This session will present evidence of the major pressures to change American Education, the alternatives being proposed, and one exceptional solution that was created by educators in a local district, expanded to cover a state, and is now exploding across several states as an easy-to-use method to focus on the needs of each individual student while retaining the classroom structure.
Schools across the nation continue to strive for improved student outcomes through improved staff collaboration and efficiency, better access to data to inform instructional decisions, added structure and cohesiveness for Response to Intervention (RtI) processes, and more transparent and consistent benchmarking methods to discern student progress. Silverback Learning Solutions has streamlined this whole process to make it easier for teachers and principals to “personalize” education, support each student where necessary, create virtual teams of capacity builders around each student, and bring the parents back to the table of accountability where research has proven they need to be in order to affect achievement gains necessary to fulfill each child’s academic potential. The presentation will include data collected from three currently active districts with various socio-economic backgrounds as well as research that support the need for developing personalized learning environments for each and every student.
This session demonstrates Science Writer, a free digital tool framed in the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) that guides students through the scientific inquiry process. Specific classroom-based examples will demonstrate embedded research-based writing strategies in digital environments to provide students in grades 4-9 with scaffolded adjustable supports for writing science reports.
This presentation will chronicle the adventures of fifth graders at Abbot School who worked together to write scripts, create props, snap pictures, sequence frames and record narration to tell the tales of European explorers with the medium of stop-action movies. The process, tools and finished projects all will be shared.
