12:00-1:00

Earth is the only known planet with life, yet we live in a solar system filled with other worlds, a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, and there are more galaxies in the known universe than stars in our Milky Way. In NASA's search for life in our solar system and beyond, what are scientists looking for? From "follow the water" to exoplanets, explore discoveries, classroom-ready resources, and learn what makes a habitable world!

Teaching students to reason and problem solve is the cornerstone of quality math instruction. This session will highlight several engaging strategies such as Three Reads, Numberless Word Problems, and more that will provide multiple entry points for all students to engage in the math and ignite a passion for problem solving in your classroom!

This session will provide the opportunity to see the current and newly adopted elementary school (K-5) Science TEKS side-by-side, followed by a round-table-style discussion of how the changes will impact teaching and learning

This session will allow teachers to see how creative students can get with their thinking. You will learn what student inquiry is really like and how to implement it in the classroom. This is exciting because you will see how your students can grow by only asking questions.

Formative assessment? Only when it drives what comes next. Utilize data to give feedback to feed forward student progress. Explore multiple ways to respond to data to revisit, reflect, revise, review, reteach and reboot when determining how to identify and close gaps! Each step is intentionally crafted to address student needs. What the data reveals determines which approach works best for teachers and students. What we do with data matters.

This session is an introduction to an instructional model called Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI). ADI was created based on findings from research on how people learn and is designed to make learning experiences more rigorous and equitable. Rigorous work presses learners to go beyond what they currently know and can do. A rigorous learning experience gives students an opportunity to figure out how or why something happens.

This session will provide the opportunity to engage in a round-table-style discussion of how the changes to the item types on the STAAR exam will impact teaching and learning.

Are you tired of giving your students a scripted lab only to realize they didn't learn from it? Help your students take control of their learning and shift your class to more student-driven inquiry. Together we will explore how to move from cookie cutter to student-driven inquiry. Taking "old labs" to "ADI-ish". We will look at upcoming units and how to open up your "favorite labs" for more student inquiry.

There are some classic experiments in both chemistry and biology that show where our underlying understanding of protons and electrons, or DNA and proteins come from. But what else was going on at the same time? (Hint: Robert Frost wrote a poem about the discovery of the nucleus) And did we know the structure of DNA before or after we knew it was the genetic material?