What a truly great experience.  For the second year in a row, I have been fortunate to be able to participate in the AVID Summer Institute.

In 2016, I took the Science I strand.  This year, 2017, I took the Student Success strand.  If all goes well, I am hoping to continue this year and take the Science II strand either during the year or next summer.

You learn SOOOO much during Summer Institute.  Your brain is on fire trying to soak up every last word, strategy, and technique.

This year I was especially fortunate.  I start at Heritage High School August 9th and the summer institute gave me a great opportunity to also meet some of my fellow teacher colleagues.  Those I met were super terrific.  I can tell the staff and teachers are all about the kids and collaboration.  They made me feel right at home.

Back to AVID, last year I incorporated a number of AVID strategies into my teaching, including using an interactive notebook.  I also began flipping the classes so that the students had an opportunity to review the lesson and take notes prior to our discussing it.  This was great.  The flipped part allowed the class to get much more into detail with the content.  It also allowed the students to come to class having processes the material a bit, and having really thoughtful questions based on that.

I learned what worked best with interactive notebooks, cornell notes, and time strategies.  This year, I plan to take it to the next level.  PUHSD has a 1:1 chrome book policy so I can go virtually paperless.  I am so excited.  I have been designing a digital interactive notebook.  Each day the students will be able to go to Google Classroom and select the links and/or copy into their notebooks the assignments for the day.  I am also going to save a lot of time by using content related material to demonstrate the AVID strategies.  For instance, the students can read a biology related article as we practice marking the text, chunking material, and summarizing material.

Some successful strategies from last year that I implemented were: Gist summaries, Cornell Notes, Interactive Notebook, evidence based discussions, and the Gallery Walk.  I also attempted collaborative group projects with Google Slides presentations using a jigsaw strategy.  I also utilized a ton of different type of foldables requiring the students to think about what they were learning and process it so that it made sense.

This year, I am hoping to build on these strategies to include: Focused science vocabulary instruction, selecting texts / articles specifically related to the phenomena being explored and reinforcing the content being explored, additional options for student choices, Socratic seminars, and Philosophical chairs.