Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners ®
A Four-Day Workshop Series
Just ASK would be pleased to offer our multi-day Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners® series on-site in your district. It can be scheduled on sequential days as a summer institute or in an ongoing format throughout the school year. The latter format provides participants the opportunity to return to their worksites between sessions and conduct action research implementing what they learned through the insightful presentations and collegial collaboration embedded in the workshop series. This series, based on Paula Rutherford’s newest book, Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners, was offered for the first time in 2010 and has already received rave reviews from educators in districts in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Texas, and Virginia.
Essential Questions
- What do schools and classrooms look like when they are organized around the commitment to the achievement of high standards by all students?
- What are the ways we can recognize, respect, and respond to differences in learners?
- How can learning be scaffolded and extended so that all learners are appropriately supported and challenged?
- How do we use data to inform our instructional and formative assessment decisions?
Overview
During the four-day workshop series participants*
- Examine how standards-based education and differentiation can be used together to promote appropriately high levels of achievement for all students
- Explore the similarities and differences in our learners and gain insight about how they are likely to respond to classroom instruction
- Identify options for meeting the needs of the wide range of students in our classrooms, including gifted students, struggling learners, students with special needs, second language learners, resistant and reluctant learners
- Address some familiar scenarios we all encounter: students who give up, students who do not do homework, students who are disorganized, students who already know what we want them to learn, etc.
- Investigate and experience many of the over 60 strategies for supporting and extending the learning of our students discussed in the text Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners
- Focus on literacy across the curriculum and explore content specific strategies for supporting and extending the learning of our students with an emphasis on vocabulary development
Learning Experiences in the Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners® Workshops
During the four-day series participants*
- Complete multiple pre- and self-assessments of their current practice and determine next steps
- Practice task analysis
- Participate in a Graffiti exercise on student choice
- Explore ways to differentiate sources, processes, and products and plan how to integrate those possibilities into the design of instruction
- Engage in a Stir the Class exercise on the diversity of their students
- Experience multiple community builders that would also be appropriate for use in their diverse classrooms
- View video clips of standards-based planning and scaffolding and extension strategies in action
- Examine practical applications of strategies to use with accelerated learners: Models of Teaching such as Concept Attainment and Taba’s Inductive Thinking, analogies and metaphors, and independent study
- Build repertoire of ways to build communities of learners as well as design and use interest and learning styles inventories
- Identify strategies that have a high probability of success with selected students in their classroom: these learners might be second language learners, students with special needs, struggling readers, or at-risk students who live in poverty
- Create tools such as anchoring activities, cubing and think dots, tiered assignments, learning mats, and foldables which they can use in their instructional programs
- Examine student work and student textbooks together
- Through video clips and readings, identify ways to integrate literacy in all content areas
- Engage in collegial discussions about how their use of what they are learning impacts student learning
* If fewer than four days are scheduled, the areas of focus and learning experiences must be reduced to allow in-depth exploration of and experience with the content addressed.
Resources
Contact Just ASK for more information.
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