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“Just Breathe: Making Teaching Fresh and Simple”
Presenters: Jody Bergman & Sarah Heppner
Demands on teachers continue to increase! Take away fresh and simple ideas that you can incorporate into your classroom immediately. Whether you are a new teacher making sense of education or an experienced teacher keeping up with new strategies and methods, we are a friendly resource for you! Highlights include: simple technology integrations, classroom management and organizational tools, working and assessing with data, and quick formative assessments. As experienced grade level representatives, RTI committee members, and department chairs we are friendly resources for our peers at our school and mentors for new teachers.
Cross-Content Shared Instruction
Presenters: Kim Johnson and Jason Hicks,
Carmel High School, Carmel, Indiana
How can we help those students who might just slip by us? How can we help our struggling learners gain confidence and skills? Carmel High School has created a freshman block class to address these issues and others. This class is essentially a merging of English 9 with Geography History of the World. While the class is not taught in a traditional block format, the framework for it allows for teachers to coordinate their time, scaffold and differentiate instruction, and meet specific behavioral needs of shared students. The hope is that through a thematic and skills-focused merging of curriculum, students will gain more support and better understanding of the content. Students will also learn how to better manage their own time, homework, and study habits.
What we have discovered so far, through trial and error, is that there are benefits to the students and the teachers that we didn’t anticipate. We have more time to scaffold instruction and monitor student progress. Our class size allows us to work with students individually to make sure each one is doing the work. Our shared student groupings foster positive behavior management and immediate need identification. Students cannot hide in these classes and let the higher skilled students do the work for them. Student leaders emerge who would never have the opportunity in other settings. Confidence among the students soars, especially when they discover their overall improvement. In essence, the dynamics of the course contributed to the evolving student identities.
Links to Additional Resources:
Description of Q1-1 Multi-Draft Expository Essay and Presentation Assignment
Course Description: English 9/Geography History of the World