Notes from STEP workshops on Facilitating and Teaching
STEP Participant home pageFacilitator Hat for presenting at a Teacher workshop
- Knowledge: Ensure teachers have the knowledge you are trying to convey in the workshop (provide the answers/information that the teachers will need to teach correctly)
- conduct pre- and post-assessments
- Discuss misconceptions and how to address them
- Ways to provide differentiated instruction (GT, ELL, etc) on this topic
- Ways to accommodate students
- How to integrate technology/ simulations
- How: Conduct and model activities so that the teachers can experience them as students
- Make and take activities
- Hands-on
- Introduce necessary vocabulary
- Memory strategies
- Model questions for students, esp essential questions
- Incorporate and discuss relevant instructional strategies/ paradigms
- Provide the teachers time
- Processing time
- Time to discuss implementation strategies
- Provide the materials they need to go forth and implement
- the complete activity write-up — both electronic and paper
- access to any technology
- when possible, copies they can use in their classrooms
- Provide the purpose and intent of what the teachers are learning
- Workshop objectives
- relevance — “why should I care”, the connecting TEKS, and the STAAR test
- connections to STEM, to careers
- context/the bigger picture (how topics relate to one another)
- Where does it fit within scope and sequence
- Be prepared to address resistance
- Participants may not have chosen to attend
- Participants may be uncomfortable with the topic (concerned about appearing ignorant); Make sure the teachers do not feel threatened (for instance, through anonymous activities like “snowball” (similar to Page Keeley’s FACT #7, Commit and Toss, in “Science Formative Assessment”)
- Participants may prefer how they are currently covering this topic
- provide teacher incentives for participating (materials, chocolate, food, stipends…)
- Encourage networking
- Assist with vertical alignment
- Provide follow-up
- Participant planning and discussion
- Share student examples and lessons learned from your own classroom experiences in this topic, with these materials
Teachers Hat for addressing this topic with their students
- Recognize that the students are starting at different levels of understanding:
- Pre-assess students
- Provide differentiated instruction; incorporate kinesthetic learning when possible to help, as long as it does not encourage misconceptions
- Provide accommodations
- [Particularly for lunar phases and seasons] clarify the perspective for each activity, discussion, simulation—students have difficulty switching from 3D to 2D
- (for phases, seasons, tides) provide a variety of models, changing positions of objects, use both 3D models and diagrams
- Ascertain student misconceptions
- Cover vocabulary, providing physical examples when possible
- Teachers need a solid understanding of the topic to answer questions
- Use essential questions (appropriately phrased, age and grade appropriate) to allow students to share their thoughts and come to the answer
- When appropriate, thing out loud to model your reasoning for questions, but take care not to seem ignorant or vulnerable to the students or faculty
- Share the relevance with the students (why should they care); possibly share the related TEKS, and your expectations for the students
At end of workshop
Teacher’s Hat
- Differentiated Activity Questions
- Lower learners — recall, memorization, sentence stems
- Sentence Stem – a starter after you give students a question. For example: “What is rotation? Rotation is the … (fill in the blank)”
- Higher level learners — predict, analyze
- Bloom’s has great verbs for each type of learner
- Lower learners — recall, memorization, sentence stems
- Evaluation
- Exit Ticket — a useful post-assessment
- Every Student answers Every Question
- Make a Dropbox or wiki for the STEP Participants
- Project Share — a social network for teachers (thru Epsilon) *We would need to see if we can access & use this
- Christine will post Page Keeley’s Probes to her Dropbox for the STEP Participants
Facilitator’s Hat
- How long to really cover this topic for a teacher workshop?
- Depends on the experience/understanding of the teachers involved
- Longer for new teachers
- Longer for inclusion of assessment/evaluation & misconceptions
- Treat your participants like Adult learners — don’t talk down to them (or students), but they should participate as students