And Much, Much More!

A one-day or two-day professional development session that provides participants step-by-step practical guidance to properly create, set up and use learning centers for differentiated instruction for every subject and every child.

Providing meaningful and truly independent differentiated activities for the majority of your students while you are focusing on small group instruction is a challenge! Learning centers offer engaging and effective activities that will extend your students’ learning through review and reinforcement, critical thinking, and cooperative work. Learning centers can support instruction for phonemes and phonics, reading comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, math facts, math concepts, science and social studies content. It offers teachers a wide array of options and examples for structuring learning centers to fit their own teaching approach and their students’ learning styles and needs. The strategies in this workshop are derived from research-based instructional strategies proven to enhance student success. It combines theory with hands-on activities and applications tailored to meet your individual classroom needs.

Participants will learn -

• Why and how to use learning centers
• Integrating differentiation and independent learning into your classroom and curriculum
• Roles of teachers and students in differentiated classrooms
• Types of Learning Centers
• Diagnosing your students
• Differentiated instruction and standards
• Differentiated instruction through technology and game-based learning
• Designing effective learning centers for teaching and learning in your own classroom
• Setting instructional goals for learning centers
• Management issues and solutions for using learning centers
• Strategies of organizing, managing and maintaining learning centers
• Designing effective learning centers for different instruction
• Setting instructional goals for learning centers
• Assessing students and learning center work
• Funding learning centers

Participants of this workshop will receive a comprehensive teacher resource workbook with step-by-step practical guidance in providing differentiated instruction tailored to the needs of each learner in your classroom! The classroom-tested and research-based methods facilitate learning at any level and ability. Spiral bound 175 pages.

Providing meaningful and truly independent activities for the majority of your students while you are focusing on small group instruction is a challenge! Curriculum Mastery® Games are ready-to use learning centers and offer the ideal setting for students to work independently or in small group settings.

Learning centers offer rich and effective review and reinforcement opportunities that will extend students learning while also developing critical thinking, independence and cooperative work skills. Learning centers can support instruction for phonemes and phonics; reading comprehension; vocabulary; spelling; math facts; math concepts; science and social studies content.

Participants will –

• Develop strategies for efficiently managing and designing learning centers
• Use a series of ready-to-use learning centers which include comprehensive curriculum aligned to the National and State Standards.
• Creatively connect the Curriculum Mastery® program to their existing textbooks and curriculum
• Investigate a multitude of approaches for utilizing centers for differentiated and individualized instruction and assessment

The pressure of standardized assessment has become a classroom reality but teachers do not have to teach to the test. There are many instructional possibilities for test preparation through authentic learning experiences based on state and district requirements. School can still be fun and engaging while still preparing students for standardized tests.

The Curriculum Mastery® products are basically, in all the different activities, forms of benchmark assessments that are grounded in the content of the curriculum standards and grade-level being taught and assessed. The same activities that can be used for practice and repetition can, in another format or setting, be used as assessments to measure progress.

Participants will –

• Learn how to utilize the Curriculum Mastery® products to prepare students for local, state or national assessments
• Learn how to use the Curriculum Mastery® products to construct assessments to use on a daily, weekly, or periodic basis to benchmark progress against the standards—and, thus, to help them predict which students need additional help if they are to master the state assessments
• Learn how to use assessments to improve instruction and to assign appropriate interventions and practice to the whole class, small groups, and even individual students
• Learn how to use diagnostic and formative assessments
• Learn how to use the Curriculum Mastery® games as alternative forms of assessment

The Curriculum Mastery® products enable students to practice new learning and to repeat the practice in various formats for as many times as needed to lock that new learning into the long-term memory. The game format and the variety of other materials help the practice and repetition from becoming boring. Too, the achievement of fluency and mastery gives a student an enormous ego boost, making him or her even more willing to return to the practice activities.

Both the Board Game and the Online Learning products include guided and independent practice activities, plus assessment and corrective feedback—characteristics of direct instruction and mastery learning models found repeatedly to be effective in improving academic achievement – particularly for remedial intervention.

Classrooms that employ small group instruction offer focused and explicit instruction, as well as, authentic assessment for students. Small group instruction is a dynamic approach for teaching all subjects. When teachers work with small groups, they can support and guide students to engage with new strategies and skills while students are afforded opportunities for differentiation, application and immediate feedback.

Participants will –

• Explore various models of small group instruction for remedial intervention
• Identify the essential elements of using small group instruction such as time management, resources needed, grouping methods, instructional approaches and assessment strategies through demonstration, vignettes and hands-on activities
• Learn how to incorporate and use the Curriculum Mastery® products into any remedial education program

Given the power of individualization, educational practice is clearly moving toward a requirement of an individual education plan for each student, not just those in special education. Increasingly, especially for at-risk students, but even for gifted/talented students, there are legislative mandates for individual plans

Curriculum Mastery® products can be selectively assigned to individual or small groups of students with similar needs for the necessary repetition and practice on one or more standards-based topics. The same is true for the online activities. The teacher can set up a practice lesson for one student, a small group, or the entire class, if needed. Each student, then, receives the benefits of expert one-on-one tutoring even as a member of a room full of students.

Participants will –

• Learn how to differentiate instruction using the Curriculum Mastery® products
• Create activities and assessments based on individual student needs

As research reveals more and more about how it is that people learn, it is increasingly clear that multi-sensory processing strategies are more effective than instruction focusing on only one modality, usually the teacher’s preferred style. Curriculum Mastery® print and online products incorporate multiple senses in the various activities, increasing the likelihood that students can retrieve information and apply it.

Curriculum Mastery® online learning provides teacher tools, including a template for lesson plans that incorporate various custom activities, games and assessments which students can access from any internet-connected computer. The web-based classroom manager collects data on individual student performance and makes reports available to the teacher that have a variety of uses. For instance, scores might be used for homework or class work grades; daily or frequent quiz grades; mastery assessment grades for curriculum topics; and/or benchmarks to check progress in mastering the knowledge and skills necessary for proficient performance on state assessments.

Participants will –

• Learn how to incorporate technology-based instruction
• Learn how to customize activities to meet individual student needs
• Learn how use the online ready-to-use lesson plans and activities

Curriculum Mastery® products – both the board games and online learning system – meet the criteria for well-designed academic learning games. The games are based on the knowledge and skills identified in the curriculum standards for the subject matter and grade-level being taught and assessed. The rules are simple and easy to understand—and easy to amend, as students become familiar with them and want to make them more challenging or more interesting. If students give the wrong answers to the assessment items, then they simply do not advance. Also, the games allow for more than one winner—the one who answers the most questions, the one who finishes the game first, and so forth. Students can also play in teams, making it possible to foster more cooperation and collaboration. Too, the teacher can set up tournaments, providing opportunities for teams to win, not just individual students.

Participants will –

• Learn the advantages of using games to learn
• Learn to how to engage and motivate students to use with the use of games
• Learn how to incorporate the Curriculum Mastery® into any curriculum

Many research studies confirm the importance of parents in whether a child learns. Reflecting this research, NewPath Learning makes available to schools a “Take-Home Edition” of its Curriculum Mastery® games. This package enables schools easily to extend time-on-task for an individual student, but also to involve the family in the learning – especially important in homes lacking economic resources and in families where English is not the native language. Students will also likely benefit when parents see the kind of learning that the school expects for their child and can reinforce those expectations through participation with him or her in the activities.

Participants will –

• Learn how to implement and administer a parental involvement program
• Learn how to plan and hold family game nights at school

Our Director of Professional Development is a thirty-four year veteran elementary teacher who has won numerous awards, most notably, Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching, New York State’s Teacher of the Year and Disney’s American Teacher Award. Her unique and creative practices have been featured in books and articles, documentaries, professional development videos, curriculum products and in national workshops and lectures. In addition, Lynn teaches graduate level methods classes in literacy and science for the Warner School at University of Rochester.

In her thirty-four years of teaching she has developed a huge repertoire of strategies and resources for successful learning with all kinds of students. In her workshops, teachers will learn through modeling of instructional practices, participating in lessons, creating and/or planning for instruction, viewing classroom video and engaging in discussion. Lynn will assist teachers in developing their own rich set of resources for learning success in their classrooms.