New Milford BOE Hears From Conference Participants

Three New Milford school district administrators recently joined educators from throughout the United States and the world at an educational conference that focused on the supervision of teachers and curriculum development.

New Milford High School Principal Eric Sheninger, David E.Owens Middle School Principal Whitney Perro and Daniele Shanley, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction attended the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) Conference in San Francisco back in March.

The three administrators presented a synopsis of their experiences at the conference during the April 25 meeting of the Board of Education.

“My experience was very humbling,” Sheninger told the school board.

“As a conference scholar I had an opportunity to engage with educators from all over the world (and) reflect on what we can do to further motivate our staffs to improve learning,” he said.

Sheninger also gave a presentation on Best Practices in Social Networking at the conference.

“I reflected on a lot of what we are doing at New Milford High School, especially the recent Holocaust study tour,” he said.

During that tour student participants communicated by Skype with their parents from the Czech Republic at an Open House in the district back on April 14.

Sheninger said that he has been receiving “excellent feedback” on his presentation through emails from conference participants.

Shanley reported that she attended workshops on curriculum mapping and brain-based learning.

The curriculum mapping workshop was designed to share strategies with educators who, “wanted to develop a professional development plan to train their own faculty members,” this according to information provided by Shanley.

In brain-based learning, Shanley explained, “real learning takes place when the whole body is engaged.”

Brain-based learning is a, “comprehensive approach to instruction using current research from neuroscience,” according to a description of the workshop she attended.

“The American school system is still very much respected throughout the world,” Perro told the school board.

“I was in the room with educators from Turkey, New Zealand and other countries …this was an extremely memorable experience,” she said.

Perro participated in a demonstration of smart boards and a workshop on detecting learning problems in youngsters at an early age known as the RTI program.

The RTI or Response to Intervention program works by “detecting problems early and enabling immediate intervention when students don’t meet grade level expectations,” according to information on the conference’s web site.