About Steve

Evidence, Inference, Impact: The Keys to Effective Collaboration  

Well-functioning teacher and leadership teams are essential to the continuous improvement of schools, especially in times of change and uncertainty. When schools and school systems de-emphasize individual practice and promote collective ability, the conditions are created for educators to continuously reflect on and improve their practice. In this highly interactive and engaging session, you’ll learn how to implement a four-step collaborative protocol that fosters positive relationships, encourages responsible autonomy, and creates professionals who enthusiastically believe they can improve student outcomes through equitable learning cultures. When teams follow this protocol consistently, both collaboration and student achievement increase. After this session, you will be equipped to:

• Enable teacher teams to effectively share innovative teaching strategies and learning practices
• Make the most of your collaborative time by clearly defining goals and expectations
• Create a replicable, student-centered cycle of evidence gathering, goal setting, data interpretation, and decision-making 

*This session also includes additional resources and tools that are available via QR codes.

Timing is Everything: Selecting Strategies for Optimal Learning

Some instructional strategies, like success criteria, are unanimously touted as impactful while others get a bad rap. This leaves us to wonder: Out of the hundreds of strategies to choose from, which ones produce optimal learning?What we don’t often talk about in the larger scheme of learning is the fact that when a strategy is introduced can have a significant bearing on how effective that strategy is in increasing student learning and, by proxy, student achievement. 

In a 2016 study, John Hattie and Gregory Donoghue introduced a model of learning to explore how various strategies aimed at increasing student achievement “can most effectively enhance performance when they are matched to the requirements of the task.” That is to say, when a strategy is introduced during the phase of the learning process in which it can best be absorbed by students.

This interactive and engaging session will explore three phases of learning: Surface, deep, and transfer and when to use them in designing effective lessons.

*This session also includes additional resources and tools that are available via QR codes.