionals engaged with them at once, all four educators have benefited from the professional development component of their work together- even with its often impromptu nature.

The panel will present coteaching as having three characteristics that serve to legitimize its role as a form of inservice professional development. Specifically, coteaching is:
a. on site, in your classroom, and entirely embedded in the natural setting of your work;
b. on demand, at least in the respect that as a question or problem arises during the coteaching event another professional is there to respond, clarify, supplement, or even take the lead, as needed; and
c. always relevant, because it involves both the content and students that are the focus at the time of the coteaching event.

Panelists will share the ways in which they've grown through coteaching along with some innovative ways that coteaching might be implemented in any school setting.

This "post-Common Core" era may seem confusing and overwhelming for those who teach mathematics. We're told to be more student-centered, but are expected to help students dig deeper while promoting higher-order thinking skills. Understanding must come first, but fluency is still a necessity. We distinguish between skills that are essential and those that are nice to know- but all of them may still be on The Test. Meanwhile, we're having to push ourselves to teach in ways that are different from those in our own P-12 experience, and fend off parents and others who question our work.

In this session, we'll examine policy-based approaches, research foundations, and evidence-based strategies that boil down to just four simple rules to guide our work in the mathematics classroom. Participants will leave with (a) a full understanding of what's behind the rules, (b) the ability to recite the rules and explain how they apply to their own classrooms, and (c) a mini-poster of the rules (just in case!).