NESSC High School Redesign in Action Conference

The flexibility resulting from the shift to a proficiency-based system provides opportunities to personalize learning and support engagement in authentic learning. The power of such learning is even greater when this learning extends to the community and results in place-based learning. 

In this session, participants will hear the story of a teacher and his students who redesigned a traditional unit in science. Presenters will share how Windham High School staff and students collaborated with community partners to create a published book called Discovering Water. They will discuss how students who engaged in this project considered the learning expectations, chose to create a scientific text, and had a voice in the product and design of the publication currently being used in all grade six classrooms located in the Sebago Watershed in Maine.

Participants in the session will see from start to finish the process of collaboratively creating this scientific text and hear about the next phase of the publication in iBook form. Presenters will also share their ideas about how to extend authentic opportunities and how to provide evidence of learning in a system that graduates students with proficiency-based diplomas.

http://www.discoveringwater.org/ 

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Over the past decade, the foremost researchers and experts on grading—including Ken O'Connor, Thomas Guskey, Robert Marzano, Douglas Reeves, Rick Stiggins, Rick Wormeli, and others—have come to agreement on one of the most important practices for improving instructional effectiveness and student learning: monitoring and reporting academic achievement separately from work habits, character traits, and behaviors such as attendance, class participation, and turning work in on time.

In this session, participants will learn about habits-of-work reporting and how the practice can help teachers more accurately diagnose learning needs and improve academic interventions and support. Participants will also learn how to communicate the rationale for separating work habits from content knowledge and skills in grading, and how to engage students, faculty, families, and community members in the process.

Session Materials: greatschoolspartnership.org/nessc16_how/ 

When competency-based learning meets Career and Technical Education, the possibilities for creating real world, personalized learning experiences are endless. As a high school located within a CTE Center, Manchester School of Technology (MST) is able to design relevant learning experiences in its classrooms and beyond through the close collaboration of faculty members across programs and content areas.

Presenters will share how the framework they have developed leads to integrated experiences that require students to demonstrate their learning across multiple content areas and fields as well their learning to 21st century skills such as communication, research, and critical thinking.

Participants will leave with an understanding of how to collaboratively design and facilitate learning across content areas in a competency-based environment. Participants will have an opportunity to apply MST’s approach and develop ideas for projects or units they can create in collaboration with their colleagues in their districts.

While many educators firmly believe in the purpose of personalized learning, one of the most frequently asked questions is around the instructional practices. What does this look like in the classroom? This session will illustrate the transition from a teacher-centered environment to that of a student-centered learning environment. Participants will examine specific classroom structures and lesson designs that support learning and consider developing stages of implementation from the lens of the classroom teacher.

As schools move to implement personalized learning and encourage and support a greater number of pathways where students are able to demonstrate their learning in more varied and individualized ways, the role of assessment becomes increasingly paramount. While our current system is based on the completion of tasks we ask every student to complete that are scored, we need to shift to a system that collects evidence of what students can demonstrate they have learned. In this session, coaches from the Great Schools Partnership will share strategies and resources educators can use to create an approach that considers the central role of evidence of learning and how we can use task-neutral scoring criteria to assess what students have learned while engaged in different experiences and how well they have done so.

Session Materials: greatschoolspartnership.org/nessc16_evidence/