2018 TAP Conference Training Preview: The Power of Strong Instructional Strategies

"Every student deserves a great teacher, not by chance, but by design."

– Fisher, Frey, & Hattie

Each year, the National TAP Conference offers educators an array of new training sessions responding to the needs of teachers and their students in partner districts. As director of training, Dr. Ann Shaw works with educators across the country to design, develop and deliver engaging, interactive trainings for teacher, school and district leaders. In 2017, this included a new training focused on helping teachers support students as they moved from surface to deeper learning.

When participants convene at the 2018 National TAP Conference in the Washington, D.C., region on March 23 and 24, they will take advantage of trainings that will extend their learning—including a new session on deeper learning entitled The Power of Strong Instructional Strategies.

Building on the 2017 TAP conference session identifying a progression of three levels of learning, the next stage will be mapping out strategies with these tiers in mind and measuring their impact.

Below are highlights from last year's deeper learning training.

A Look Back at 2017 Training: Moving from Surface Learning to Transfer of Deeper Learning

Teacher leaders are charged with identifying, field-testing, and assessing instructional strategies to help teachers accelerate student learning growth. An equally important consideration is how to differentiate an instructional strategy to support students working at different levels of learning: surface learning, deeper learning, and transfer of learning.

Surface-Level Learning

Surface learning is essential as it is the entry point for lessons and sets the stage for later successes. Students are engaged in surface-level learning when they learn something new, in order to reproduce or recall the information later.

Deep-Level Learning

The transition to deep learning begins once students gain an initial understanding of a concept and can begin to go deeper. This stage is characterized as learning in order to understand, place meaning to, and identify the significance of, new concepts. Students engage in deep learning when they are able to self-regulate, self-talk and self-question. Deep learning means that students can integrate concepts and consider what they learned in the surface level to construct new meanings and ideas.

Transfer-Level Learning

Students engaged in deeper learning must then develop the ability to transfer this learning and apply a concept to novel situations.

The work of a classroom teacher is to move students from surface learning to deeper learning to the transfer of learning. Teacher leaders play a crucial role in identifying research-based instructional strategies that will support this learning progression. They play an equally important role in helping teachers to differentiate instructional strategies in ways that support students at all levels of learning in their classrooms.

The support of teacher leaders is essential in helping classroom teachers assess the impact of their instruction, adjust and make improvements based on data, and continually get better in helping every student to be able to master surface learning, move into deeper learning, and transfer that learning to new ideas, situations and challenges.

Participants in this 2017 training learned how to support classroom teachers to:

1. Determine the impact of lessons
2. Understand how to plan, deliver and measure teaching
3. Define the levels of learning based on teacher and student actions

This year, we will build on this popular training to enable participants to examine research-based strategies that have proven to have a positive impact on student learning and understand how these strategies can scaffold for the three levels of learning.

We look forward to seeing you in March at the National TAP Conference!