Crystal Cholin has been an educator for over 25 years, gaining experience in multiple provinces and community settings. She now works with Elk Island Catholic Schools as a learning consultant focusing on Division 3 and 4 English Language Arts, disciplinary literacy, and Indigenous education. In addition to her expertise with English Language Arts, Crystal is also trained in the AIM for FSL and is TEFL certified. Her personal learning journey continues through the pursuit of educational opportunities and through the exploration and sharing of strategies and resources to enhance literacy instruction.
Learning Opportunities
This session has been completed.
Secondary Classrooms - Provoking More Thinking
Presented By
Crystal CholinSeries Sessions
| Date | Time |
|---|---|
| Oct 18, 2018 | 9:00 am to 3:30 pm |
| Nov 22, 2018 | 9:00 am to 3:30 pm |
Location
Grade Levels
AllFrustrated seeing secondary students struggle to learn from the textbook that is too hard for them? Or having to spend hours condensing the learning for students into short presentations, screencasts or simplified notes? Wishing you could find a way for students to understand your course material and engage more with your subject?
Drawing on the most promising strategies from across fields (Hattie: Visible Learning; Gini-Newman & Case: Creating Thinking Classrooms; Erickson: Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction; as well as various Disciplinary Literacy and English Language Learning experts), this 2 day series is framed around a new set of resources developed by ERLC to help teachers intentionally integrate the most impactful learning strategies at the right moment in their lessons/units. These strategies will help teachers launch new topics in an engaging way, get students to do more of the thinking, provoke deeper questions about content, and help students craft more well-thought out responses and/or projects.
You will spend the day partaking in mock lessons from across the content areas in order to actively experience impactful thinking strategies and discover for themselves how to enrich their own disciplinary context.
Day 1 - Activate Thinking, Anticipate Roadblocks & Reinforce Vocabulary
This day will focus on the introductory aspect of lessons and units. We will share strategies that foster student curiosity and activate thinking right out of the gate. Guidelines will be provided for anticipating roadblocks in the content to be learned. We will focus much of the day on how to support students learning new vocabulary, a particular area of challenge for secondary students as they encounter more complex texts and concepts.
Day 2 - Extract Info, Deliberate, Challenge & Consolidate Understandings
This day will focus on the learning and consolidating aspect of lessons and units. We will look at how to effectively use different conceptual lenses, graphic organizers and social construction of understanding where students learn to extract essential details and deliberate on texts they encounter in focused partner and group tasks. Participants will leave with an array of structures and methods to help students consolidate their thinking and share new learning in engaging ways. Goal: more student thinking and interaction = less teacher doing all the thinking for them = deeper learning.
On both days, you will leave with a copy of our new Thinking Strategies placemat and supporting tools. We have carefully selected thinking strategies that can easily be integrated in classrooms.
These 2 days are intended to work in tandem, but participants are welcome to only attend one or both of the sessions. Please email info@erlc.ca if you wish to attend only one of the days.
Target Audience
Grades 7-12 Teachers Across All Subject Areas
Also Recommended For
School-based Administrators, Instructional/Learning Coaches