All sessions can be delivered as keynotes or as workshops from 60 minutes in length to a full day. Sessions will be customized to meet the needs of your group or conference theme.

Whole Class Differentiation

Not only is it impossible to differentiate your instruction for students 100% of the time, it is inadvisable to do so.

In this session you will use basic knowledge of your learners to effectively and proactively differentiate for your whole class.

Providing Differentiated Challenge

When you are teaching foundational concepts and skills that students simply have to get, you will need to provide challenge appropriate to students’ different starting points for learning.

In this session we will consider some simple ways to pre-assess students’ knowledge, learning preferences and interests, along with ways to use this information to differentiate your response to students’ readiness to learn.

Searching the Haystack

Albert Einstein was asked about the difference between his intelligence and everyone else’s. He said, “When people go looking for a needle in the haystack and find it, they stop looking. I keep looking for more needles.”

In this session we will use a variety of creative and critical thinking processes to search for and develop multiple workable solutions to specific problems of student disengagement.

Strengths Gazing

The 21st century marks the hopeful beginning of a revolution—a time when adults in workplaces will be supported in work that emphasizes their strengths rather than their weaknesses.

This session will begin with a review of the Gallup research into strengths-based organizations and then will share some practical and manageable ways you can use differentiated instruction to do some strengths gazing of your own—for yourself and for your students.

Young Adolescents –What are they all about?

The defining characteristic of early adolescence (students in grades 6-10) is not hormones, but diversity.  Early adolescence is a dynamic time, second only to the first two years of life for growth spurts in all areas of development – physical, social, emotional, moral, and cognitive. 

In this session, we will look at the developmental needs of the young adolescent learner, and the implications for our teaching and our students’ learning.

Planning for Success

Take a half or a full day to deepen your work on differentiated instruction and assessment.

In this session we will use the backward design process to further your understanding and skills in one or more of the three stages of: establishing clear learning goals and success criteria; creating assessments that effectively determine student understanding and skill before, during and after learning, and using the principles of differentiated instruction and lesson design to develop lessons and activities that address stated learning goals. The intention of this workshop is that you leave with plans in places and activities ready to use in your classroom tomorrow.

Engaging Students in Assessment for Learning

Students develop metacognitive skills, become more engaged in learning and are able to self-advocate when they understand who they are as learners, how they learn best, and the steps they can take to improve their learning.

In this workshop we will explore a variety of tools for self, peer, and small group assessments.

Assessment Sanity

Assessment for learning techniques and tools are meant to provide educators with the evidence needed to inform next steps in instruction and give descriptive feedback to students. They aren’t meant to add to a teacher’s workload or create additional stress.

In this session you will be provided with a wide variety of simple assessment for learning tools, and shown how to match these tools to learning goals. We will use actual classroom examples to demonstrate how to gather assessment information as part of daily work and how to determine appropriate next steps in response to the information gathered.

Literacy Strategies Across the Curriculum

This session provides an introduction to effective literacy strategies for all adolescents in all subject areas.

Participants will leave this workshop with an understanding of key principles of adolescent literacy. An assortment of literacy strategies for use before, during and after learning. Knowledge of how to differentiate strategies to address student readiness, preferences, and interests.

15 300 Hours

We have limited time with our students –15 300 hours in all of Kindergarten through Grade 12. In that time, we need to help them get ready for a future that, as Yogi Berra said, “ain’t what it used to be.”

But what does that actually mean for our classrooms? Is the “21st century learner” simply rhetoric or do we need to change what we do?

Engaging the Disengaged

What causes so many students (and some of their teachers) to disengage from learning, and what can we do about it?

Author and educator Karen Hume will provide an overview of five aspects of engagement where the actions we take can help all learners be more involved in their work and achieve greater success.

Not Like the Others: Teaching in Today’s Classrooms

Diversity is the defining characteristic of today’s classrooms. Differentiated instruction is the response to that diversity. 

In this interactive session, author Karen Hume will work with you to think about differentiated instruction in ways that are achievable, manageable, and even exciting! 

Developing Competent Learners

In effective classrooms, students develop competencies that support their engagement and achievement and help them see school as a relevant place to be. That statement makes for a nice sound byte but it may seem more rhetoric than reality when we are addressing a jam-packed curriculum and multiple classes of diverse learners.

In this interactive keynote, educator and author Karen Hume will share practical and manageable ways for you to help students develop needed competencies through differentiated instruction.