ADE Updates

This video outlines the Understanding by Design workshop series being offered by ADE, in partnership with the Education Renewal Zones, AETN, and local education service cooperatives. T he Education Renewal Zones, Arkansas Department of Education, AETN, and local Educational Service Cooperatives are hosting a four-day workshop series focusing on Understanding by Design (UbD). Understanding by Design is a way of thinking purposefully about curricular planning and school improvement. It offers a three-stage design process of planning, a set of helpful design tools, and design standards – not a rigid program or prescriptive recipe for instruction. It will also assist those who have completed the year one training of the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC)or Mathematics Design Collaborative(MDC) in understanding how to expand on practices learned. This workshop series will provide information, training,and practice in each Stage of UbD. Schools should send a team of at least four participants, consisting of teacher leaders and administrators, to these sessions in order to establish UbD leaders in the schools. During these multi-day sessions, participants will work to develop at least one unit of study using the Understanding by Design Framework. Mrs. Allison Zmuda will be facilitating the workshops on Days 1 and 2. Mr. Jay McTighe will facilitate Days 3 and 4. The team must attend all four days of this series. The Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards call for students to apply their learning in authentic ways, e.g., to “closely” read complex texts, develop and critique arguments, solve “messy” problems requiring sound reasoning and perseverance, and engage in scientific inquiry. These goals demand concomitant assessments that call for more than making a selection from given answers in a selected-response format. Richer and more authentic tasks are needed. Such tasks provide more than simply another method for measuring earning – they embody the most important goals of the standards while engaging students in meaningful learning. Utilizing the UbD philosophy also ensures quality-learning experiences directly linked to the Teaching Task and Formative Assessment Lesson that would be used in LDC and MDC

Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe was honored February 3, 2012 at the Peabody Hotel in Little Rock by the College Board for promoting educational excellence, academic rigor and the Advanced Placement program. This video contains highlights from that event.

Tom Kimbrell announces the schools selected for the Arkansas STEM Works initiative. (STEM is short for "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.")