Zona Mastery at your school
Dennis is available to contract for your professional learning needs. With a background in exceptional educational practice and top-notch coaching strategies, he is able to provide engaging and interactive sessions virtually for your staff to enhance classroom instruction. Many topics are ready to be shared (see below), and he is also happy to design a custom session through a collaborative session with the institution’s leadership team.
All sessions are two hours in length with an optional additional one hour modification for supported work time during which any further questions can be answered or clarifications can be made.
Basic Curriculum (Re)Design
This session will integrate the basics of curriculum design by discussing how to think about course length within the curriculum, learning targets, evaluator expectations, etc. I also touch on the need to vet canned curriculum and why. Resources provided.
Advanced Curriculum Design
This session is for the basic curriculum designer who is looking to take their layout to the next level with relevant structure, differentiation, considerations for multiple forms of assessments, critique of canned curricula, and more. Resources provided.
Basic Lesson Planning Design
Utilizing a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach, this session is geared towards career and technical instructors who come from a trade industry who have not been given prior formal instruction in lesson design through a teacher prep program in college. Resources provided.
Advanced Lesson Planning Design
This is a high-level UDL backwards design session which focuses on providing a variety of options for the advanced instructor. We will be exploring every aspect of lesson design, including opportunities for MLL differentiation and SEL components. Resources provided.
Equity vs. Equality
One of the biggest challenges to the advancement of equity in our educational facilities is not truly understanding that there is a difference between these two words. This session can be an engaging and informational professional development piece, or with some collaboration from leadership, I have designed this to be an escape room activity.
Quick! How Do I Know My Students Learned That?
There are many ways in which students can demonstrate mastery of a skill, standard, concept, or outcome. If educators are always waiting to assess learning until the test day, they are missing valuable information along the way. This session discusses formative assessments and how using a variety of non-paper checks can be beneficial. Resources provided.
Equitable Grading Practices
Based on the book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman, this session explores the various aspects of how grading to mastery instead of grading to percentages makes sense in education. If your school is CTE, you will want to consider this professional development. Informational resources provided.
Active vs. Passive Learning Environments
In this session, groups take the time to explore some research around both of these types of learning environments and become experts who will share with their colleagues the pros and cons. Education sometimes uses terminology that gets handed down like a game of operator. Let’s clear that up. Resources provided.
Elevating Structured Student Discourse
What does it mean to learn? And how do we truly know our students are doing it? Is the summative assessment showing that to us? Structured discourse opportunities are the first step in getting our students to their intended outcomes, but first we must put away our egos. Resources provided.
The Power of The Question “Why?”
During my time as an instructional coach, I challenged many teachers with this one target: ask the question “why?”. This was by far the least employed of my coaching tactics, but hands-down, it was the most impactful. Here’s why - oh, you thought I was going to give it away that easily? Resources provided.
What Makes Feedback Effective?
There are many types of feedback, and to be honest, some of them can barely be called feedback. Has an employer’s “feedback” ever shut you down? This session gets into the various types, lets your institution define them, and decide what effective feedback then needs to look like moving forward on campus. Resources provided.
Differentiation - An Easy How-To Guide
Differentiation is anything but easy. So, how is this session an easy how-to guide? I’ll break down the areas of differentiation for you as Carol Ann Tomlinson laid them out. Then we will do some group activities to determine a personal and collective status of differentiation within your institution. Resources provided.
All Things Con-CTE-dered
When it comes to Career and Technical Education, I’m your person. Add in the experience that I have in equity and diversity, curriculum design, teaching marginalized populations, lesson design, business ownership, and so much more, there really is no other reason needed to contract this session. It is designed for administrators who are in need of (re)connecting with their instructors and staff (i.e. climate and culture).
I’m Krashen into Teaching
Being a first year teacher is no joke. This session is meant to support both new teachers and administrators of new teachers. Every class, every content, every day - it’s all a language class. Whether you’re teaching brakes to auto mechanics or Pythagorean Theorem to geometry students, both are in English, but each has specific language necessary to. Let’s learn about language. Resources provided.
Teaching Critical Thinking for Industry
For Career and Technical Education, it is critical that students understand problem solving techniques before they enter the industry or they could hurt themselves or someone else. But, why aren’t they getting it? Is this even something we can teach them? There are a few explanations, and we’ll explore them in this interactive session. Resources provided.
Equitable Orientation and Onboarding
For the institution that provides its own orientation and/or onboarding, this session can illuminate practices that end up hurting your new hire educators. Those practices lead to quicker burn out levels, and higher turnover rates. Let’s take a look at how we can mitigate some of these practices together through reflection and change. Resources provided. CTE institutions strongly encouraged.
Identifying and Highlighting the Genius Around You
This session is intended for leadership teams or administration teams. Many of my years in education have been surrounded by leadership who did not value the genius that others on campus brought to the table. Instead of creating a community of collaborators, these leaders would individualize and diminish talent. Designed around content ideas from the book Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. Resources provided.
Let’s Collaborate on An Idea You Have!
Is there a topic that you have that doesn’t quite fit under one of the umbrella topics listed here? Let’s collaborate and build that session together. It can be as creative and engaging as you would like it to be. I will also provide any resources that are made for your session.