MNEA Good Teaching Conference 2008

Monday, Oct. 20, 2008
Renaissance St. Louis Hotel - Airport
9801 Natural Bridge Road, St. Louis, MO

Registration required. Call the Missouri NEA Teaching and Learning office at
(800) 392-0236 for more information or register online now.

Professional development for educators by educators! Join us in St. Louis as the NEA Training Cadre presents Missouri NEA’s Good Teaching Conference. The NEA cadre is composed of accomplished classroom teachers from around the country, specially trained and armed with proven strategies you can put to use in your classroom and share with staff in your building. Participants will choose two of the following three hour sessions to attend. The diversity and autism sessions are appropriate for education support professionals as well as teachers.

Attend two of the following four sessions.

Autism: Applying Useful Techniques and Instructional Strategies to Maximize Learning
With increasing numbers of students who are identified with some form of autism, classroom teachers have many questions about how best to address their needs. This presentation explores the issues important to school personnel, such as features of autism and some of the techniques and strategies that work.

Universal Design for Learning: Reducing Achievement Gaps
(Elementary and secondary grade-level sessions)
Universal Design for Learning (UDL) addresses challenges inherent in today’s highly complex and diverse classrooms. Using principles of UDL, educators offer increased opportunities for all students to access, participate, and progress in the general education curriculum.

Educationally Relevant IEPs: Collaborative Approach to Developing and Implementing
(Elementary and secondary grade-level sessions)
Both IDEA and ESEA/NCLB require an increasing number of students with disabilities to be included in general education classrooms as well as state and local assessments. General education teachers, special education teachers, and related service providers need to know how to work together to align IEPs to student content standards. Key components of the individualized education program (IEP) and various collaborative service delivery models are explored in this presentation.

Our Diverse Community: Living, Working and Learning Together
This seminar defines diversity, explores the process of developing cultural identity, and forces us to think about how individuals, groups, and organizations behave around diversity issues. With the aid of interactive exercises, participants will better understand how the values, beliefs and self-concepts they harbor affect the way they think, behave and make assumptions about people who are different. Participants also will learn how the absence of information–the silent teacher–can contribute to assumptions, stereotypes, and even bigotry. The diversity competence scale will be introduced as way to monitor progress as we move along a continuum toward fully accepting diversity. The focus of this workshop is staff to staff relationships. Limit: 35 participants each session.