Several teachers, administrators, and staff members from Chicago Heights School District 170 recently served as presenters at the prestigious 2018 Illinois ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) Conference held in Chicago.
Shannon Vera, CHSD170's Bilingual Director, SIOP (Sheltered Instruction Observational Protocol) Coaches Diane Kostovski and Katie Kvasnicka, Jennifer Gorton, the district's Parent Academy Director, and Karen King, Emy Flores and Elizabeth Briones, members of the Parent Academy team, made presentations during the event.
The presentations were exceptionally well received, earning positive feedback from attendees representing school districts and associated entities from across the state.
"Chicago Heights School District 170 is very proud of the contributions that the members of the district's Bilingual and Parent Academy teams made in optimizing the success of the 2018 ESSA Conference," said Mary Kay Entsminger, SD170's Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction.
"The current climate of education at both the state and national levels makes it incumbent upon each educator to embrace all available opportunities to share the successful programs found in every district."
"In understanding the importance of such an occasion, we are thrilled and honored that the conference organizers recognized the teachers and administrators of our district in selecting them to be presenters based upon their expertise, excellence, and commitment to serving our students and our community," Entsminger concluded.
Kostovski, Kvasnicka and Vera's presentation was entitled, "Building Oracy with English Language Learners!" and was designed to help educators make their classrooms come alive with language building activities that support language learners through focused instruction and meaningful interaction.
"As a district, we have made a conscientious plan to improving our instructional practices both at the classroom level and within our school communities to best meet the learning needs of our growing student base of English Language Learners," Vera said.
"The execution of our program improvement began with diligent research to support district-wide teacher training and ultimately rigorous classroom-level implementation, and we now have begun to see the impact of our programming with student achievement especially in the areas of language acquisition," she continued.
"Our presentation at ESSA highlighted specific interactive instruction strategies that our classroom teachers have been using with great success to support ELL students' academic conversations. We were able to provide teachers from across the state with hands-on experience with these strategies and support to implement them within their school communities."
Kostovski added to Vera's thoughts, saying, "We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to present at the 2018 ESSA Conference. The experience was meaningful for us, not only as presenters, but also as learners, and it was a pleasure to be in the company of so many dedicated educators striving to promote collaboration and enhance educational practices for every student."
"We hope that attendees were able to leave with applicable strategies to build listening and speaking skills through interaction in the classroom that will promote the development of academic language."
The presentation by Gorton, King, Flores, and Briones was entitled "Take Your Parent Engagement Programming Beyond Family Reading Nights!" and provided a framework for family engagement that welcomes families into classrooms on a monthly basis to work and learn with grade-level teaching teams.
"I speak for the whole Parent Academy team in saying we thoroughly enjoyed our experience as presenters at this year's ESSA conference," Gorton stated.
"The theme of the conference was "Focus on the Learner," and I can confidently say that our Parent Academy presentation drove home the importance of recognizing both students and their families as learners and supporting them with engaging and meaningful programming to continue learning together."
"We are all very proud of the work we are doing in Parent Academy and were very glad that we had the opportunity to share our work with a great audience of education professionals. I think our audience sincerely appreciated the rigor of our curriculum content and also our student achievement and family attendance data that shows that what we are doing is working in our school communities."