Rationale This booklet is designed to ease your effort in preparing a presentation/demonstration for the Invitational Summer Institute for the Northern Nevada Writing Project (NNWP). The fact that you are already enrolled in the Invitational Summer Institute means that you have been recognized by other teachers or administrators as being a teacher leader with exceptional teaching abilities. We hope to help you hone your leadership qualities this summer. We hope that you will continue your association with the Northern Nevada Writing Project beyond this summer experience. “Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises� (Demosthenes); we hope this small opportunity will be the beginning of a great enterprise for you. The development of a presentation that showcases your inquiry and research is one of the core components of the Invitational Institute. Fellows across the country spend their summer in just this pursuit. You are joining a special group of teachers associated with the National Writing Project who will be putting forth the extraordinary effort necessary to develop an inquiry presentation/demonstration. While right in the thick of the work your presentation will require, you might not fully value the rewards, but we know you will. The things you learn, the expectations you raise, the questions you ask and the friends you make are going to be with you forever. Our philosophy at the NNWP is the one shared with writing project sites across the country. This philosophy was first articulated by the creator of the National Writing Project, James Gray. In his book, Teachers at the Center, James Gray explains our feelings about the teacher demonstration in this way:
“By allowing excellent teachers the opportunity to demonstrate their best practices without restrictions, the project remains open to new ideas, approaches, and variations…The writing project is not a writing curriculum or even a collection of best strategies; it is a structure that makes it possible for exemplary teachers to share with other teachers ideas that work….This teacher-teaching-teachers idea is the heart of the project. Classroom teacher are believable as no other consultants can ever be. They have a knowledge about effective teaching based on their own experience in real classrooms that no other consultant outside of the classroom can ever match…. The most successful teacher demonstrations communicate not only what the teacher does but also why the teacher thinks this particular practice works. The emphasis upon the why as well as the what is important: it provides a theoretical underpinning and it accents a considered approach to writing beyond mere gimmickry.”
The Inquiry Demonstration - Defined Your teacher demonstration/presentation will be a 75-minute affair shared first with the fellows in your Summer Invitational Institute and then with other teacher audiences in different venues. Your presentation will always begin with an inquiry question: something that you noticed, based on student work, was not going as well as it should in your classroom. Your inquiry may communicate a best practice but asks the teacher to step back from a piece of their work and ask a question about it. This demonstration asks the audience to be part of the inquiry process. Teachers using the inquiry model are encouraged to ask, “If this worked for me, why did it work?” Teachers and participants will “share and gain knowledge of more than just a strategy that works. Rather, a piece of theory will evolve from a presentation that has
general applicability to the presenter’s teaching and maybe all teaching” (Peterson, 2004, p. 1). Examples of teacher inquiry demonstrations taken from Peterson’s article include: A community college teacher brought her successful work with very structured essay writing to the Institute. Her inquiry into her practice showed that students really learned what she taught, but her question was about what “successful” meant. A first grade teacher developed a case study of beginning writers for the Institute to assess, focusing on the relationship between her school’s reading program and the writing instruction she had developed to accompany it. After examining his student work, a teacher decided that the rubrics he was using both enabled and inhibited the assessment of his students’ work. For his presentation, he engaged the institute in an experiment using rubrics. The discussion examined the use and misuse of rubrics.
Determining Focus When you are able to choose a focusing topic for your presentation, you have overcome the biggest hurdle. You love your job, you love your students, you love telling people about your job and your students. Keep in mind that you want to cull the most important aspects of best teaching practice to share with others. You want to have a main point and you want to stick to it.
One of the main problems for audiences is having to put up with speakers trying to get far too much information across in the time available. So you have to be prepared to cut your material to an extent that you may find quite painful. (Lend Me Your Ears)
Worksheet for Focusing an Inquiry Demonstration The examination of student work is at the heart of the inquiry demonstration. You should begin to focus your idea by first examining your student work and answering the following questions.
• What do I know about my students?
• What do my students do effectively as readers and writers?
• What do I want to find out by examining my students’ work?
• How do I examine their work?
• What is the evidence that supports the effectiveness of my instruction?
• Does student work show that my teaching reaches all students or just some? Which ones and why?
• How will I use what I learn about my students and my teaching to direct my students’ work in the future?
Required Components It is part of our philosophy that the “required” part of any presentation be as loose and open to interpretation as possible. You are the expert in determining how best to demonstrate your inquiry and research so that the audience learns from you and your experience. Effective presentations can take an endless number of forms.
The required components are:
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Essential/Research Question: __________________________________________________________________ ________________________________
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Focusing Standard: __________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________
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Research Base/Literature Review: __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ ___________________________
• Methods of Analysis: ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________
• Data Analysis: ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________
• Reflection and Future Practice: ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ _____________________________
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Active Presentation: __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________
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Electronic Booklet: __________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________
Presentation Methods Method Lecture
Skill Practice/Role Playing
Discussion (small or large group)
Video/Modeling
Games
Jigsaw Learning
Reading
Writing Tasks
Adv/Disadv
Content/Context
Energy Flow
Preparation and Practice This summer will be a rush of work with a lot of time pressures that you may not be used to. Don’t let that pressure keep you from being successful in your presentation. The very best way to feel great about a presentation is to be prepared enough in advance that you can feel relaxed, confident, and wellrested when presentation day arrives. The worst thing to do is be up all night with last minute preparations. Some things that we don’t always remember, but are wise to think about when preparing to present are: • Are all of my AV components ready and have I practiced with them? • Is the furniture arranged how I want it? • What am I displaying and where will it go? • How will I use my booklet during my presentation? • Do I need any print copies of any pages in my booklet? • Do I have other materials planned for the right places at the right times? • If I am grouping the class, do I have a method for doing that? • If I run over, what can be cut? • If I run short, what can be added?
Booklet Your booklet should include • Rationale: written explanation of why you choose this inquiry and how you proceeded to answer your essential question. You may want to
explain best practices you used in your inquiry, share your educational path, successes and failures, and where you are in the inquiry process. • Essential question: Brief Literature Review: provide an overview of key texts that were essential to you during the inquiry process and that have contributed to the conclusions you are able to draw. The key to this overview is to make connections between sources and not just provide a summary. • CCSS Writing Standard: • Supporting Materials: any readings, working pages, templates, explanations of ideas or procedures that will help the audience participate and use your idea. • Student Samples (when available and/or appropriate): be selective. You may want to show several samples of students across a variety of ability levels. Student samples that are included in the booklet should be clearly labeled so a teacher referring to these samples later can identify their purpose within the context of your inquiry. • Bibliography: notice that it is a bibliography not a work cited, so this can include anything that you have read that others would find helpful where this topic is concerned. Be sure to give credit where credit is due in naming people, materials, etc. that you used during your inquiry process.
Your Mentor We have paired you with a mentor to support you through the process of your inquiry research and presentation. Your mentor will support via email, phone conversations, face-to-face interactions. It is important that you respond to your mentor—we are here to help. My mentor is: _______________________________________________ I can reach her at: ___________________________________________
In the spirit of giving credit where it is due, much of the material for the booklet has been taken from the booklets of previous years which have been compiled by Jodie Black. Further, much of the information on good PowerPoint presentations is from what we have learned from Meggin McIntosh.
Bibliography Barbazette, J. (2006). The art of great training and delivery. San Francisco, CA: Pfeiffer. Gray, J. (2000). Teachers at the center: A memoir of the early years of the
National Writing Project. San Francisco, CA: National Writing Project.