It's daunting how much information you can get in a PD in such a short amount of time. It's easy to feel inspired to think, "I can't wait to revamp my entire syllabus and way of teaching!" But it's just not feasible. My goal in every PD I attend is to find one thing I can take back into the classroom. Baby steps is key, and taking even just one thing to incorporate in class can prove challenging. However, each one thing you successfully incorporate, the closer you get to becoming a better teacher.
When I went to Achieve the Core last time, my team and I decided to utilize a common writing method, the CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning). I now use it for formative assessments based on a group of primary documents. Learn more about CER here!
On another Woo-Hoo moment: I think I've already talked about Quizlet Live on this blog before, so I decided to film my students playing it so you can see how useful/fun it is!
(They all have permission to be filmed.)
Video 1 Commentary: The SmartBoard shows the number of questions correct for all the teams. The quickest team to get all the vocab words correct wins. One of the students at the beginning of the video glances at the board to see his team's status. If the team gets a question wrong, they have to start back to 0. The second team the video shows gets one wrong as I walked by. The third team there was a ESL student, with extremely little knowledge of English. The pair took over his iPad, I told them next time to let him press the words, but they can tell which words they want him to choose. This will at least allow him to feel a part of the team. The game automatically stops when a team wins, as seen towards the end of the video where the "Congratulations" screen pops up on everyone's iPads at once, and the winning team celebrates. I don't give them anything but bragging rights for winning, they just love the competition that much.
Video 2 Commentary: Best reaction to winning ever.
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