Learning to Learn: Developing Self-Directed Learners
This session focuses on cultivating self-directed students in a K-12 environment by equipping them with skills to create and implement their own learning plans. Participants will explore strategies for fostering student autonomy, goal-setting, and self-monitoring. Emphasis will be placed on practical techniques to help students manage their time, develop problem-solving skills, and build resilience. Attendees will learn how to integrate these practices into their teaching to support students’ growth both academically and personally. By the end of the session, educators will be prepared to guide students in becoming proactive, responsible learners capable of thriving inside and outside the classroom.
Jonathon Borys
Regional Director of Education, OneSchool Global North America
Courtney Avangelista
Global Teacher Academy Director, OneSchool Global North America
Adaptive Expertise in the Science & Art of Teaching
Join us to explore the concept of adaptive expertise in teaching, and how research from Mind, Brain and Education (MBE) can support excellent teaching and learning. Teachers continuously adapt their instruction in response to ever-changing classroom dynamics, and expert teachers draw from a robust bank of knowledge, tools, and strategies to inform their practice. In this session, we’ll explore how concepts from Psychology, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, Health and Education can inform great teaching by enhancing adaptive expertise.
Kristin Simmers
PhD Candidate, University of Connecticut
A Science of Teaching Built By and For Teachers
The profession of teaching is under assault. Many politicians, administrators and parents question content and methods. Some researchers and professional organizations lament that teachers do not leverage “evidence-based” strategies, others argue that teaching is a calling whose strategies are beyond examination, mystifying and de-professionalizing the practice of teaching. Does teaching lend itself to generating proof of its impact? This talk will explore the model of an educator who is evidence generating as a result of responsible classroom practice and the dire need for this to happen. Inherent to this idea is the need to evaluate practice in context by those who implement it, and the appreciation for what the teacher can, and should, bring to the practice and study of teaching. We will discuss various perspectives on where teaching innovations can, and should, come from; how to vet new, and current, strategies; how difficult it is to design for authentic classroom impact; and the need to examine unintended consequences when introducing new strategies to practice. Ultimately, the goal of this talk is to explore a new model of what it is for teaching to be a profession that responsibly generates its own knowledge and practices. We have Science of Learning: Why don’t we have a Science of Teaching?
David Daniel
Professor Emeritus, Psychology James Madison University
An emotion-based approach to education: Insights from a teacher turned mental health counselor
As educators, some of our hardest work is that involving emotions. The classroom itself is a hotbed of emotion-based interactions! However, teacher training seldom includes practices that could help to identify and address emotions. As a former science teacher now pursuing a career in youth mental health, I am learning skills that I wish I had known in the classroom. In this interactive session, we will discuss how principles of trauma-informed mental health treatment can be incorporated into the Universal Design for Learning framework. We will identify different states of emotional activation, what prompts them, how to spot them, and how to respond when they arise. You will learn how to reach more students, enhance student learning, and improve interpersonal connections with your students and colleagues. Whatever your educational role, this session will include nuggets of insight for you!
Raquel Sherman
School-Based and Educator-Support Clinician, River Valley Counseling Center
'Better than Bloom'? - Thinking Moves A - Z: Metacognition Made Simple
Roger Sutcliffe, the creator of the scheme, will explain how the 26 verbs in the A – Z encompass but surpass Bloom’s famous, but flawed, taxonomy of cognitive processes. He will show how teaching and learning at any level, and in any domain, can be improved by planning for and practising individual Moves, and by developing a rich range of metacognitive strategies, expressed as simple combinations of Moves. These strategies can be compared with Project Zero’s Thinking Routines, but enable both more precise articulations of the steps involved, and more potent variations.
Roger Sutcliffe
Director, DialogueWorks
Returning Control to Students: Learning Portfolios as Assessment Tools
The importance of student agency when it comes to assessment practices is well documented, though it can sometimes be challenging to design for such work systematically. This session will explore how learning portfolios can provide students with authentic opportunities to author their own learning narratives. Specifically, attendees will learn how to embed regular opportunities for metacognitive reflection, how to develop a culture of documentation, and how to capture this work in several different portfolio formats.
Kurt Prescott
Humanities Instructor, Maret School
The Sequel to the Science of Reading: The Science of Teaching Writing
This session will discuss the current state of writing instruction and student proficiency in America, identify key issues with existing teaching methods, and introduce the Writing Pathway—a free, open-source scope and sequence developed with and for teachers to guide writing instruction in any content area, grades 3-12. We’ll present findings from a quasi-experimental study we conducted in the 2022-2023 school year, which showed statistically significant improvement in student writing outcomes when the Pathway was used. Additionally, we’ll share preliminary results from a second ongoing study and demonstrate how the Pathway’s AI tools support teachers in creating tailored, high-quality materials that embed the teaching of writing in their specific content.
Sherry Lewkowicz
Senior Director, The Writing Pathway Innovation Lab, Teaching Lab
The Writing Revolution: Writing in Service of Learning with the Hochman Method
With the focus intensifying on evidence-based reading practices, it’s crucial that writing instruction is not excluded from the conversation. When students write about what they are learning, it improves their understanding of texts, deepens their thinking about content, and builds background knowledge and vocabulary. During our session, we will provide an overview and practice with the Hochman Method, an approach to explicit writing instruction that teachers can use in every grade and in all subjects.
Alexandria Chalonec
Co-Director of Academics, The Writing Revolution
Christine Teahan
Co-Director of Academics, The Writing Revolution
The Power Of A Core Set Of Teaching Techniques
Why do students struggle in the classroom? Well, it’s complicated! In a class of multiple individuals, it is not straight-forward to find out how successfully each individual person is learning, identifying what their difficulties or gaps are and then to use that information to close their learning gaps with appropriate responses. All too often, faced with this ever-present difficulty, teachers cut corners and do not structure lessons so that they focus on flushing out difficulties, errors and gaps in recall and understanding. They rely too heavily on collective responses and a generalised sense of student success rate without consciously and deliberately attending to each and every individual. As a result, the least confident students can pass from lesson to lesson, going through the motions of lesson activities, being present, caught up in the general flow, without having their individual learning issues addressed; their learning gaps go undetected at the point of instruction and often remain. Teachers who master a core set of powerful teaching techniques can respond more readily to these challenges.
Matt Stone
Director of Education & Operations, Teaching WalkThrus
Using MBE Strategies to Develop High Quality Learning Sessions
Effective learning design is the cornerstone of meaningful learning. By carefully crafting your learning episodes with evidence-informed strategies, you ensure that every moment in the classroom is impactful. Our session emphasizes the critical role of intentional and thoughtful design, combined with the use of evidence -informed strategies, in creating engaging and deep learning experiences. You will learn how to structure your learning episodes for a wide variety of audiences to maximize learner interaction, understanding, and retention.
Amy Struntz
Supervisor for Induction and Professional Learning, Frederick County Public Schools
Tammy Sander
Teacher Specialist for Induction and Professional Learning, Frederick County Public Schools
We Are All Innovators- How Design Thinking and Problem Based Learning Inspires Learners
Design thinking and problem based learning teachers create learning opportunities that create instructional value through transformation of information and learning as they form structures and experiences that are not merely about the product, but a process that encourages students to create knowledge, apply skills and acquire competencies by solving all scales of problems. When design thinking is combined with problem-based learning, it is a transformational process that creates deep cultures of learning, that embraces academic acumen, cross disciplinary skill, student choice, and inspired creativity.
Charles James
CTTL Design Thinking Research Lead, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School
How Teaching & Learning Happens: Implementing Evidence-Informed Practice in the Classroom, School, and District
This session is perfect for teachers and leaders seeking to start their school or district on a journey toward evidence-informed practice. Using insights from the acclaimed books How Learning Happens and How Teaching Happens, the session will highlight essential ways to use key findings from cognitive science to enhance student learning outcomes.
Walk away with a vision of the science of learning in practice at scale and how to move from theory to application on Monday morning!
Meg Lee
Advisor for Evidence-Informed Practice, Academica University of Applied Sciences
Teaching Like Ted (Lasso): Growing Happiness Today and Success Tomorrow
What does it mean to be educated? How about learning to be happy? Life, however, is not an easy assignment. The core tenets of the award-winning show Ted Lasso teach us to help others and aspire to reach our highest potential. To help students do this, we aim to emulate what Ted teaches: Teach students to connect their intellects with their hearts, broaden success as a positive sum, and grow positive feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Why? Happiness connects people more powerfully than almost any other human experience. The effects of those positive changes ripple through social networks increasing the happiness around us. You find yourself surrounded by the very things you helped foster. As Trent Crimm aptly remarked, “If the Lasso way is wrong, it’s hard to imagine being right.”
Join Steve in this engaging and interactive workshop where he will unveil over two decades of practical, evidence-based teaching strategies. These strategies intertwine the psychological science of happiness with SEL competencies that can seamlessly integrate into existing curricula or classroom settings. Additional lesson ideas and practices from Steve’s book will be provided to get you started teaching like Ted and growing happiness.
Steve Banno, Jr.
Author, Teaching What Matters
