Greetings from the Learning Bridges Team!
We want to provide YOU with FREE resources
and focus on special opportunities that might be helpful for your school improvement efforts.
We invite you to print the resources
that you can use in your classroom or school. We also hope you will share the newsletter
with your colleagues so that they might also receive the FREE resources. When it
is possible, we will connect the resources to your
state's content standards - whether those are
research-based instructional strategies/interventions or parent
activities.
We will feature one of the powerful online courses, an instructor, and a teaching
resource - all connected to your state standards and assessments.
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
When you try an instructional strategy, share a parent activity with parents, complete
online professional development, or use one of the teaching resources, we hope you
will come back and share your
thoughts with us online. Read what other teachers have said, too!
We invite you to join our team as a Bridge to a New Way of Teaching and Learning!
Greetings from the Learning Bridges Team!
We want to provide YOU with FREE resources and focus on special opportunities that might be helpful for your school improvement efforts.
We invite you to print the resources that you can use in your classroom or school. We also hope you will share the newsletter with your colleagues so that they might also receive the FREE resources. When it is possible, we will connect the resources to your state's content standards - whether those are research-based instructional strategies/interventions or parent activities.
We will feature one of the powerful online courses, an instructor, and a teaching resource - all connected to your state standards and assessments.
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!
When you try an instructional strategy, share a parent activity with parents, complete online professional development, or use one of the teaching resources, we hope you will come back and share your thoughts with us online. Read what other teachers have said, too!
We invite you to join our team as a Bridge to a New Way of Teaching and Learning!
Read more
Featured Online Class - EDCI 607J Effective Instructional Strategies
An effective teacher develops a repertoire of diverse instructional strategies, a box of tasty classroom recipes to engage students in meaningful educational experiences. Master 10 effective strategies: Planning and Prioritizing, Engaging, Comparing, Questioning, Reflecting, Graphic Representations, Summarizing, Providing Feedback, Thinking Critically, and Cooperating. When selecting a successful strategy teachers must consider the nature of information or skills to be shared, the learning styles of the students, special needs of the class, time, resources and their own understanding of effective instructional strategies. By offering students a rich variety of strategies and activities, the teacher will provide students with multiple pathways for accessing and retaining knowledge and ensure that lessons are engaging and relevant to all students, regardless of their racial, cultural, socio-economic or linguistic differences
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FREE Instructional Strategy - Rehearsal of Learning
Why can’t they remember?!! Have you ever thought that your students learned something only to find out 3 weeks later that they have forgotten it again? Learn how to MAKE IT STICK! Rehearsal of Learning occurs when the learner has the opportunity to process and reprocess information with increasing levels of challenge, in order to increase deep meaning to transfer knowledge into long-term memory. There are two forms of rehearsal: rote rehearsal and elaborate rehearsal.
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FREE Parent Activity - Language Arts: Reading Fluency - Grades K - 1
Standard: Read aloud with fluency in a manner that sounds like natural speech.
Reading with fluency is a critical skill that impacts on a child’s ability to comprehend what they are reading – as they are reading it. So often, when children are first learning to read, they are so focused on sounding out – or decoding – each word as they encounter it. By the time they finish sounding out the words in an entire sentence, they have forgotten to pay attention to what they just read. Parents can help their child discover the joy of reading and improve fluency with Mirrored Reading.
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Featured Instructor - Karen Holicky-Michaels
Hi! My name is Karen Holicky (pronounced Hulitsky!)-Michaels. I definitely should've taken my husband's last name when I had a chance! I've been an instructor for Learning Bridges courses since early 2007 and it's something I thoroughly enjoy and learn a great deal from! The students are amazing and you get to know what's going on around the country in education and for a short period of time you get a glimpse into another professional educator's life - and honestly, it's humbling. These experiences have only deepened my respect for educators.
Before becoming an instructor I was the program manager of Learning Bridges in our district (The Roseville Area Schools in Roseville, MN adopted LB's district-wide around 2003) and also assisted the principals and other teachers when in small professional learning communities.
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Featured Teaching Resource - How the Brain Learns, 3rd Edition
How the Brain Learns, 3rd Edition
David A. Sousa
David Sousa is masterful in helping teachers understand how the brain learns and what that means to classroom teachers. He “walks the talk” is assuring that teachers remember the critical information to teach so that children can learn.
How the Brain Learns, Third Edition, the newly revised and updated edition of this powerful and practical bestseller, examines remarkable new research and developments in brain functioning while continuing its successful tradition of translating this information into effective classroom strategies and activities.
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Discussion Topic - What do YOU think?
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is attempting to discover the best indicators of excellent teaching. They are going to video-tape 4,000 teachers and have the videos analyzed to identify what makes an effective teacher.
They are looking at the relationship between student achievement and students’ perceptions of their teacher’s effectiveness, teachers’ content knowledge, teachers’ ability to choose the right methods to teach that content, and “value added” estimates of teacher effectiveness based on test scores.
The Foundation hopes the results will help retool recruitment, professional development, pay, and evaluation structures. They have put aside $500 million to undertake this research.
YOU are in the classrooms with students. YOU see teachers and students every school day. What do YOU think are the best indicators of an effective teacher?
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