This open discussion session focuses on challenges, hopes, and strategies for success in teaching. Student teachers and teachers in their first few years of service are invited to talk about challenges and victories. Experienced teachers and others who care about the struggles of novice teachers are encouraged to attend and share their ideas.
Blog Archives
Read with Choice: The Rebecca Caudill and Lincoln Titles
Come learn about the titles for the 2025 Rebecca Caudill and Lincoln Teen Readers Choice book awards! Learn about new, great books and also how you can run the program at your own school, if you want. Learn how you can get involved in helping select the books that go on the lists as well!
Getting Students INTO Analysis
Teaching the previously-dreaded analysis skill becomes an anticipated opportunity for discovery and reasoned defense with a new approach. Get students into analytical reading and writing using a series of engaging warm-up activities that will spark interest, inspire investigation, and boost confidence. No more dry and boring book talks! Guide students through the fields of art and music first. Transition to crime scene analysis to make clue searching fun again. Involve AI if you dare. When students finally land in the world of text, they will know how to argue for their interpretation with conviction and solid evidence. Come learn new ways to approach analysis!
Session materials: Slides (The slide deck also includes access to a note-taking page.)
Make Time To Write!
Looking for new ways to energize your instruction through creative writing? This session will offer strategies for helping students gain a better understanding of point of view, punctuation, mood, narrative distance, and syntax by giving students the opportunity to write letters, spoken (and unspoken) dialogues, and poetry in a range of voices. Why not ask students to write a deferral letter in the voice of Meursault or imagine Jane Eyre and Janie Crawford as college roommates and write the dialogue when they first meet? Why not re-write the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet in a spaceship or re-imagine the soldiers in The Things They Carried as junior high school boys on a basketball court? Creative writing helps students unpack character motivation, and builds empathy and connection with different lived experiences.
Re-writing scenes from different characters’ perspectives can help students develop a deeper appreciation for the limitations and possibilities of the author’s selected point of view. Attendees will look at student samples and consider nimble creative writing possibilities for commonly taught novels in grades 9-12 as well as short stories, poems, and even independent reading. Writing can also be a great way to get students to connect with their classmates through sharing their writing with one another. The session will give teachers tools to strengthen students’ reading and writing skills and to establish a greater sense of community in the classroom.
Session Materials: Slides
Empowering Multilingual Learners: Leveraging Asset-Based Language and Effective Strategies in Mainstream English Classes
This presentation aims to explore the transformative potential of asset-based language frameworks and practical strategies for supporting multilingual learners in mainstream English classes. By shifting the focus from deficit-based models to acknowledging and harnessing the linguistic strengths and cultural assets of multilingual students, teachers aim to create a positive and inclusive learning environment. Attendees will gain insights into differentiated instructional techniques, effective assessment methods, and collaborative learning approaches, supported by real-world examples and success stories. The session encourages interactive participation, fostering a space for educators to exchange ideas and best practices, contributing to a more inclusive and effective approach to teaching English to multilingual learners in diverse educational settings.
Session materials: Slides
Future Leaders Speak Out on Refining Our Literary Traditions
Since literary traditions are ever-evolving, it’s crucial to engage with the perspectives of future educators on how to refine and redefine these traditions. This presentation will offer insights and research from pre-service teachers enrolled in the licensure program at Northern Illinois University. These emerging educators represent the next generation of literary leaders, and their voices are instrumental in shaping the future of ELA education. This panel features pre-service teachers at various stages of their licensure program, each offering a unique perspective on the refinement of literary traditions. Through interactive discussions, personal reflections, and practical examples, the presenters will delve into innovative approaches to teaching literature that honor tradition while embracing contemporary voices and perspectives. By amplifying the voices of future leaders in education, this session contribute to the ongoing dialogue about how literature can foster empathy, criticalthinking, and cultural understanding. The presentation will inspire conference attendees to reevaluate their own teaching practices and consider new ways to engage students with literary texts. Areas of focus include: 1) Reimagining canonical texts for diverse classrooms; 2) Integrating contemporary literature into the curriculum; 3) Using technology to enhance literary learning experiences; and 4) Empowering student voices through reader-response pedagogy.
Identity Cycles: SEL Integration in the ELA Classroom
Suggested: Bring a laptop with Google Suite
Together we will explore a curriculum rooted in identity for middle school students that empowers them to not only critically craft their own identities, but more thoroughly develop critical thinking skills in order to enact social change. The curriculum integrates social emotional learning with common core, while being non-linear and revolutionary. Texts, skills, and activities centered on identity allow students of color, in particular, to take control over their identity formation, and also allows white students the chance to authentically reflect and understand their own positions of privilege in contrast. Paired with seminars, collaborative writing, and individual reflections through an active revision process, this cyclical curriculum engages students by returning to concepts and skills in order to deepen their holistic development throughout the year. The intersection of SEL, ELA, and equity is of utmost importance as our students, and the world around us, continue to recover from the upheaval of a global pandemic. Corrine Ulmer has over a decade of direct experience developing and implementing advanced middle school curriculum that offers practical takeaways from Elise Zerega’s background in pedagogical research that explores the intersection of SEL and academic achievement.
Engaging students in local, collaborative problem solving to build their vision of the future
Explore how local news can be used as a powerful tool to teach reading, writing, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving skills, while serving as a motivational hook to help students seek out information and connect with peers and the broader community. Our federally-funded unit connects reading and thinking skills with the writing process using a student-centric, project-based approach.
To highlight some features of the highly versatile featured unit, students develop reading and critical thinking skills through interactive modeling of cognitive skills and corresponding writing assignments. Built-in prompts engage students in peer-to-peer discussion about local issues. A culminating group project invites students to engage in collaborative problem-solving with their peers as they formulate a personal cause, select and analyze news articles, and produce an essay and a creative work aimed to advocate for change within their own community.
Participants will learn a reliable process for evaluating news articles in a non-biased manner. They will explore unit materials, including reading and writing activities, grading rubrics, student work and notes from teachers who have taught with the materials previously. This unit can be tailored to meet the needs of any classroom, and provides ample opportunities for cross-curricular connections, community involvement, and meaningful communication with peers and the broader community.
“My Excellent Friend”: The Letter-Writing of Frankenstein in the Age of SnapChat
Our students use text to correspond with each other more than ever, often churning out micro-epistles while we teach our most engaging lessons. But while research overwhelmingly suggests that handwriting stimulates brain development and correspondence boosts mental health, snapping bypasses many of these benefits, due to the brevity and screen-dependence of the medium. When given the opportunity to turn a text into a real letter, however – one with an elevated salutation, advanced vocabulary, and ornate sentences, students will scribble seriously for half an hour, phones forgotten in backpacks. Engaging this activity in preparation for reading novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will allow students to playfully encounter the language of the 19th century, consider new words and their shifting meanings over time, and compose heartfelt and often hilarious missives (if only to scold the dog for soiling the “citadel” of their bedroom).
In this workshop, participants will examine sample letters, both from Frankenstein and from online archives of Victorian-era correspondence; next, they will draw from an extensive word list in composing letters of high emotion and elevated language. At the end of the workshop, participants will discuss further implications for how such writing generates authentic stakes, stimulates discussions of word usage and parts of speech, and increases student confidence in the otherwise daunting task of reading 19th century texts.
Video Games as Literary Source Material for the Writing Classroom
Video-computer based games emerged as consumer products in the 1970s and now surpass movies, television, and music in terms of worldwide profits. Many of the original text-based games, such as Zork and Deadline had a genre based literary quality to them, and 50 years later we still see literary storytelling in this medium, with both major corporations and independent developers delivering significant texts using varying levels of technology and sophistication.
At the lower level of this, developers often produce low cost material that effectively deals with social and personal issues our students are interested in. Papers Please is a multi-platform game that examines issues around immigration and documentation. One Night, Hot Springs looks at the experience of being trans at a hot spring, while This War of Mine allow us to be a civilian in an urban combat zone (and is a text in Polish history classes). New and exciting games come out frequently, and this is a rich area for texts, which are sophisticated and meet students “where they live.”
We have successfully used video games in the writing classroom, and we are proposing a workshop that presents a number of short low-cost (or free) games to the audience, along with a variety of ways of using them in the classroom. As part of the experience, we would like to engage the participants in an actual lesson in relation to one of the games being presented.