Navigating the many professional development options for educators over summer vacation – not to mention throughout the school year! – can can be daunting. We looked over the Illinois Education Association’s calendar for the summer, and found some fascinating offerings – including many from ISU’s OnlineImpact program.
Share the following links (and the calendar) with interested individuals in your school looking to get a step ahead. Then, check back next week for a recap of The Chicago Principal Partnership’s first annual Town Hall, where principals and stakeholders will come together to design solutions for making professional development opportunities more accessible and visible throughout the school year.
Illinois Civics Is Back Workshop
Begins: June 7th, 2017
Ends: July 18th, 2017
This Illinois Civics Is Back workshop will prepare participants to identify, analyze, and reflect upon both the new civics law and their current practices and offerings in their civics curriculum. Participants will also examine and assess best practices in civics using direct instruction, current and controversial issues, simulations of democratic processes and practices, and service learning. Additionally, the workshop will provide participants the opportunity to implement one of the best practices for civics education in their classroom.
Informational Text Literacy in the Elementary Grades
Workshop Begins: June 7th, 2017
Ends: July 25th, 2017
In this workshop, participants will explore a variety of strategies to explicitly teach reading informational text to increase students’ comprehension, recognize text structures and identify strategies to teach students to use structures, and create a plan of literacy strategies to build students’ skills in comprehending informational text. Participants will develop a lesson or unit utilizing informational text to be implemented in their classroom.
Implementing the Eight Mathematical Practices in the Elementary School Classroom
Workshop Begins: June 14th, 2017
Ends: August 1st, 2017
One of the major changes Common Core Math Standards requires is a shift in math instruction to incorporate number sense and reasoning in the math classroom. This shift places emphasis on student thinking and problem solving. During the seven-week workshop, designed for professional educators including teachers and administrators, new strategies will be utilized in order to facilitate and create opportunities for students to persevere and reason through problem solving. Focus for the implementation of practices will be in the primary grades (K through 6).
Algebraic Thinking in Elementary School
Workshop Begins: June 14th, 2017
Ends: July 25th, 2017
This workshop provides teachers of grades 3 through 5 with an opportunity to explore how activities that foster algebraic thinking can be integrated into the elementary classroom. Algebraic thinking consists of more than just learning how to solve for the variables x and y, it helps students think about mathematics at an abstract level, and provides them with a way to reason about real-life problems. In this workshop, participants will explore three components of algebraic thinking: making generalizations, thinking about the equals sign, and being able to reason about unknown quantities. As participants stretch their own algebraic reasoning skills, they will also spend considerable time thinking about how to integrate algebraic tasks into their own classroom instruction. This workshop uses readings, video, online discussion boards, a final project, and engaging mathematics problems to promote the idea that the incorporation of algebraic thinking tasks in elementary school mathematics is critical to students’ future success.
The Reconstruction Era and the Fragility of Democracy
Seminar begins: July 17th, 2017
Ends: July 19th, 2017
Seminar is on-site:
William P. Gray Elementary School
3730 N Laramie Ave
Chicago, IL 60641
8:30 am – 3:30 pm
How does society rebuild after extraordinary division and trauma, when the ideals and values of democracy are most vulnerable? We will explore this significant period in U.S. history, when Americans were faced with the challenge of restoring a nation amid the social and political upheaval of the civil war.
Professor Christopher Benson will be our guest scholar at this seminar. Professor Benson is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Journalism at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He co-authored Mamie Till Mobley’s memoir Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, about the life and death of Mrs. Mobley’s son, Emmett Till. Death of Innocence won the 2004 BlackBoard Nonfiction Book of the Year Award and the 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award Special Recognition.
This seminar is recommended for upper middle and high school social studies, civics, and humanities teachers committed to implementing a four-week (or more!) Facing History unit. If you are a teacher at a Facing History Chicago partner school in a subject or grade level outside of these educators, please reach out to your program associate or email chicagooffice@facinghistory.org about your interest in attending.
Scholarships are available for CPS educators to cover all costs except a $30 registration fee, payable upon acceptance.