Supporting Struggling Students Staff Development Kits
Setting Students up for Success: Rather than wait for students to fail before providing supports, this kit will help teachers set students up for success and implement strategies that prevent students from struggling in the first place. Teachers will learn:
• How to use acceleration to help struggling students prepare for learning
• How to use advanced organizers to frame the learning for students
• How to implement effective vocabulary instruction
• How to use previewing strategies to help struggling students acquire the skills they need to be successful in an upcoming unit
• How to use organizing strategies such as graphic organizers to help students successfully engage in the learning process
• How to activate prior knowledge or provide students with the background knowledge they need to be successful in an upcoming unit of study
Proactive Intervention and Remediation: This staff development kit helps teachers develop a proactive intervention plan that provides struggling students with specific supports to help them meet or exceed the standards. Teachers will learn:
• How to tell whether students are struggling productively or destructively
• How to identify mastery thresholds
• How to determine red flags that signal a student is headed for destructive struggle
• How to use red flags to provide appropriate and timely interventions designed to get struggling students quickly back on track.
• How to implement progressive interventions that help students meet mastery thresholds
• Specific intervention strategies to address the needs of struggling students
• How to gradually remove supports so that students can learn to be successful on their own
• How to provide effective remediation prior to the summative assessment
Rigor Staff Development Kits
Planning Rigorous Lessons: : This Staff Development Kit helps teachers understand the four stages of rigor and how to increase the level of rigor in their lessons. Teachers will learn:
Teachers learn:
• How to successfully move students through the four stages of rigor (acquisition, application, assimilation, and adaptation).
• How to help students learn new material in a highly rigorous way.
• How to help students develop specific thinking skills such as abstraction, analyzing perspectives, classification, compare/contrast, constructing support, deductive and inductive reasoning, and error analysis.
• How to help students build thinking processes such as decision making, investigation, invention, hypothesis testing, and problem solving.
• How to help students develop habits of mind.
• How to develop assessments that measure students’ thinking skills rather than their rote memorization of disconnected facts and skills.
• How to develop lessons and units that build students’ capacity for rigorous learning over time.
Preparing Under-Prepared Students for Rigor: Many students could access more rigorous courses if only they were prepared. Given the push to help more students succeed in rigorous courses, it is important to build students’ capacity for rigorous thinking and learning. Teachers will learn:
• What rigorous learning really means.
• How to help under-prepared students build their capacity for rigor over time.
• How to support under-prepared students without sacrificing the rigor of their courses.
• Specific strategies to support rigorous acquisition, application, assimilation, and adaptation.
• How to prepare students for rigorous summative assessments.
• How to select learning materials that foster rigorous thinking and learning.
• How to implement effective interventions to help under-prepared students keep up with rigorous coursework.
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Differentiated Instruction Staff Development Kits
Planning Differentiated Learning Units: Rather than plan three or four lessons to meet the needs of students, this professional development kit helps teachers plan ONE lesson that will help EVERY student meet or exceed the standards. Teachers will learn:
• How to identify the needs of the four types of students
• The learning needs of each of the four types of students
• How to plan learning units that address the needs of each of the four types of students
• How to design lessons that are customizable so that students can find their own learning pathways through each lesson.
• Specific strategies to provide differentiated learning opportunities for students.
Differentiated Supports: Different students require different types of supports. In this kit, teachers will learn how to customize their supports to directly address the learning needs of each student. Teachers will learn:
• The learning needs of each of the four types of students.
• How to create customizable learning assignments that provide embedded support for each of the four types of students.
• Specific support strategies to address students who struggle with content.
• Specific support strategies to address students who struggle with processes.
• Specific support strategies to address the needs of students who require more challenge.
• How to monitor students and provide appropriate, just-in-time supports to meet their various learning needs.
