Conferences and Workshops

A district science coordinator sent me this question last month: “We’ve had teachers attend ADI workshops before, and they loved them. Now someone has suggested we send a few people to a Facilitator Institute instead. What is actually different? Isn’t it just a longer workshop?” It is not a longer workshop. The two experiences share a lot of surface features, since both put participants inside an ADI investigation, both move through the seven stages, and both involve plenty o

An instructional coach asked me this question recently, and it is one I hear from principals and district leaders all the time: “We sent a group of teachers to ADI training in the summer. I want to walk through their classrooms this fall and figure out if the training worked. What should I be looking for? And what separates the classrooms where it sticks from the ones where it doesn’t?” It is exactly the right question to ask, and it is also the one most walkthrough tools are

Over the next seven weeks I'll be presenting at six conferences in five states. The sessions share one question: how do we design instruction and assessment that make student sensemaking visible, instead of rewarding students for reproducing answers? Some sessions tackle that through Phenomenon-Driven Tasks (PDTs), a three-dimensional assessment format we've been developing at ADI. Others take it up through STEM design challenges, literacy practices, and investigation design.