This cohort series of hands-on workshops helps educators increase instructional rigor, develop students’ critical thinking skills, and impact learning. In essence, it offers a detailed map of the instructional shifts necessary for success with rigorous new standards.

In partnership with Dr. Robert J. Marzano, Learning Sciences International researchers have identified the essential classroom instructional strategies most effective
for developing higher-order thinking skills, such as analysis, reasoning, hypothesis generation and testing, and decision-making. These strategies move instruction toward
a learner-centered pedagogy, where students have increased autonomy and responsibility for their own learning.

In Teaching Foundations, teachers will learn to construct and implement instructional strategies that help students build foundations when learning new grade-level specific TEKS content. Highly effective strategies, such as identifying critical content, previewing new knowledge and skills, processing content, organizing students to interact with new concepts and skills, elaborating on content and recording and representing new learning will be modeled and recommended for use when introducing new content to students. Teachers will have the opportunity to strengthen the instructional strategies they currently utilize by practicing intentional planning to monitor for evidence of the desired result.

In Goals & Scales, teachers will learn to construct and implement rigorous TEKS-based learning goals and performance scales that not only help students understand what they are learning but also drive instructional decisions. Creation and implementation of standards-based goals and scales will be modeled and teachers will have the opportunity to create or strengthen goals and scales for their own classroom.

In a TEKS-based classroom, teachers need to continuously check where students are in their learning. In Monitoring for Learning, participants learn how to build monitoring into their lessons to determine who is cognitively engaged and who is simply being compliant. This hands-on session gives teachers techniques, tools, and resources to observe, collect, and use formative data to assess learning during a lesson, develop and use assessment tasks in each lesson and adapt instruction based on timely student evidence.

In this hands-on session, teachers learn how to use rigorous TEKS-based learning goals and performance scales to make instructional decisions and drive formative assessment. Participants will create formative assessments to track student progress, plan to monitor student learning in both formal and informal ways, and discover how to encourage student ownership of learning by helping students track their own progress.

In Guiding Deeper Thinking, teachers will learn to construct and

implement research-based instructional strategies that support

students as they expand, apply, and deepen their understanding

of the TEKS student expectations. Highly effective strategies such as tiered questioning, reviewing content, effective guided and independent practice, examining similarities and differences, examining reasoning, and revising knowledge will be modeled to

demonstrate the cognitive progression of thinking required to deepen knowledge. Teachers will have the opportunity to strengthen the instructional strategies they currently utilize by practicing intentional planning to monitor for evidence of the desired result. They will also uncover other strategies and criteria required to guide deeper thinking to reach rigorous standards.

In Facilitating Complex Learning, teachers will learn to construct and implement research-based instructional strategies that ask students to utilize the TEKS student expectations they learn. Highly effective strategies will be modeled and recommended for use when facilitating students as they engage in cognitively complex tasks. Teachers will have the opportunity to strengthen the instructional strategies they currently utilize by practicing intentional planning to monitor for evidence of the desired result. They will also uncover other strategies and criteria required to engage students in complex learning to reach rigorous standards.

• Unit and lesson planning is goal driven, effective and efficient
• Lessons are standards-focused
• TEKS are broken down into learning targets
• Formative assessment data is gathered and used to plan and implement instruction
• Instructional strategies are selected by the teacher based on the progression of learning
• Students spend more time thinking at cognitively complex levels while developing autonomy

• Administrators
• Curriculum Coordinators
• Instructional Coaches
• Department/Grade Level Leads
• New Teachers
• Any Teacher Wanting to Grow in Pedagogy!

Educators will register through The Education Service Center, Region 20. For more information call (210) 370-5671 or Click HERE to register!