ENGAGING Survey

Our faculty study group selected Paul Vermette's book, "Engaging Teens in Their Own Learning: 8 Keys to Success," as our primary resource for professional development. I created the survey below to help teachers determine where there stand with regard to the ENGAGING model. Feel free to give it a try.

If you are interested in obtaining copies of the book, it is available from http://www.eyeoneducation.com/; Dr. Vermette is very accessible via email, and would really appreciate feedback about the book.

ENGAGING click the word to go to the survey...the password is "engaging"

DON'T WORRY IF YOU GET A WARNING ABOUT THE SITE'S SECURITY CERTIFICATE...IT'S LEGIT!

Cheers.

Stepping Out PD

Today I had the chance to attend the Stepping Out PD session that was run by Karen Greenham on behalf of Student Pathways for Success. Karen did a great job facilitating despite not having the course books at her disposal. The session introduced me to some really interesting ideas as far as preparing kids for reading and viewing activities. It also reminded me of things that I knew previously, but have not used in some time. The main strategies that I plan to implement in the near future, if not tomorrow are:

-Question generation (where the students, not the teacher, generate the questions)
-anticipate guides
-foldables
-word wall
-"they say, I say"

One of the things I liked best about the session was that Karen gave us a chance to actually experience the strategies instead of just telling us about them. We were also given ample talk time to think of how we could apply any given strategy to our own classes. I was sad to hear, though, that Marie Chambers is retiring in January. She will definitely be missed!

I will create some postings to describe my use of the above strategies in the near future.