#MarburnCon21

This week got to experience the wonder of #MarburnCon21.  This virtual conference hosted by my school, Marburn Academy, focused on the theme of "Closing the Gap."  It brought together researchers from across the country as well as England and Australia to share the most recent best practices, techniques, and strategies to help students that learn differently or in non-traditional ways. 

What I really love about conferences is being able to take information from these experts and filter them into two buckets - what can I do to change my own classroom in the long term and what can I get from these presentations that I can bring back to the classroom on Monday.  MarburnCon21 gave me a good opportunity to reflect on my current teachings.

Day One

The Keynote speaker, Dr. Carl Hendrick, shared so many good thoughts. He reminded us that memories are built around schema - that words in context could have different meaning and memory depending on this schema. Vocabulary is built based on this schema and novices need lots of practice as well as explicit practice to build memories - much more so than people that have previous connections. 

Dr. Hendrick also talked about authenticity in four parts: Expertise in the subject, passion, unicity (the purposeful linking of the teacher's experience with students), and building rapport. 

One takeaway from Dr. Hendrick for Monday connected to feedback. The purpose of feedback is to improve the student, not the assignment. Improving the one assignment will not transfer, but improving the student has a stronger chance of transferring to the next activity. 

Another speaker that left an imprint on me was Dr. Sarah Powell. Dr. Powell spoke on helping students with word problems - a very important part of my everyday teaching world. She opened up with ineffective word problem practice.  When I say ineffective, I mean based on long term studies, not based in opinion. 

Dr. Powell shared that attaching keywords to operations in word problems is not an effective practice. For instance, teaching students if they see "all together" they should always add. What research has shown is that students will scan for numbers, key words, and then use the clues to solve the problem without reading the context.  She shared that in norm-referenced tests, key words led to correct answers between 25 and 50 percent of the time. With multi-step word problems (the type seen in late elementary to middle school) this accuracy dropped to less than 10%.  

Instead, we have to teach our students attack strategies and help build their schema to recognize how problems should be solved. Dr. Powell also shared a great visual for students in a round table discussion after her presentation.  

Day Two

Day two continued first with Dr. Erica Lembke sharing her knowledge of data based learning decisions. Much of her presentation fell into the bucket of long-term thoughts and how I could revise my progress monitoring on various skills and, more importantly, have students track their own growth over time. 

Her presentation was followed by an amazing language acquisition presentation by Dr. Pamela Snow. First, her dedication to helping educators was shown off by the fact she is located in Victoria, Australia, meaning she was presenting to us at 2:00 am local time.  Amazing.

Dr. Snow led us down a conversation of components of language including form, use, and content. She went into biological vs. non-biological forms of language, the explosion of vocabulary between ages five and eight, and the different tiers of vocabulary from everyday oral vocabulary (expression of feelings or needs) to general contextual reading (knowing words for comprehension), to lexicon in specific classes (hypotenuse, quotient.)  

I finished my MarburnCon21 experience with information from Dr. Amber Ray as well as Dr. Elizabeth Hughes. Both of them shared many ideas that I plan to incorporate into my lessons over the next few weeks. Dr. Ray spoke on SRSD as an approach to writing, while Dr. Hughes talked about the importance of precision of vocabulary in the classroom. Dr. Hughes had many connections back to Dr. Snow as well as Dr. Hendrick, and I reflected on how as a math department we have spent the past couple of years focusing on our vertical alignment of vocabulary.  It is a great feeling now when students join us in seventh grade and say, "I'm going to plus 5 and 9" and I hear a cry of "You don't plus numbers, you ADD them!"

Thank you to all of the organizers, presenters, and behind-the-scenes members that made this event possible!