Jane E. Pollock

• Standards and Assessment

Workshops

• Minding the Achievement Gap One Classroom at a Time: National goals call for “closing the gap” and “reducing dropout rates.” Research shows that teachers can make positive gains with all learners, regardless of language, disability, or poverty. Pollock recommends ways to advance engagement and achievement in special education, with ELLs, and with students academically at-risk. Teachers and administrators can learn to “mind the gap,” to plan lessons and assessments for all learners to meet curriculum goals and apply powerful feedback strategies.
• The i5 Teacher: "Teach critical and creative thinking,” is the message from the National Educational Technology Standards, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Common Core State Standards, echoing the 1950s when Benjamin Bloom urged teachers to teach higher-order thinking. The digital age finally provides tools that allow educators to teach thinking and innovation to all students, even those who are academically at-risk.
  Using the i5 framework, teachers learn to transform teaching and learning. Students move beyond integrating to innovating, beyond consuming to producing information. Participants will learn about the neurological function of the frontal lobes, what’s new, and what we need to know in the classroom; learn to teach critical and creative thinking as standards with success criteria; learn to plan and deliver units of instruction to incorporate stages of learning new information and skills with inference and hypothesis by using technology as the "way to learn," not the "what to do"; and learn to formatively assess students for success in problem-based learning where the process is important and the product is evidence of innovative thinking.
  The i5 Teacher introduces a unit and lesson planning protocol, based on research, for teachers who want to teach students critical and creative thinking skills by using technology.