Feb. 1, 2016

INTERACTIVE WORD WALLS

U.CAN on Jan. 25th was a fabulous time of reflection on the work we did with Dr. Julie Jackson. Every conversation was meaningful and the collaboration among our staff made me feel grateful to be working with a group of teachers that are committed to growth, based on researched practices, to help our students. Here are the questions that were used to guide team discussions:

1. Does it contain student generated material?
   
2. What TEKS are being addressed?
   
3. Does it include process skills and/or TEKS verbs?
   
4. Are words arranged to organize learning? (Visual Literacy)
   
5. Is it used by students and teachers to support instruction? To support writing in class?
   
6. Does it include any part of a claim, evidence and reasoning statement?
   
7. Can you tell what stage of the unit of study students are currently in based on the wall development?
   

Please continue to use these questions and invite other staff members to give you feedback. Many of you requested for interactive word walls photos to be uploaded because you did not get to visit all classrooms during UCAN. Please upload them to this folder.

If you have any other ideas of how we can utilize this same type of UCAN process, please share them me.

Jan. 11, 2016

Many times we have the opportunity to attend a training, however we never get the face time with the presenter to personalize the ideas to our students. Our time spent with Dr. Julie Jackson has ignited great discussions to help us on our journey of growth from good, to better & best!!

This slide was shown during most small group sessions and will be a perfect addition to the planning process. It is imperative that we as teachers understand the reasoning (scientific principle) we teach so we set our students up for success.

The link to the blog article that Dr. Jackson referred to is http://www.edutopia.org/blog/science-inquiry-claim-evidence-reasoning-eric-brunsell

This link also has the Audi commercial "My Dad is an Alien" as well. In several of the small group meetings, Dr. Jackson shared this video and suggested that it might be a great video to use to introduce CER to your scholars. Enjoy!!