Approaching the Social Studies
Classroom Based Assessments
Workshops for Elementary & Secondary Educators
Please stay tuned for announcements about upcoming CBA workshops.
Program Overview
This workshop will offer educators a professional experience of learning and leadership in approaching the CBAs.
It is aimed at educators who are new the Social Studies CBAs or just starting to experiment with them in their schools.
Following the belief that teachers must and should be the primary driving force behind school change and reform,
Global Source Education has become involved in building learning communities and cultivating teacher leadership around the WA State Social Studies
Classroom-Based Assessments (CBAs), slated for implementation 2008-2009. Global Source's professional development programs
link CBA integration strategies with best practice in social studies education.
Facilitated by Jonathan Garfunkel who has been working with Caleb Perkins from the
OSPI Social Studies Program to help meet the needs of districts and teachers in adoption and implementing the new reform. He is also consulting with schools and
districts on CBA adoption, and helping to build professional learning communities to support their implementation and integration.
Participants will have the opportunity to:
- Experience the anatomy of a CBA, by working through a common CBA unit of study from teacher and student perspectives.
- Address strategies for adapting, adopting, and integrating the CBA’s within existing and changing curriculum
- Identify and discuss professional discretion and structural constraints surrounding CBA unit development, implementation and assessment the CBA’s
- Examine how the CBA units of study model opportunities for best practices in teaching and learning through the social studies.
- Explore how engaging in the CBAs can be a force for promoting meaningful professional dialogue, building professional learning communities, and fostering
positive change in school communities.
- Work on framing and planning your own CBA unit of study
Program Information
- Minimum Enrollment: 15, Maximum: 30
- 5 clock hours will be available (additional fee to Puget Sound ESD).
- A reading and resource packet will be given to each participant
- Light Refreshments will be provided, BYO lunch
- Tuition: $60, advanced registration required.
District and School Consultation
Global Source is consulting with school districts to develop the programmatic architecture to
support the adoption and implementation of the CBAs.
If you would like Global Source to present one of our CBA workshops for your school or district, please contact Jon Garfunkel at
garfunkel@globalsourcenetwork.org
or call (206) 780-5797.
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Building a Teacher Leader Network
to Support the CBAs
We invite you to be part of an initiative to develop teacher leadership in connection with the WA State Social Studies Classroom-Based Assessments (CBA’s). Global Source, in collaboration with OSPI's Social Studies Program and others, is helping to create a leadership network and train regional mentors and coaches to support the statewide implementation of the CBA’s.
Richard Elmore’s 1996 article Getting to Scale with Educational Practice makes the most compelling case for building a teacher leadership network around the Social Studies Classroom-Based Assessments (CBA’s) developed by OSPI. His extensive research on educational reform reveals that "the problem of scale in educational innovation can be briefly stated as follows: Innovations that require large changes in the core of educational practice seldom penetrate more than a small fraction of US schools and classrooms and seldom last for very long when they do" (pp.1-2). /p>
Hence, the statewide implementation of the CBA’s slated to take place in 2008-2009 faces this same fate unless we can somehow learn from the lessons of previous educational reform efforts. Fortunately, Elmore concludes this article, as do other researchers in more recent studies, with a hopeful call for the development of "strong external normative structures for practice" for teachers.
Elmore goes on to explain that teachers would "begin increasingly to think of themselves as operating in a web of professional relations that influence their daily decisions, rather than as solo practitioners inventing practice out of their personalities, prior experiences, and assessments of their own strengths and weaknesses" (p.19). This new way of thinking captures what we hope to foster among a select group of educators who want to be part of a CBA Teacher Leadership Network. Moreover, it supports the work of other researchers, including Milbrey McLaughlin, who highlight the importance of developing professional learning communities when trying to ensure that educational reforms have the opportunity to succeed.
If you would be would like to learn more about this
initiative, please
contact us.
(Reference: Getting to Scale with Good Educational Practice, by Richard Elmore, Harvard Educational Review, Spring 1996)
Past CBA Professional Development:
- OSPI Teacher Training Workshop, with Caleb Perkins, Aberdeen, May 2007
- Social Studies CBA Teacher Leadership, with Caleb Perkins, OSPI Summer Institute, Spokane, June 2007
- Social Studies CBA Teacher Leadership, with Caleb Perkins, OSPI Summer Institute,Vancouver, August 2007
- Social Studies CBA Teacher Leadership, with Caleb Perkins, OSPI Summer Institute,Auburn, August 2007
- Orientation to the CBAs, Inservice for Sumner School District , August 2007
- Approaching the Social Studies CBAs, Seattle, October 2007
What Educators Are Saying About Global Source
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