2016 Idaho MEMTA Retreat

After attending the Mickelson ExxonMobil Teacher Academy (MEMTA) in 2016, I became part of the Idaho MEMTA group.  Each year when funds are available, teachers who have attended MEMTA are invited to be part of the Idaho MEMTA retreat.  During this time, we get to reconnect with Idaho teachers we met at MEMTA, as well as, meet past and current attendees.  We are given time for team building in addition to continuing our personal professional development.  With all the educators being engaged there are so many ideas being shared.  It was simply amazing to me how many ideas I walked away with during our brief two days together.



Takeaways:

• How do we encourage more teacher leaders in Idaho?
• How do we continue to build capacity within ourselves and others?
• Talk, Task, and Tools
• Be thoughtful about the questions we as teachers ask.
• Convergent (closed, one right answer) vs. divergent (open-ended, more than one right answer)
• How do we create a safe environment for divergent thinking?
• Cooperative learning
• Bono's Thinking Hats for student scaffolds on the talking process.
• Allow students to have process time
• Perhaps have them write individually first (write or draw a picture) in their notebooks before taking verbal responses
• Prevent unintentional shutdown of ideas
• Think, pair, share
• Alternate which student gets to start
• Small group modeling
• Identify alternate ways of problem solving ( anonymously if needed to build student confidence first)
• Prelesson requires more time than the actual task
• Setup time
• Planning
• Prep

• Hot Wheels Speedometry set for 4th grade teachers
• Available intermittently for Hot Wheels at no charge (http://www.hotwheels.com/en-us/speedometry.html)
• Classroom set of Hot Wheels track and cars
• Use table tents to support and scaffold desired talk behaviors
• CER
• Sentence starters
• Respectful talk starters
• Can also be added to science notebooks rather than as table tents
• Supporting posters can also be placed in the room
• Project-based learning
• Buck Institute for Education (bie.org)
• Discuss observable and unobservable 
• Ex. What did the car do? vs.  What forces change the car's movement?
• GlobalLab (https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9EBD53TjC1lYmx0TUlsQndDRFk)
• Your class can post their experiment data and have other classes around the world duplicate the experiment and share their data
• Your class can find an experiment and duplicate it.  Compare existing posted data with other classes around the world.
• Socially Situated Science
• Current events and student interest drives the science learning
• Choice or menu options for student work
• Tic Tac Toe
• Cafe Menu
• Use of CER (Claims, Evidence, and Reasoning)
• Not only does it support successful talk, but it promotes critical thinking
• Use of this terminology is in the ISAT tests
• Engineering Challenge Solo Cups

   

Apply to the Mickelson ExxonMobil Teacher Academy (http://www.sendmyteacher.com/) even if you didn't get accepted the first time you applied.  It's worth it!