Jan Bryan

Jan Bryan’s educational tenure includes K – 8 music teacher, primary classroom teacher, and assistant professor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Jan now serves as VP and National Education Officer for Renaissance where she researches and writes about how educational trends best serve teachers and learners. She authored an elementary social studies series, and co-authored a career tech series, for the Texas Education Agency. For Renaissance, Jan authored white papers focusing on what powers effective educators and Response to Intervention. She has been both blessed and humbled to work with education professionals across the United States, Canada, and in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Guam and Pago, Pago.

AAPF19 Session

On the Matter of the Student’s Role in Assessment
​Session will discuss Rick Stiggins’ groundbreaking work, “The Perfect Assessment System” (2017), asks if we are “sufficiently angry enough” to redesign assessment practices in response to the changing mission of U. S. schools. If so, join your colleagues to analyze the emotional dynamic of student success and how we facilitate that dynamic in all learners. Evaluate Stiggin’s “perfect assessment system,” via students’ role in assessment, data analysis, goals and growth Transform your sufficient anger into exceptional leadership.

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AAPF18 Sessions

Mass customized learning: The “how to” for competency-based learning

Education has been described as “an industry existing in a world that requires a profession.” Mass customized learning (MCL) places profession and achievement above tradition, norms, convenience, and habit. Based on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory, MCL considers teachers and learners as equal partners; working together to find intense focus toward mastery rather than to stagnate in a state of apathy and boredom. Please bring your experiences and ideas to this session as we identify the characteristics, and inevitable consequences, of MCL. In doing so, we summarize the shared teacher/learner responsibilities required for competency-based learning for At-Promise Youth, and unify instruction, practice, and assessment to the point that they are—once and for all—seamless and indistinguishable.

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Past AAPF Sessions: 

​The Life-Changing Power of Abundant Reading 

​Dr. Jan Bryan, former professor and current education officer for Renaissance, will lead a session focused on differentiated and individualized instruction for reading and the use of multiple metrics to quantify reading growth. Attendees will explore practices proven to yield achievement and growth gains. Further, they will explore reading’s impact on vocabulary acquisition and how that impacts job advancement outside of school to understand why wide abundant reading is the surest route out of poverty.

Personalizing Instruction for At-Promise Students
SIATech continues to lead the way in changing the conversation about schooling from assessment for the purposes of sorting students to assessment for purposes of personalizing instruction; from assessments that lead students to proficiency toward standardized benchmarks to skillfully using assessment data to guide students to drive their learning. In this session, we apply the groundbreaking work of Todd Rose and his book, The End of Average, to our determination to personalize learning.  We begin with a new way to explore data—finding the jagged edges of talent within each learner’s data. Next we look Rose’s claim that traits are a myth. In doing so, we look at David Shenk’s book The Genius in All of Us. Shenk takes personalized learning to the molecular level; shattering what we think we know about nature, nurture, and learning. Finally, we look at how learning progressions coming into play at the end of average, where each learner walks a road less traveled. ​