2018 Annual Yeshiva Day School Day Of Learning: Workshops
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PEDAGOGY
EVENT HOME | WORKSHOPS | PRESENTERS
Building a Writing Community (Room 120)
Learn about building a writing community, establishing routines in Writing Workshop, and understand immersion: Getting to know the Touchstone Texts and learning how to read like a writer. During this workshop, participants will also examine and define the stages of the writing process and map out a timeline for each Unit of Study and participate in class demonstration modeling at varying stages of the writing process. There will be a focus on best practices when modeling mini-lessons and student conferences, assessing student work through conferences and Writing Fundamentals evaluations, utilizing assessments and conferences to differentiate instruction, as well as how to extend the units. Teachers will learn to develop and incorporate mini-lessons and touchstone texts of their own.
Building Relationships with Students (room 123)
Maggie Pagan
Without positive relationships, you cannot achieve relevance with your students, and without relevance, learning cannot be truly rigorous. This session will examine the importance of relationships and introduce the Rigor/Relevance Framework, a powerful tool for analyzing curriculum, instruction, activities, and assessments in K-12 classrooms. Through the lens of the Rigor/Relevance level of critical thinking required and relates content to real-world situations.
Comprehending Hebrew Reading Comprehension (room 124)
Familiarize yourself with new research regarding reading comprehension in English and Hebrew, including the predictive ability of Hebrew reading fluency on Hebrew reading comprehension for 1st to 3rd graders. Understand how students read and understand texts, reflect on current practice and discuss how this research applies to your school.
Data Driven and Individualized Instruction in Judaic Studies (room 125)
This lecture is an interactive and experiential learning experience focusing on one key question - what are our students learning? This paradigm of educational instruction and leadership focuses on what students have actually learned and mastered to help inform the student, teacher and administration drive academic excellence. The presenter will focus on four areas; Assessment - To create rigorous interim assessments that provide meaningful data, Analysis - Examine the results of assessments to identify the causes of both strengths and shortcomings; Action - Teach effectively what students most need to learn; Culture - Create an environment in which data-driven instruction can survive and thrive.
Diving into Tefillah (room 126)
The CoJDS Tefillah Curriculum will be brought to life with this hands-on and interactive workshop. One focal point of the curriculum is to make the Tefillah a personal experience for the students. One example expressed through the Curriculum is by way of the bracha of Netilat Yadayim. Students are taught that this blessing is about their hands given to them by their God who knows them personally and will always be with them. In an age-appropriate manner, key elements of a Jew's life, such as the example of the hands, are brought out through discussion and student exercises to enhance the students Tefillah time and lives. These crucial lessons are taught from the words of the Tefillah itself in a systematic approach applauded by teachers world-wide. Although the Curriculum takes a year to teach in the classroom, Rabbi Benari will provide a year's synopsis and give you something real and tangible to take back with you to enhance your classroom. Come see what schools have been piloting for years. It is now ready for you and your students!
Excellent Lesson Plan (room 129)
Learn techniques for organizing and structuring a lesson that engages and facilitates learning. By understanding the crucial elements of a lesson, looking at various lesson planning templates, and walking away with ideas on how to structure and create your own lesson plans, you will be able to develop a framework for lesson planning that is compatible with your teaching context and your teaching style.
Executive Function (room 130)
Learn the basics of executive functioning and how to identify students who may need support in this area. Understand how to identify/define executive functions and learn about their development across childhood, the relationship between executive functioning deficits and ADHD, and how these skills impact self-esteem. Discuss interventions that can be used with students individually and in small groups to develop skills, including using a planner, building awareness of time, prioritizing, breaking tasks down into component parts, activation/motivation, managing distractions, and organization. Through this interactive session, participants will be encouraged to think about and incorporate these concepts into their own interactions with their students.
L’havin U’lehaskil - a unique way to differentiate instruction (room 131)
Using the Chumash Program, L’havin U’lehaskil, differentiate in your classroom to meet all learners needs and interests. Delve into the L'havin Chumash Skills Program, which incorporates current educational models and technology, and it allows students to gain the textual skills to learn Chumash independently. The program includes workbooks for students; teachers’ guides for Rabbeim and Morot; creative lessons; worksheets; Smartboard-ready discs; interactive songs; charts, posters, and flashcards for each student; and formative and summative assessments to ensure each student is meeting the appropriate grade standards.
Laser Focus: Illuminating the Path of Intrinsic Motivation in Judaics (room 225)
Imagine a classroom where students participate in Torah learning thinking about the content and not the grade. Discover an instructional method leveraging intrinsic motivation that helps students develop the skill of cultivating interest and engagement. Explore an approach for gathering data about students’ intrinsic tendencies and designing a plan to coach these skills in individuals. Students should engage in the pursuit of mastery without extrinsic motivators so they can develop a passion for Jewish learning that extends beyond our classroom and assignments.
Literacy Strategies through the content area (room 226)
It’s time to reevaluate the role of literacy in your classroom! Literacy skills – reading, writing, speaking, and reasoning – are arguably the most important skills we can teach today’s learners for success in the unknown global workplace of tomorrow. This session will offer strategies for literacy instruction in the content areas at the secondary level. Join Karen in exploring literacy-focused tools and increase your understanding of purposeful, intentional, and meaningful literacy strategies, regardless of your content area.
Making, Made Easy (room 227)
Making is pedagogically based in the idea that creativity is a natural human skill. we will learn about maker spaces and what they mean for education through hands-on activities that are easily transferred to the classroom. We will explore everyday materials and tools in a variety of ways to create projects based on your personal interests.
Workshop participants will focus on one base material, Cardboard. They will explore the material properties of cardboard and experience a variety of activities that utilize cardboard in creative and cross-disciplinary ways.
Mindfulness 101 (room 228)
Yael Shayne
Let’s face it, life is stressful! Teaching and leading is hard work! Mindfulness is becoming increasingly popular in mainstream culture from education, health care, and law enforcement systems to Google, Target, and professional sports affiliations. Why? You’ll be actively engaged and learn foundational mindfulness practices, the importance of establishing a personal practice, the science, and the benefits – both personally and professionally. You'll be able to bring back mIndfulness practices to incorporate into your class, and into your daily lives!
Multisensory Math: Reaching All Learners Through Hands-On Instruction and Explicit Concept Based Language (room 201)
The What Works Clearinghouse and the Principles of Universal Design for Learning recommend using a multisensory approach for teaching. In mathematics, that means using manipulative objects to explicate math concepts. Multiple representations help students internalize concepts and link those concepts to calculations and applications. Most teachers receive little instruction in using manipulatives though. This workshop provides a brief introduction to the multisensory approach. It will focus on strategies for incorporating the Concrete-Representational-Abstract instructional sequence to reach the greatest number of students and help them become successful in math. Participants will leave with strategies for teaching foundation skills such as the development of numeracy and subitizing, place value concepts, multiplication and division, and fractions.
This workshop is to be 4 hours in length. Participants will receive full-color handouts and a small packet of manipulatives for workshop use.
Our parents, our partners (room 229)
The session is geared toward enhancing methods of ongoing communication as well as developing contact and contracts for specific circumstances that may arise. Viewing parents as partners who can enhance our effectiveness in the education of our students will allow for collaboration with parents to maximize the impact of our instructional goals.
Playing to Learn: Games in the Classroom (room 233)
Game-Based Learning (GBL) draws on the power of games to build engagement and persistence in a learning context. This workshop is for teachers who are interested in implementing GBL but are not sure where to start. You will be introduced to some of the reasoning behind using games (both analog and digital) in the classroom and provided with concrete steps you can take to get started. The workshop will also give you hands-on experience with a few specific games and how they can be used to support curriculum. Try out the games in a learning context and see first hand what your students would experience!
Reading – Conferring during small group instruction (room 234)
As students work toward reading goals, students can benefit from strategy instruction that helps us to unpack and break down the invisible, automatic work of reading into a series of actionable steps. In this session you will learn about the importance of focusing your differentiated instruction on individual goals based on formative assessment information. Then, you’ll consider the power of matching methods to purposes and think beyond guided reading. Join Denise as she shares a variety of methods to make independent reading time instructional including compliment conferences, coaching conferences, research-decide-teach conferences, and small group strategy lessons.
Rethinking Teacher Supervision and Evaluation (For Principals Only) (Beit midrash)
Learn about the impact of replacing traditional teacher evaluations with short, frequent, unannounced classroom visits with a face-to-face coaching conversation after each one, followed by a short narrative summary sent electronically to each teacher. These interactions, along with other points of contact (e.g., teacher teamwork on curriculum unit planning, PLCs analyzing student assessments, parent outreach, and other professional responsibilities) are summed up in end-of-year rubric evaluations, with teacher input. Presenter Kim Marshall will make the case for why this approach takes less time than the traditional approach and is far more effective at building trust and continuously improving teaching and learning. Participants will use clickers (audience response devices) and frequent small-group discussions to react to and think through the ideas presented.
STEM (room 235)
Erica Tate
Learn about the new science standards, and how they have been designed and organized across disciplines and grades to provide all students an internationally benchmarked science education. A key focus of this seminar will be on instructional shifts in relation to the new standards, as well as on deep understanding of the Scientific and Engineering Practices and the impact that these will have in the K-12 classroom.
The Progression of Fractions (room 139)
Examine the progression of the study of fractions from Grades 3-7 and how to deepen our own understanding so we can help our students enjoy learning about fractions, find them relevant and accessible, and retain fraction concepts from year to year. We will also look at how we can make small changes in our lessons that will have a huge impact on student success with fractions.
To Be Online: Digital Citizenship and Literacy (room 239)
Monica Brandwein
If a school is integrating technology into classrooms, at one time or another students are online. They may be accessing a museum website, doing research for a humanities project, or finding texts that explain the week’s parasha. They are constantly viewing and reading myriad informational sources, and not all of those sources were created equal.
So how do we ensure, that when they are online, our students know how to tell facts from fiction and truth from lies? How do we arm them with the tools they need to be critical thinkers and active, questioning, digital citizens? How do we keep them safe and help them build their own digital footprints? We will discuss the many approaches to these issues and check out resources available that can help teach these lessons to students.
Transforming your academic culture (room 240)
The research is clear: when students are actively engaged, learning is transformed. But what does engagement really look like? We will explore answers to this question and experience strategies to equip you with the tools to provide intentional, engaging instruction in every lesson, every day. You will leave prepared to transform your academic culture from compliance to engagement.
Weaving Mindfulness into the School Day: Insights, Practices, and Approaches (room 241)
Mindfulness-based practices can support the development of focus, calm, self-awareness and compassion. For teachers, mindfulness can help us hold true to our inspiration and to teach from our hearts. For students, we can offer mindfulness tools that can help them navigate challenge, reduce stress and find a sense of ease and connection. This workshop will focus on simple, basic practices that can be integrated within the ongoing life of the classroom and school in ways that are meaningful and engaging. Resources will be provided for those interested in learning more.