Supporting Classroom Instruction: Annotation Guides

Last week at North Star Online School and Inspire Academy teachers gathered to create school-wide annotation guides. Discussing what annotation means, why students use annotations, and what annotations might look like,  teachers created school-wide annotation guides they and their students will use to support a careful reading of text in a variety of content areas. The materials for these collaborative session can be found here. The guides teachers created are linked below. 

• North Star Online School Annotation Guide 
• Inspire Academy Annotation Guide 

Shifting Instruction to the Core: Planning for the Shifts

During separate sessions this week, teachers at North Star School and Inspire Academy gathered and continued their work to align instruction to the shifts. During these sessions ELA and literacy teachers collaborated to design and implement vertically aligned annotation guides in their middle and high school classes and mathematics teachers planned for focus, coherence, and rigor. Materials for this session include:

• CCSS Reading Standards for ELA/Literacy
• Northern Nevada TAH Grant Text Annotation guide 
• Common Agreements Note taker for Inspire and North Star
• PowerPoints for Inspire and North Star

Supporting Classroom Instruction: Text & Task Resources for Adult Education

Many educators in Washoe County School District's Adult Education classrooms have questions about where to find texts appropriate for both the learning and maturity levels of their adult students. While the resources for K-12 teachers have expanded immensely over the last couple of years, textbooks fully aligned to Adult Education's College and Career Readiness Standards are still in development. As publishers work to better align resources, Adult Education teachers might consider newspapers, periodicals, and civics course materials to support pairing complex text and text dependent tasks in basic adult literacy and English language courses . In working with Adult Education teachers, Dawn Adams and I drafted a text-dependent activity resource (linked here) that teachers could possibly use to integrate texts worth reading and tasks worth doing into their lessons. Later supports will look at selecting a series of texts to support building a coherent body of knowledge throughout basic literacy and language courses.

Shifting Instruction to the Core: Planning for Coherence and Rigor

Inspire Academy and Turning Point educators gathered Wednesday to continue their professional learning around the Instructional Practice Guides for the CCSS Mathematics. Working through resources from the Teaching Channel, Student Achievement Partners, and Illustrative Mathematics, teachers and administrators planned lessons that reflect the coherence and appropriate aspects of rigor called for by course standards. Resources for the days session included:

• The PowerPoint
• Coherence Cards: Kindergarten - 8th Grade, 6th-8th Grade
• Math Tasks from Illustrative Mathematics: Ants versus humans and Clea on an Escalator
• Resource links for planning

Shifting Instruction to the Core: Continued Introduction to Core Action Two

On Wednesday afternoon educators at Inspire Academy and Turning Point continued their professional learning centered around the Instructional Practice Guides, Core Action 2 (the first session description and materials can be found here). In this second introductory session, teachers and administrators shared their completed 'Steps for Addressing Core Action 2' and engaged in text-centered, standards-specific tasks that addressed both the substance and the craft of The Atlantic article, "The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math'".  Resources from this session include:

• The PowerPoint

• Steps for Addressing Core Action 2

• Resources for exemplar texts and lessons

• Text Annotation Matrix