Carolyn Chapman Differentiating for the Stars: One Size Doesn't Fit All (keynote)

With differentiation, teachers can lead students to take responsibility for their learning by being fully accountable, personally engaged, and actively immersed in experiences of their choosing. In its brain-friendly way, differentiated instruction creates designs for learning tasks and assessment tools that are interesting, relevant, meaningful, authentic, and powerful.

Differentiated Assessment Strategies: One Tool Doesn't Fit All

Participants will be actively engaged in a variety of useful informal and formal tools during this session.  The toolbox of strategies is used to assess students before, during, and after learning.  These easy to implement assessment strategies, tips, and tools enable educators to evaluate prior knowledge, to find entry points of learning and continue to let assessment drive curriculum throughout the learning process.  Quality assessment data guides instruction in a differentiated classroom.

Donna Tileston Understanding Digital Kids: Teaching and Learning in the New Digital Landscape (Preconference)

Every educator knows that today’s kids are fundamentally different. These differences result from the fact that many of today’s kids, kids of the Instant Messenger (IM) Generation, are growing up in a global digitally networked landscape filled with innovative, interactive, and powerful communication technologies. This presentation examines the new digital landscape and the profound implications this holds for the future of education.

What Every Teacher Should Know about Differentiated Learning

We all realize that kids today are different and that there are significant differences in the way every individual student learns. Furthermore, teachers today have the monumental task of trying to meet the needs of all of their students all the time. This workshop provides a practical, step-by-step process for meeting the needs of different learners. Participants will use interactive and hands-on processes for dealing with differences in terms of socio-economic status, learning modalities, ethnicities, learning difficulties, English language learners and digital learners.

What Every Teacher Should Know About Learning, Memory and the Brain

Everyone has a different opinion about which teaching strategies work best. How do you distinguish between good and great techniques? Based on brain research and on meta-analysis of the effect sizes of different instructional practices, this presentation will help participants learn a process for making informed decisions about choosing the best instructional practices that will make the most difference in student learning. Participants will not only learn why certain practices have a greater effect on student achievement but will also create a process for making decisions in their own classrooms based on the type of knowledge being taught and tested.

Marcia Tate Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites: 20 Instructional Strategies that Engage the Brain

Have researchers ever complained that their students cannot understand or recall much of the content taught after a 24 hour period? It stands to reason that if students don’t learn the way we teach them, then we must teach them the way they learn! Experience 20 instructional strategies (based on brain research and learning style theory) that maximize memory and minimize forgetting. Increase learning for students when strategies like drawing, metaphor, music and storytelling are used to teach curriculum objectives and meet national standards. Explore research that shows why these strategies are preferable to others. Ensure that brains retain key concepts, not only for tests, but for life! This workshop has been called both professional and personally life-changing and lots of fun!

David Sousa Helping Students Become Better Readers Through Brain Science

Kathie Nunley Differentiating the High School Classroom: Overcoming the Obstacles

Can high school teachers cover a huge content-heavy curriculum, follow the district text, prepare students for AP and SAT exams, use predominant lecture methodology, AND differentiate instruction? Absolutely! Best of all, you can have a good time doing it. Despite the obstacles the system may throw our way, differentiation can be done at the high school level. This session will provide practical and humorous suggestions that work in any high school situation.

David Hyerle Thinking Maps: A Language for Learning from Kindergarten to College

This presentation will offer a compelling display of what happens when Thinking Maps and Software are used as a language for learning for all students across different cultures and second language acquisition. Thinking Maps are eight fundamental thinking skills defined and animated by nonlinguistic representations, and introduced as an integrated, common visual language for thinking and learning across whole learning communities. In this presentation, the audience will investigate and practice with these tools and applications in every content area and show exemplars of student work that are explicitly meeting standards and transforming whole schools.

Leadership in a New Language for Teachers and Administrators

Over the past dozen years Thinking Maps have been implemented with depth in over 5,000 whole schools, with a focus on improving content learning and thinking processes. Thinking Maps provide a common visual language for managing an overload of information within complex, often nonlinear problems, which require gathering, organizing evaluating, and communicating ideas. In many schools these schools have provided the glue for bringing people together. In this session, you will be able to literally SEE how this language enables organizational members to see each other’s thinking, resolve differences, create plans, and implement sustainable solutions.