Reconsidering the Training of Teachers of High Ability and Exceptional Students

1. Reconsidering the Training of Teachers of High Ability and Exceptional Students Michael Slavkin and Stacy Stetzel Manchester University Education Department

2. Overview of roundtable • Programming in teacher education driven by market forces, high stakes tests, and external challenges from all sides • How do we meet the needs of our preservice teachers? • How can we prepare them for schools that don’t yet exist? • How can we ensure that their needs and the needs of their future students are met? • What theories and strategies are most important to share? In order to ensure that they are able to meet the needs of present and future students, we need to emphasize strategies that work across settings and student populations.

3. Special education and high ability • Prepare our students for work in variety of settings, but each of them must prepare to work with (1) high ability students, (2) students with exceptionalities/special education, or (3) English Language learners. • If they can accommodate the needs of these students, then they can work with traditional learners • If they understand how to accommodate using best practices, then the needs of all students can be met

4. High Leverage practices • The heart of the TeachingWorks strategy is to ensure that all teachers have the training necessary for responsible teaching. We focus on a core set of fundamental capabilities that we call "high leverage practices.“ • A “high-leverage practice” is • an action or task central to teaching • increase the likelihood that teaching will be effective for students’ learning • useful across a broad range of subject areas, grade levels, and teaching contexts, and are helpful in using and managing differences among pupils • set of “best bets,” warranted by research evidence, wisdom of practice, and logic • Over time, and in collaboration with our partners, TeachingWorks will improve the set of high-leverage practices by studying their effects on students’ learning of basic and complex academic content and skills. • common framework for the practice of teaching that will provide the basis for a core curriculum for the professional training of teachers.  Such a core curriculum would make possible collective development of materials and tools for training teachers, common assessments of performance, and agreement about standards for independent practice.

5. High leverage practices • Making content explicit through explanation, modeling, representations, and examples • Leading a whole-class discussion • Eliciting and interpreting individual students’ thinking • Establishing norms and routines for classroom discourse central to the subject-matter domain • Recognizing particular common patterns of student thinking in a subject-matter domain • Identifying and implementing an instructional response to common patterns of student thinking • Teaching a lesson or segment of instruction • Implementing organizational routines, procedures, and strategies to support a learning environment

6. High leverage practices • Setting up and managing small group work • Engaging in strategic relationship-building conversations with students • Setting long- and short-term learning goals for students referenced to external benchmarks • Appraising, choosing, and modifying tasks and texts for a specific learning goal • Designing a sequence of lessons toward a specific learning goal • Selecting and using particular methods to check understanding and monitor student learning • Composing, selecting, interpreting, and using information from methods of summative assessment • Providing oral and written feedback to students on their work • Communicating about a student with a parent or guardian • Analyzing instruction for the purpose of improving it • Communicating with other professionals http://www.teachingworks.org/work-of-teaching/high-leverage-practices#sthash.Kkwv5UFv.dpuf

7. Development course

8. assessment course

9. instruction course

10. Why do this? • "So our environment, including the classroom environment, is not a neutral place. We educators are either growing dendrites or letting them wither and die. The trick is to determine what constitutes an enriched environment. The brain has not evolved to its present condition by taking in meaningless data; an enriched environment gives students an opportunity to make sense out of what they are learning, what some call the opportunity to "make meaning.“ • The brain is essentially curious and it must be to survive. It constantly seeks connections between the new and the known. Learning is a process of active construction by the learner and enrichment gives students the opportunity to relate what they are learning to what they already know. As noted educator Phil Schlechty says, "Students must do the work of learning.” - What Do We Know from Brian Research? by Pat Wolfe and Ron Brandt

11. “…if we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.” -John Dewey