Dr. Catlin Tucker

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As educational landscapes evolve, educators need to embrace a mindset, skill set, and tool set that allows them to thrive in class, online, or a blend of the two! It’s time to design and facilitate learning experiences that free teachers from their role as the expert at the front of the room and place students at the center of learning. Teachers who universally design learning using blended learning models to remove barriers, give students agency, develop dynamic learning communities, and cultivate expert learners will thrive in any teaching and learning landscape. Join educator and best-selling author Dr. Catlin Tucker to explore universally designing learning using blended learning models.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning

Deeper learning demands that students transfer or apply their learning. To achieve deeper learning, teachers must strive to architect learning experiences that position students at the center of the learning process to develop their cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal competencies, which are critical to deeper learning. Leveraging a combination of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), blended learning, and the CASEL Framework for social-emotional learning can arm teachers with beliefs, instructional models, and routines necessary to drive deeper learning.

Lack of time and energy are barriers to innovation. Too many teachers are exhausted because they are doing the lion's share of the work. To achieve balance, teachers must shift their mindset, develop their skill set, and build a useful toolset. Teachers who partner with students can share the responsibility of learning to create dynamic learning environments both online and offline. Join educator and best-selling author Dr. Catlin Tucker to reimagine your role, rethink your workflow, and reclaim your life.

*Book pairing: Balance with Blended Learning

School closures can result from a health emergency or an extreme weather event. Schools and districts need to prepare teachers with the training necessary to take their offline courses online. This will make it possible for teachers to successfully engage students in high-quality learning at home in the event of a school closure. This full-day workshop (offered both online and offline) will help teachers to build a community of inquiry online and master the basic building blocks of an online course: virtual lectures, online discussions, personalized practice, and collaborative group work. Participants will learn how to leverage online conferencing tools and video creation tools to transfer information, design dynamic online discussion questions to engage students in asynchronous academic conversations, leverage online practice and review tools, and encourage collaboration.

*Half-Day or Full Day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches *Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning

The teacher cannot be the only person in the classroom thinking about the students’ learning. Students must be actively engaged in thinking about, monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting on their learning. Research shows that developing metacognition helps students to apply what they are learning (knowledge and skills) in new and novel contexts, improve their ability to be strategic and flexible learners, and develop resilience in the face of challenges. This session will focus on technology-infused strategies teachers can use to help students develop their metacognitive skills so they can be more active and engaged learners. This work is critical to developing expert learners who are resourceful, strategic, and motivated. 


*Half Day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*Book pairing: Balance with Blended Learning or UDL and Blended Learning

Explore how online discussions, choice boards, and hyperdocs can foster collaboration and give students more control over their learning in a blended classroom. Participants will explore these strategies and the technology tools needed to design their own online discussion topics, choice boards, and hyperdocs! Participants will leave this hands-on workshop with lessons they can use with students.

*Full Day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session

*Note: This can be broken up into three 90-minute sessions

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning

Too often professional learning is an event, not a process. Districts spend money on technology but do not invest equally in building a professional learning infrastructure to ensure that technology has a transformative impact on both teaching and learning. Catlin Tucker will provide an overview of a blended learning coaching cycle designed to support teachers from goal setting to implementation to reflection. She will also highlight the value of grouping teachers in professional learning communities that use coaching strategies in combination with an ongoing inquiry and action cycle to continue learning together. If schools are going to meet the rapidly changing needs of their students, it's crucial that the entire school community has a professional learning strategy that works.

*Full Day

*Audience: Coaches

*Book pairing: Power Up Blended Learning or UDL and Blended Learning

The 5Es instructional model positions the students to engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate. This model blends online and offline learning strategically to encourage students to explore an essential question related to the curriculum. The goal is to help students construct knowledge and make meaning through both individual and collaborative processes. In this workshop, teachers will learn how to use the 5Es instructional model and explore a range of online tools and resources that teachers can use to engage students in the various parts of this student-led inquiry. We’ll incorporate Universal Design for Learning principles and use a backward design approach to construct our 5Es inquiry cycle.

*Half-day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning

This workshop explores how teachers can leverage technology and blended learning models to help learners develop their reading, vocabulary, writing, and speaking/listening skills. In this workshop, participants will collaborate in grade-level teams to create student-centered learning activities they can use with students immediately.

Half-Day or Full Day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning or Creatively Teach the Common Core Literacy Standards

The concurrent classroom presents several challenges. It’s tough to meet the needs of students in class and online simultaneously. Often, there is an inequality of teacher attention, students struggle to stay engaged, and learning experiences do not maximize face-to-face and online learning affordances. When teachers rely exclusively on a whole group, teacher-led model, these challenges are exacerbated. Teachers can combat the challenges associated with the concurrent classroom by using blended learning models to prioritize differentiated small group and personalized 1:1 instruction, give students agency, and shift control over the pace of learning to students. This workshop will explore how teachers can use the station rotation model, flipped learning model, and playlist model to successfully engage students in a concurrent classroom.

*Half-Day or Full Day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning or The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

Social-emotional learning (SEL) must be woven into the fabric of every class to ensure that students cultivate the following skills: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. Educators who weave SEL skills into the fabric of their classes can help students share the responsibility for learning. They also create learning environments where students feel safe taking risks, engaging in academic conversations, collaborating around shared tasks, and creative problem-solving. SEL skills are crucial in a blended learning environment where students enjoy more autonomy and agency.

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*Book pairing:  The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

Leading the Shift to Blended Learning: The Why, How, and What The transition from traditional teacher-led learning to student-centered blended learning is daunting for all stakeholders in a school community, so leaders must have a clear vision. This session will explore the why, how, and what of blended learning so leaders can clearly communicate the value of this shift to teachers, students, and parents. Why: Articulate the why, or value, of blended learning How: Explore the blended learning models to understand how they work and what teaching/learning will look like in classrooms What: Identify the “pillars of learning” that can be used to create a blended learning rubric that allows leaders and coaches to provide uniform feedback about progress toward teaching and learning goals

*Half-Day or Full Day

*Audience: School Leaders

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: Power Up Blended Learning or The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

Explore how blended learning models–Station Rotation and the Flipped Classroom–can help teachers reimagine learning in the classroom. Blended learning models create more opportunities for individualized scaffolding and support, differentiated instruction, and self-paced learning. During this hands-on workshop, participants will experience a Station Rotation lesson then create a lesson they can use with students immediately. They will also learn how to design a flipped lesson that effectively blends in-class and online learning.

*Full Day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning or The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

Lecture alone is ineffective, whether it is live or online. So, the challenge with the flipped classroom model is to engage students around the video content in a dynamic way. This session will review tips for creating effective video instruction and explore strategies teachers can use to design a complete learning experience around video content. Leveraging video content to shift some explanations, instruction, and models online can free the teacher to work directly with students to facilitate learning.

*Half-day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning or The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

It's impossible to meet the needs of diverse learners if you move lockstep through curriculum and activities as a whole class. Explore how the Station Rotation Model can help you create more opportunities to work directly with small groups of students, individualize scaffolding and support, differentiate instruction, move feedback into the classroom, and allow students to control the pace of their learning. During this hands-on, practice-based session, Catlin Tucker will highlight strategies for designing dynamic lessons, provide tips for making the most of your teacher-led station, review grouping strategies, and encourage you to move feedback and assessment into the classroom.

*Half-day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning or The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

The playlist model shifts control over the pace of learning to students and frees the teacher to spend time supporting individual students as they progress through the playlist. Playlists can be differentiated and/or personalized if teachers build conferencing into their playlists. A playlist can span a few days or a couple of weeks depending on the scope. This workshop is designed to help teachers use backward design to construct a personalized playlist. Participants will identify a focus for their playlist, explore the elements of a playlist, and work collaboratively in grade-level or subject-area teams to create an outline they can use to create their playlists. *Half-Day or Full Day Note: Half-day will focus on creating an outline for the playlist. The full day will allow teachers time to begin creating their playlists.

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning or The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

The choose your own adventure concept can be used to design learning experiences that effectively remove barriers, prioritize student agency, and increase engagement. Instead of a single learning path that all students must follow, a choose your own learning path adventure provides meaningful choices throughout the learning experience. Students have opportunities to decide how they want to acquire new information from a range of options designed to give them more control over the experience. They select strategies for making meaning individually, with a partner, or collaboratively as part of a group. Finally, they transfer their learning to demonstrate a deep understanding via a performance task which offers them a degree of agency over how they communicate their learning. As students move through a choose your learning path adventure, the teachers are freed to provide individualized support, host real-time feedback sessions, and/or conference with students about their progress. We’ll incorporate Universal Design for Learning principles and use a backward design approach to construct these choose-your-adventure experiences to ensure they are grounded in standards that align clearly with the performance task.

*Half-day

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*Book pairing: UDL and Blended Learning

Teachers must partner with their students to create learning environments that maximize the available technology and encourage students to take a lead role in monitoring, assessing, and reflecting on their learning. Too many teachers are exhausted and disillusioned with this profession because they are doing the lion’s share of the work in classrooms. It’s time to rethink our workflow, embrace new teaching and learning models that leverage technology, and shift ownership of learning over to students. This workshop will explore a partnership model and dive into strategies teachers can use to encourage metacognitive skill-building, provide more meaningful feedback, and reimagine grading and assessment.

*Audience: Teachers and Coaches

*UDL focus can be applied to this session.

*Book pairing: Balance with Blended Learning

Live Sessions

You can create a customized learning experience for your teachers by selecting the workflows you want to target in your training session. 2 workflows: half-day 3 workflows: full-day

Description: Teachers are exhausted because they do the lion’s share of the work. This workshop will guide teachers in reimagining time-consuming, teacher-led workflows that are ineffective and help them to shift to more sustainable student-led workflows. This workshop will focus on developing a partnership with learners and embracing workflows that position the learners as active agents in the learning process. We’ll explore how teachers can leverage blended learning to create the time and space for these sustainable workflows and use the principles at the heart of Universal Design for Learning to ensure these workflows are accessible, equitable, and inclusive. Teachers will leave this training with concrete strategies designed to help them shift to more student-led sustainable workflows. These workshops are hands-on and practice-based, so participants will leave with resources they can use immediately!

This collection of workshops is based on my upcoming book with Dr. Katie Novak titled UDL and Blended Learning 2: Shifting to Sustainable Student-led Workflows, which will be released in spring 2022!

Workflow Shift #1 - From Transfer of Information (Lecture) to Student Discovery

Workflow Shift #2 - From Whole Group Teacher-led to Small-group Student-led (Online and Offline) Discussion

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #3 - From Reading as Solitary Endeavor to Reading for Connection

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #4 - From an Audience of One to an Authentic Audience

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #5 - From Teacher Created to Student-Generated Review and Practice

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #6 - From Formative Assessment as Teacher Tool to a Metacognitive Skill Building Tool for Learners

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #7 - From Feedback on Finished Products to Feedback During the Process

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #8 - From Teacher Assessment to Self-Assessment

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #9 - From Teacher Initiating Parent Communication to Learners Owning the Conversation About Their Progress

​​​​​​​Workflow Shift #10 - From Teacher Project Design to Student-Initiated Project-Based Learning

Goal: Provide teachers with personalized support as design and facilitate student-centered universally designed blended learning experiences.

Coaching sessions are available in person or online via Zoom.

Coaching works best one-on-one or with small teaching teams.

Coaching sessions run 90 min-2 hours in length with each teacher or team.

Coaching follows a specific cycle but can be customized depending on the number of coaching days in a contract and/or needs of the teachers.

Teachers work directly with Catlin to set clear goals and design a blended lesson that also incorporates Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

Teachers implement the lesson with support and coaching from Catlin. Catlin may co-teach, model parts of the lesson, and provide feedback in video, writing, or a follow-up debrief conversation, depending on time and the teacher’s preference.

Instructional coaches on campus are welcome to shadow all coaching sessions to ensure they can replicate the process to provide continued support.