GETCA 2025

This 1-hour session will explore some of the practical ways in which Grades 7-10 teachers can model and scaffold for readers and writers the skills needed to more actively and meaningfully engage with texts of all kinds. Teachers will come away with tools and strategies that enable students to make visible to us the often-invisible process of comprehending, a process that can’t always be captured by a standardized multiple-choice assessment. Tannis will also provide a brief overview of Pearson’s new Literacy Success Assessment (Grades 7-10), a tool for gaining insights into how our students comprehend and communicate.

Governments and school boards across the globe are banning the use of mobile devices in schools in response to the inherent dangers that social media apps present. While phone bans will improve engagement in class, what happens to your students outside of school? It is imperative that schools still teach students practical skills so that they can better manage their online lives. This session will look at the methods social media companies use to keep all of us online and will offer practicl advice to better manage ones use of phones and social media apps.

Psychoeducational (or ed psych) assessments are important pieces of information for teachers, but so much of the data is often told in a different language. How do we decode the assessment reports and use them to inform planning for students? This session will give teachers a better sense of the data sources and information within an ed psych, and how they can apply it to supporting their students within the classroom and the larger school. The goal of this session is to leave teachers feeling more confident in understanding how to use ed psych data.

This presentation is designed specifically for teachers that have recently joined the plan. It provides a general overview of the plan, including information about pension contributions, maintaining your spouse/beneficiary information, the eligibility requirements for a pension, purchasing leaves of absences and substitute service, and transferring service with another pension plan.

This presentation is designed for teachers who are planning to retire during the current year or within the next few years. It provides detailed information about deciding to retire, the Steps to Retirement process and forms, the pension options, and post-retirement considerations.

Are you looking for strategies to use in your classroom that will enhance student learning and provide you valuable feedback about your teaching practice? Formative assessment provides information on what, how much and how well students are learning. This information can guide instructional practice and will benefit all students; however, it will particularly have a positive impact on low-achievers. This would be a valuable session for you because it will introduce you to a range of formative classroom assessment techniques, how to use them, how to analyze the data that they gather, and how to share that data with students. The takeaways from this session are very practical and could be smoothly incorporated into your classroom regardless of teaching situation or teaching style.

The use of performance assessments in the chemistry laboratory present unique opportunities for formative assessment. They are authentic ways for students to demonstrate their abilities and can positively affect students’ attitudes toward the lab, their academic achievement, and upon the overall environment of the classroom. When used in conjunction with student self-assessment checklists performance assessments can also promote metacognitive activity. This session will present how to administer performance assessments of five basic lab skills and the benefits to the classroom that result. The lab skills that will be discussed are measuring mass using an electronic balance, measuring volume using a graduated cylinder, lighting a Bunsen burner, measuring volume using a pipet, and completing one trial of a titration. Although this session focuses on high school chemistry, the ideas discussed could easily be adapted to the physics, biology or general science classroom.