Teacher-led Institute Days at EG!

By Linda Ashida

Today we carried on our tradition of our teacher-led professional learning with our January Institute Day:  "Making Connections."

We collaborated with our colleagues across all departments to plan Spark sessions and Learning Labs that made connections to our professional learning goals and the learning goals we have for our students.

Check out this Google Doc to see more details on the schedule and to see how we crowd-sourced resources, inviting staff to add their own examples and resource to the Google Docs for each Spark Session.

Check out this Storify to get an idea of what the day "looked like." 

Future posts this week will share more details and resources from the Spark Sessions and Learning Labs.

If you are interested in learning more about our tradition of teacher-led institute days, check out the drop-down menu on this Teacher-led Institute Day link on our Collab Lab Resource Hub.

Notability Learning Labs

by Katie Winstead and the DTC Team

Today the Collab Lab had its doors open every period for a cool, new concept: Learning Labs. After meeting with staff members during the Peer Observation Day, the school saw a need to have specific days devoted to learning different instructional techniques. Today’s Learning Labs were devoted to learning more about Notability.

Even teachers who regularly use Notability stopped in to learn different ways to engage students through interactive notes. For example, we discussed “Katie’s technique” where we share a note with our students and they have the capability to use the scissors in Notability to move words or drawings around, change the color or size, and generally manipulate documents to categorize, sort, etc.

We also discussed the idea of audio notes: students can brainstorm and write as they plan out essays, for example.

In math classes, students have been using the audio function to talk about how they are solving problems to make learning visible. Students can also push out their documents as "Notes" so that teachers can open up the editable file and either write or speak back to the students!

Overall, it was a very successful day and the teachers at Elk Grove are looking forward to many more Learning Labs to come!

Building a Culture of Learning: A Day of Spark Sessions and Learning Labs

by Linda Ashida

Today the Collab Lab hosted Spark Sessions and Learning Labs for all staff during an extended late start Thursday morning.

It was a great morning of professional learning and interdisciplinary collaboration with 8 Spark Sessions (~five minutes each) followed by 2 informal Learning Labs (twenty-five minutes each).

We shared the schedule with staff via this Google Doc.  Our goal for the morning was to spark learning that would continue long after the day was over.  To faciliate future learning, we decided to make the doc editable during the morning and we invited all staff attending to add resources in the far right column of the document.

Feedback from the morning has been very positive. Staff indicated that they enjoyed the variety of the spark sessions and opportunity to learn and explore new ideas with colleagues from so many different departments in the Learning Labs. Also, many noted how the Learning Lab sessions demonstrated the rich interdisciplinary culture of learning at Elk Grove High School that continues to grow. A Spanish teacher commented how she enjoyed collaborating with a Science teacher and two music teachers to experimenting with audio assignments in Schoology! To get a better idea of what our day looked like and sounded like, check out highlights from Twitter curated in this Storify.