Have you ever found yourself in need of making accommodations to better support the range of learners in your room, but you didn’t know how to begin? In this presentation, you will be provided some ways to create a template for accommodating and modifying that can be used consistently throughout the year to speed up the process and provide a starting point. I have taught biology and chemistry for many years with a diverse group of learners, including students assessed on the Essential Elements with significant needs. Whether you just need some ideas for embedding more explicit vocabulary strategies or materials to reach a nonverbal student in a way that allows them to participate in a lab with their peers, there will be an opportunity to see examples and hear how they were created.
The goal of the session is to provide an overview with a few examples of my resources followed by time to brainstorm with peers in the session, ask questions, and create some resources you can use in your classroom when you return. Bring your colleagues for even more collaboration!
Attendees will hear about our work to best unpack rich teacher resources to develop a cohesive PLC perspective of what a uniform experience might look like. We will discuss strategies for how to UBD a transfer task based assessment system which focuses on Science and Engineering Practices (SEPs) and Crosscutting Concepts (CCCs) rather than Disciplinary Core Ideas (DCIs). Teachers in a PLC need to develop a shared vision of what student success looks like on SEPs/CCCs in order to efficiently share success criteria with students and effectively plan instruction to provide students to deeply engage in productive work to build the capacity for that success. At the end of the session, attendees will leave with a template that could be used as is or edited to organize PLC discussions for backwards planning a unit. Attendees will leave with strategies for clarifying SEP/CCC success and facilitator moves for developing those practices in the classroom.
Attendees will experience several related science phenomena to build incrementally more productive models that explain the science that is being observed. A focus will be placed on attendee sensemaking -- both individually and as a collective group -- to increase facilitator tool boxes in terms of supporting student sensemaking through scientific models. The NGSS Science and Engineering Practice (SEP) of Developing and Using Models can be leveraged to bring student ideas to paper to explain weird and complex ideas. As facilitators in 3-Dimensional learning spaces, sometimes it is difficult to provide students guidance in how to create productive models without squashing student agency and authority. How can a teacher guide students toward success while leaving space for student discourse around productive modeling practices? Attendees of this session will leave with practical tools they can use to organize their facilitation moves when they ask students to develop scientific models.
Insects are the Rodney Dangerfields of conservation—they don’t get no respect. As a result, invertebrate conservation (including that of insects) tends to be significantly underfunded and ignored. It doesn’t help that a majority of people think of most insects as just “bugs”—pests that would best be exterminated. One exception to this rule is Danaus plexippus—the monarch butterfly. Despite being invertebrates, monarchs rank up there with eagles and whales, manatees and wolves as emblems of conservation and the parts of nature that we love. Most people can identify monarch caterpillars, know that they feed on milkweeds, and certainly recognize the adults—not something they can say about any other lepidopteran.
The first grade class at University Lake School—a small, private school in Hartland, Wisconsin—has, for many years, learned about and acted out the monarch life cycle and migration. We will go through the activity, providing background information about these iconic invertebrates as well as giving out materials so participants can easily have their students become graceful monarchs!
