Region 13's E-Campus

This series of workshops is aligned with ESF Lever 3 EA 3.1 Compelling and aligned vision, mission, goals, values focused on a safe environment and high expectations.

How can you create a productive and engaging learning environment for your students? As a teacher, you are expected to set goals for your TTESS evaluation for Dimension 4--Learning Environment. This Dimension requires you to set up a respectful classroom environment that provides students with efficient class routines and procedures, clear behavior expectations, and a emotionally supportive learning climate to maximize learning. Teachers attending the Strategic Instruction Learning Environment Workshops will learn practical and useful instructional strategies for meeting those expectations and goals and for designing effective lesson plans with high expectations for all students.

The series of Strategic Instruction workshops include sessions on teaching practices in these areas:

1) Academic Conversations: Participants will learn useful strategies that can be used immediately--less theory, more action—to increase the rigor of classroom academic talk. In an interactive workshop, teachers will learn and practice teaching methods to increase students' critical thinking and literacy skills through classroom conversations with the teacher and with each other.

2) Jumpstarting Your Classroom  How do you create a learning community in the first 20 days of school? 

You will learn a variety of productive, collaborative, and engaging strategies and lessons to help you build structures for a learning community in your classroom. Creating a positive culture and climate in your class will be our focus during the day. We will plan and practice how to blend social-emotional and academic learning to create an engaging and meaningful classroom where all students can learn in a collaborative environment. 

3) Learning Intentions and Success Criteria:  Which comes first - the learning intention or the activity? Our inclination, at times, is to set up activities before establishing learning intentions. In this workshop we will do the opposite by analyzing the TEKS to determine learning intentions (what students are expected to learn). But how do we measure student progress? Success criteria, what must be achieved to show learning had occurred, gives us the ability to measure progress. We will change our thinking to ask what are students learning not what are they doing. Then we'll create TEKS aligned formative assessments to measure their mastery of clear learning objectives and success criteria. 

The Learning Environment workshops were created and will be presented by ESC Region 13 specialists who used the instructional strategies with their own students and/or worked with teachers using them in classrooms with a diverse range of students.