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WERA 2024 Annual Conference
Pre-Conference Sessions Downtown Tacoma Marriott Hotel
December 4, 2024 WERA is offering thirteen pre-conference sessions across two time blocks. Morning Sessions: 9:00-12:00
1. Crafting Clarity: Mastering the Art of AI Prompt Engineering in Education Explore the art of Prompt Engineering in our interactive workshop. Learn how to craft effective AI prompts that yield meaningful and actionable insights from educational data. This session will equip you with strategies to enhance AI responsiveness and accuracy in educational research. Access to a frontier model AI is encouraged but not required. This session will cover pre-existing student identification models, the updates to OMB SPB 15 and their proposed changes to student race/ethnicity identification, OSPI's work on updating student race/ethnicity data collection and use in Washington State, and the impact this work has on local and state achievement metrics and access to equitable education funding and outcomes for under- and misidentified student populations. Schools are embracing two complementary approaches—Mastery-Based Learning (MBL) and Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CRSE)—to create more engaging and relevant learning spaces and more equitably prepare students for a successful future. This session will include an overview of the strategies used in MBL and CRSE before diving into how the State Board is partnering with schools, districts, state level partners, and national experts to build a sustainable system for this work. Attendees will engage in discussion with state and local leaders and provide feedback to inform these efforts. This session will explore the statewide focus of integrating systems and efforts to provide inclusive outcomes for all students. In addition to inclusionary supports, the session will examine several related and interwoven state efforts, reducing exclusion, supporting a sense of belonging as a preventative factor, and highlighting the systems that support this improvement effort. Participants will engage with models and concepts to promote this systems level improvement as well as a multitude of tools to use in their buildings and districts for implementation and improvement efforts. Efficacy, equity and efficiency! This session will provide an actionable approach to strengthening professional learning communities by offering clear strategies to combat data silos to enhance best first instruction and differentiation. Participants will take away strategies that are implementable in the next 10 days, 10 weeks and 10 months. A strong focus on cycles of inquiry while using formative assessment data will help strengthen methodological and pedagogical toolboxes that will maximize student outcomes and help address the ever-present learning loss post covid more strategically. Curious to learn about R? R is a programming language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. This workshop is for anyone who is unfamiliar with R and wants to learn some basics to get started. Topics include a brief history of R, installation, working with the console, importing data, generating descriptive statistics and graphics. The workshop is step-by-step, with examples and practice throughout. Participants will need a laptop. Installing R prior to the workshop is helpful, but not required. Read more about R and computer requirements at https://cran.r-project.org/.
Afternoon Sessions: 1:00-4:00 7. AI Unpacked: Transforming Educational Data into Actionable Insights This session provides an introduction to using AI to interpret complex data in a safe and secure environment. Participants will have the opportunity to analyze and visualize educational data through natural language processing with minimal past experience with data analysis. Commercial and free models will be used to demonstrate how aggregate data can be processed alongside an AI before moving to a new, closed environment within AWS & Azure that should calm privacy concerns about where student data is stored. By the end of this workshop, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how AI can enhance their ability to interpret and utilize data more efficiently and ethically. Bring your questions and your data! Join us for an energizing session focused on how districts and schools can more effectively support students' postsecondary aspirations. We'll share insights from a Gates Foundation-funded study that uncovers how students perceive the support they receive for college access and career readiness, highlighting both effective strategies and critical areas needing improvement. This workshop offers a unique opportunity to reflect on your district's own practices, collaborate with peers, and develop actionable strategies to close gaps and enhance postsecondary outcomes. Leave inspired and equipped with practical tools to elevate your district's support systems. Does your district have capacity for implementing innovation? In this interactive workshop, participants will learn how to assess and use district capacity results in conjunction with other implementation and outcome data to guide their implementing planning. Participants will use case studies and illustrations for applied learning and leave with tools and access for administering, analyzing, and reporting capacity assessment results. Utilization of MTSS systems can be overwhelming and without the right tools solutions can be driven by the wrong data. How using innovative technology to understand student behaviors, movements, & locations among 2,500 students and establish appropriate Tiered interventions is the focus of this workshop. The workshop will include an explanation of the use of Minga, a digital student management system and data from EduClimber and PowerSchool. This interactive session will focus on the unique challenges and opportunities small school districts face when developing and maintaining Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS). Participants will engage in discussions, share experiences, and explore solutions to common issues. This is NOT a sit-and-get presentation; it is a facilitated problem-of-practice session. The goal is to empower and equip educators with practical strategies to enhance MTSS implementation in their districts. We encourage participants at all stages of development to join us in this learning experience. Research shows high-quality professional learning possesses design structures likely to have a positive impact on efficacy beliefs among educators. Given the positive correlates to high levels of collective teacher efficacy, it is imperative to intentionally design professional learning with the specific intention of growing the collective efficacy of educators. In this session we will confirm the characteristics of high-quality professional learning, explore what research tells us about its intersection with collective teacher efficacy, and explore implications and tools for our practice. Come join data analysts from OSPI to learn the basics of how to use structured query language (SQL) to access and analyze your database data. This workshop will walk through the basics of what a database and SQL are and enable you to able to apply basic aggregations to your data for quick answers. This workshop will have attendees working with their computers, so signing up early is advised to ensure your IT team has time to get you the software you need. |