Designed for teachers of grades 5–8.

Which of our state’s national parks is home to over 12,000 documented species of plants, animals and invertebrates? In which park can you walk in the footsteps of Revolutionary War patriots? North Carolina is home to ten national park units stretching from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Cape Hatteras shores. These parks offer diverse opportunities to spark students’ desire to learn more about the rich science and history of our state. Discover how park resources, including informational texts and supplemental materials, can also enhance literacy skills. Learn ways your students can experience our parks both physically and virtually. Partner with national park rangers, historians and science experts to create lessons that will engage student learning in your classroom.

Today’s diverse students enter school eager to become successful in classrooms originally designed for culturally homogeneous populations and are expected to learn from teachers who are often not from the same cultural, ethnic/race or social-class. Unsurprisingly, student performance in reading and other subjects is often low while student dropout and teacher burnout rates are high. This program guides participants to explore and document their experiences in motivating at-risk students to become effective readers. In addition to sharing successful strategies for improving reading skills and producing a written narrative, participants will examine barriers children encounter along the pathway and how these barriers affected them. Additionally, participants will become familiar with strategies they can use today to change the culture of the classroom to support the development of higher order thinking skills while enhancing self-motivation, personal responsibility, and perseverance to become skilled readers who excel academically.

It’s time to start thinking outside the box! Teachers often think projects take too much time to plan or don’t know how to align them with curriculum. Project Based Learning units (PBLs) are an effective and enjoyable way to learn that allow students to work as a team, reflect, ask questions, build confidence, work with a purpose, problem solve, and learn time management. Investigate what essential questions, unit questions, and content questions will enable you to develop your own PBL unit. Return to your classroom with a PBL unit you create that will excite and engage your students as they claim ownership of their learning.

Designed for ELA teachers of grades 6–8 and those who coach them.

Middle grades ELA inhabits a type of educational limbo. Intellectually, students are capable of taking on complex reading and writing tasks but many are still developing the necessary maturity to do so. This program will examine the knowledge and skills necessary to transition successfully from elementary to high school. Teachers will engage in and then craft their own language arts activities that engage both the child and the budding adult in each of their students. Activities will address reading, writing, thinking, speaking and listening skills.

Designed for grades K–3 teachers.

Elementary teachers use a variety of literacy assessments (mClass, STAR, benchmarks, unit tests, spelling inventories, etc.) in order to get a complete picture of their students’ literacy ability. These assessments generate a lot of data that can be overwhelming. Investigate how to get the most out of the literacy data by linking assessment data to literacy instruction. Explore ways to manage the data for each student. Discover ways to use literacy data to plan for individual, small, and whole group instruction while examining strategies to differentiate instruction to meet the learning needs of all students.