March 16, 2015

On Saturday March 14, Cosby Hunt, Inspired Teaching’s Manger of Teaching & Learning, spoke at the 2015 Teaching & Learning Conference, held in Washington, DC. Cosby was a panelist for a session on Implementing the Common Core as a Community of Practice: Lessons Learned through the Literacy Design Collaborative.

The panel was moderated by Dr. Suzanne Simons, Literacy Design Collaborative Chief of Instruction & Design. On the panel, Cosby was joined by Kathy Dulis, Media Specialist for Seaford Middle School in Seaford, Delaware; Nancy Gardner, Department Chair and Senior Project Coordinator in Mooresville Graded School District, North Carolina; and Rod Powell, a social studies teacher at Mooresville High School in Mooresville, North Carolina. As described in the session description, panelists shared their “insights, challenges, and successes based on their first-hand experiences with LDC” and discussed ways to implement standards that “empower both educators and students.”

In 2012, Inspired Teaching integrated the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) framework as part of a partnership with District of Columbia Public Schools to provide social studies educators the training they need to continue building students’ content expertise and independent thinking skills. The Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity has recognized work created by Inspired Teaching within the LDC framework as “exemplary.”

This year, Cosby and Matt Fiteny, Inspired Teaching’s Social Studies Education Manager, are training a cohort of teachers through BLISS: Building Literacy in the Social Studies, a powerful social studies Teacher Leader education program for middle and high school teachers. Through a partnership between Inspired Teaching and DCPS, the program trains teachers in inquiry-based instruction and adapts the LDC framework to create College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) aligned curricula that will be available to DC social studies teachers District-wide.