Pre-Conference Sessions

This session, geared toward participants who are new to AVID Secondary or are interested in implementing AVID, will focus on how AVID helps educators become more engaged so that students may succeed through college and beyond. Participants will walk away with an understanding of the impact that AVID can make by systematically increasing academic rigor, creating engaging learning environments, accelerating the performance of underrepresented students, and delivering results schoolwide.

This session will provide an introductory overview of AVID Elementary for participants who are planning to implement or are interested in implementing AVID Elementary. Existing AVID Elementary partners are welcome and may pick up some updated information through this session. Participants will learn what college readiness means in an elementary context as well as the relational connection between AVID Elementary and AVID Secondary. The intended audience is district stakeholders (superintendents, curriculum and instruction directors, and District Directors) and elementary or intermediate principals and assistant principals, teachers, and instructional specialists.

This interactive and engaging session will provide a window into the latest professional learning, tools, and curriculum that will help educators deepen the impact of AVID within districts and schools. Participants will walk out with ready to access resources, and an understanding of the resources that are on the horizon.

This session is intended for all teachers, administrators, and support staff looking to engage students in the AVID Focused Note-Taking Process. The phases of this process can increase rigor and retention of information in any content area. If you are looking for more literacy across content areas, and more student interaction with the content, this session is for you.

This session, intended for all AVID educators preK–12, will explore how to use a blended approach to WICOR^® as a lens for lesson design and best instructional practices. When the five skills of WICOR—Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading—are woven together and integrated into lessons, the result is higher levels of student engagement, academic rigor, and student achievement. A blended learning approach to WICOR amplifies and accelerates learning to build student agency by empowering students to approach anything new with curiosity, a growth mindset, and a set of technology and problem-solving skills to engage with content in meaningful ways. Participants will explore WICOR as a lens for lesson design that blends with digital strategies to engage students in collaborative learning practices that empower them to take ownership of their learning.

AVID Weekly^® and AVID^® Elementary Weekly are each a collection of texts, lessons, and resources that provide options for educators to customize them to meet the needs of their students in all learning environments. The AVID Critical Reading Process is integrated into the lessons so that educators in all content areas can bring disciplinary literacy to life in their classrooms. These lessons integrate WICOR strategies, providing opportunities for students to engage in writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading. This session will explore how to maximize AVID Elementary Weekly and AVID Weekly schoolwide using innovative instructional practices from AVID’s curriculum resources.

Educators are invited to this session to discover how AVID STEM Connections^® engages students in hands-on STEM lessons that promote problem-solving skills and college and career readiness. Participants will experience how STEM Connections provides a comprehensive review of AVID’s multidisciplinary approach to STEM by engaging in several differentiated STEM Connections lessons that utilize the design thinking process to support critical thinking and problem-solving.

What the world needs most are students who analyze problems like engineers, develop hypotheses like scientists, think analytically like mathematicians, recognize the power of individuals like historians, create like artists, and record their thinking about all of the above like authors. Disciplinary literacy is a schoolwide approach to providing students with the tools and strategies for success in every content area. This session will explore what disciplinary literacy is, why it matters, and how to take it schoolwide so that AVID schools and districts are able to close expectation, opportunity, and achievement gaps for all students.

What the world needs most are students who analyze problems like engineers, develop hypotheses like scientists, think analytically like mathematicians, recognize the power of individuals like historians, create like artists, and record their thinking about all of the above like authors. Disciplinary literacy is a schoolwide approach to providing students with the tools and strategies for success in every content area. This session will explore what disciplinary literacy is, why it matters at the elementary level, and how to take it schoolwide so that AVID schools and districts are able to close expectation, opportunity, and achievement gaps for all students.

When Mary Catherine Swanson introduced AVID in 1980, she knew students would need to be able to organize their learning materials to be successful in rigorous classes. With the rise of technological advancements in the 21st century, a need emerged for students to take ownership of their digital organization and tell their learning story in a meaningful way. In this session, participants will experience intentional organization of time, materials, and thoughts within a digital learning environment through interactive notebooks (INB) and AVID eBinders.

This session invites educators to evaluate the ways in which they are already supporting their students with critical thinking and problem-solving and to explore additional approaches to capture student inquiry and engagement through “unplugged” activities (with no computers required) that incorporate computer science and computational thinking skills. Participants will learn how to apply the logical thinking processes used in computer science across all academic disciplines and grade levels.

Wouldn’t it be so easy if all educators had to do was deliver information? Then you throw students in the mix, each with their own history, experience, personality, and relationship to school, and it gets much more complicated. Instead of looking at WICOR^® strategies as just one more thing to do, in this session participants will experience how to use WICOR (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading) as a lens for lesson design to transform instruction and develop instructional routines that increase engagement, create access to rigorous content, and accelerate learning. Participants are asked to bring their digital device.

In blended learning environments, educators’ biggest concerns are keeping students engaged and providing rigorous learning. This session illustrates the foundational power that relationships have over memory and resilient learning in order to show how grit, determination, and positive purpose arise from caring and committed relationships. Elementary educators are invited to explore how the neurochemistry of positive and challenging relationships increases memory and engagement with rigorous learning.

The Weeks at a Glance (WAG) for the AVID Elective are undergoing a revision. AVID Elective teachers who have used one of the new WAG units on offer for the 2022–2023 school year—STEM, eBinders, or Financial Literacy—and have ideas about how to improve the WAG are invited to come to this interactive workshop to see a demonstration of the new website for WAG, explore the new unit and lesson formats, and provide feedback to contribute their voices to the WAG Revision Project!

This session will provide participants with content aligned to the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework, to support and strengthen AVID Elementary implementation. Some key topics include student and educator agency, collective educator agency, elementary progress monitoring, and vertical and horizontal alignment. The session will address these topics utilizing WICOR^® (Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading) to align the work.