Categories:
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 to
- Use acceleration to help struggling students prepare for learning
- Use advanced organizers to frame the learning for students
- Implement effective vocabulary instruction
- Use previewing strategies to help struggling students acquire the skills they need to be successful in an upcoming unit
- Use organizing strategies such as graphic organizers to help students successfully engage in the learning process
- 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 to
- Tell whether students are struggling productively or destructively
- Identify mastery thresholds
- Determine red flags that signal a student is headed for destructive struggle
- Use red flags to provide appropriate and timely interventions designed to get struggling students quickly back on track
- Implement progressive interventions that help students meet mastery thresholds
- Address the needs of struggling students
- Remove, gradually, supports so that students can learn to be successful on their own
- 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 to
- Move students through the four stages of rigor (acquisition, application, assimilation, and adaptation)
- Help students learn new material in a highly rigorous way
- Work with students to develop specific thinking skills such as abstraction, analyzing perspectives, classification, compare/contrast, constructing support, deductive and inductive reasoning, and error analysis
- Teach students to build thinking processes such as decision-making, investigation, invention, hypothesis testing, and problem solving
- Help students develop habits of mind
- Develop assessments that measure students’ thinking skills rather than their rote memorization of disconnected facts and skills
- 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 to
- Understand and apply rigor
- Help under-prepared students build their capacity for rigor over time
- Support under-prepared students without sacrificing the rigor of their courses
- Support rigorous acquisition, application, assimilation, and adaptation
- Prepare students for rigorous summative assessments
- Select learning materials that foster rigorous thinking and learning
- 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 to
- Identify the learning needs of the four types of students
- Plan learning units that address the needs of each of the four types of students
- Design lessons that are customizable so that students can find their own learning pathways through each lesson
- 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 to
- Create customizable learning assignments that provide embedded support for each of the four types of students
- Address students who struggle with content and process
- Monitor students and provide appropriate, just-in-time supports to meet their various learning needs
