MONTEBELLO – The Montebello Unified School District will host an innovative educational conference designed to provide more than 100 of its own transitional kindergarten through fifth-grade instructors with the tools and resources to best provide rigorous instruction aligned with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

The Strategies for Implementing Common Core State Standards Conference at La Merced Intermediate School on March 28 focuses on the implementation of critical thinking and collaborative learning activities in the classroom.

“We have so many highly qualified, experienced educators right here in Montebello Unified,” Montebello Unified Board President Edgar Cisneros said. “This is an outstanding way of working collaboratively and sharing best practices to provide the support and tools our hard-working teachers need to successfully implement Common Core effectively.”

The conference, coordinated by the MUSD Elementary Education Department in conjunction with the Montebello Teachers Association, will include nine specific discussion sessions on effective communication techniques and teaching methods for implementing CCSS.

“The purpose of the conference is to provide teachers with the opportunity to enhance their teaching skills to maximize student learning,” Adeline Canedo, Director of MUSD Elementary Education, said. “By tapping into our top program specialists’ areas of expertise to assist our teachers with implementation of Common Core in our schools, we are establishing a cohesive network of educators that can keep the ongoing transition as seamless as possible.”

More than 10 Montebello Unified Program Specialists, teachers and coordinators are presenting during the sessions, which focus on an array of topics to improve instruction across subject areas. For example, one session will address language arts instruction, such as principles needed to draft a quality purpose statement from complex text or how to analyze two or more texts to draw conclusions about how those two texts are similar.

Other sessions break down effective assessment strategies to discover how to integrate CCSS with the Next Generation Science Standards in the classroom.

Another notable session will be “Influence Student Learning with Effective Feedback,” which will provide teachers with strategies to reinforce what students already learned, while clarifying goals for student learning to move forward. Ideally, students would receive feedback in a timely fashion throughout the school term, giving the students and instructors a chance to make adjustments and improvements well before final grades are issued.

“This unique conference illustrates that our teachers are committed to providing the best quality education for our students,” Superintendent of Education Susanna Contreras Smith said. “We thoroughly commend the staff, administrators and teachers within the Elementary Education Department for their hard work in putting this conference together.”

Many of the strategies to be discussed are based on the research of Professor John Hattie, whose Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) talks and Visible Learning books have greatly influenced educational studies around the world.