AVID Summer Institute 2019 Day 1

I had the opportunity to attend the AVID Summer Institute (SI) last week in Dallas, Texas! As I stated in a previous post, I am going to be teaching a section of our AVID elective for (at least) the next four years. As the final step in being able to teach the AVID elective, I had to go to SI for training.
We had two half days and a 3/4 day training to teach us strategies and expectations for teaching the AVID elective.

I have just now got time (or had the mental energy) to be able to process all of the information that was given. Let's go through it.

Day 1
We discussed the importance of relational capacity, which is a fancy term for building community and relationships within your class. We did a license plate icebreaker, which helped us to get to know other people in the room. My AVID elective teacher partner (the teacher who is teaching the other section of AVID 9) are planning on tying this activity with the infamous Sara VanDerWerf name tents. If you haven't seen these, go check them out!

Then we dived straight into WICOR, which is an acronym for AVID teaching strategies. The picture below will define WICOR.

Then we started our section on Focused Note-Taking, which includes five phases for taking notes: Taking Notes, Processing Notes, Connecting Thinking, Summarizing/Reflecting on notes, and, finally, Applying notes. For more information, google the 5 states of note taking and AVID. I did not have time to take a picture of the slides on this part. We then went through and modeled the steps as a group.

After focused note taking, a student panel was brought in of local kids who were in AVID, and then we got to talk to some of the kids and talk about AVID and how it had made a positive impact on their lives. After this, we did a collaboration (the C in WICOR) activity which led into an introduction to the tutorial process, which was day 2.

I also forgot to mention WICOR partners. You give students a sheet with WICOR on it. Then you play music and when the music stops, the person closest to you puts their name on your sheet. The first person would be your W partner. Then the process repeats for ICOR. So, this is a cool way to do partners! As a teacher, you can say "Get with your W partner" or "Get with your O partner. Students would need to file this in a binder or INB.