After a brief overview of how ChatGPT works, we’ll talk about ways to design assignments that deter students from using AI generated texts. This is NOT a session on how to catch, police, or punish the use of AI, but to design more holistic and process-oriented tasks that ask students to do their own thinking.After a brief overview of how ChatGPT works, we’ll talk about ways to design assignments that deter students from using AI generated texts. This is NOT a session on how to catch, police, or punish the use of AI, but to design more holistic and process-oriented tasks that ask students to do their own thinking.
Blog Archives
Featured Speaker, Briana Morales, 2023 Illinois Teacher of the Year
Briana Morales is a proud Latina and freedom fighter for students in alternative education, where she has spent her career loving and learning alongside students furthest from justice in East St. Louis, IL. Throughout her career she has helped students turn pain into power through narrative poetry of witness. Briana was honored in 2021 as a NCTE Early Career Educator of Color and more recently as the 2023 Illinois Teacher of the Year.
Featured Speaker, Jessamine Chan, Illinois Author of the Year
Jessamine Chan holds a B.A. from Brown University and a MFA from Columbia University. Chan worked as a reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, and her stories have appeared in Tin House and EPOCH. Her debut novel The School for Good Mothers is a New York Times Bestseller and was included on The Today Show host Jenna Bush Hager’s “Read with Jenna” book list. It was a finalist for the 2023 John Leonard Prize awarded by the National Book Critics Circle. Freckle Films, a production company owned by Jessica Chastain, purchased the rights for a TV adaptation of A School for Good Mothers.
Lifetime Membership Award, Gary Anderson
The Ethical Frame: Understanding the Relationship of Discourse and the Ethical Basis of an Argument
For teachers who teach argumentation. In addition to effective argument processes (claim, evidence, warrant; logos, ethos, pathos), the way a speaker frames an argument can determine a speaker’s success with an audience. This frame is built with a speaker’s discourse–deliberate and purposeful language choices of a speaker to present an argument. Effective deployment of a particular discourse can redraw the moral and ethical lines that make an argument appealing. This session will provide teachers with a vocabulary and knowledge base for teaching the concept of discourse and the way a speaker’s choice of discourse frames an argument.
Let’s Talk Narrative
Personal narrative is often seen as an extra unit of writing because of the pressure on teachers to focus on informational and analytical writing. When we look at authentic writing, however, personal narrative is often blended with other genres. This session will focus on how writers often incorporate personal stories for the purpose of answering questions and feature lessons and activities from our upcoming book, Narrative as Navigation.
Illinois State Readers’ Choice Awards
Want to learn about the Readers’ Choice Awards for Illinois? Did you know that they exist for all ages from k-12th grade? Find out which program is for you and learn about strategies for using the lists in your classroom and a sampling of books from the lists.
What is “real,” anyway? Creating a new 12th-grade ELA course to align with college composition
The co-presenters, a high school and a community college English teacher, collaborated to create a new 12th-grade ELA course under the state’s Transitional Instruction Initiative. The new course more intentionally aligns with first-year college composition. They will share information about the course, their work together as colleagues at neighboring institutions, and how they’ve created a curriculum, along with engaging instructional techniques, to make college a more realistic and tangible option for students that identify themselves as needing extra support in the areas of reading and writing.
Neurodivergent: Walking the Walk of Authenticity
Authenticity requires a careful balance of the teacher’s executive presence (Hewlett, 2014) the requirements of subject area, the needs of the students, the students’ individual situations, both biological and environmental. Neurodivergence, on the part of the teacher, the students, or both, adds a bit of spice to the experience. This presentation/discussion will explore using teacher authenticity as an important element of relationship-building as a foundation for learning, maneuvering as a neurodivergent (autistic) teacher to support that authenticity, and modifying strategies to encourage success and accessibility for all in the neurodiverse classroom.
Fostering Resilience: utilizing differentiated strategies to support all students in cultivating a growth mindset and becoming metacognitive readers and writers
We need to be pioneers who embrace our resilient spirit. Participants will gain specific ideas to create warm, supportive, engaged, and hard-working classrooms where students feel a strong sense of belonging. These methods can easily be incorporated into any lesson and will strengthen the student-to-student bonds as well as the student-to-teacher relationship in order to help students reach optimum academic success.
Producing Podcasts as an Alternative Assessment
This session will describe a summative assessment that used the genre of a “true crime” podcast with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Students modeled the journalistic style of the novel, used critical thinking and textual evidence to analyze characters, practiced the writing process through re-reading, drafting, and revision, and tapped into their own creativity and humor to increase their understanding of the novel. This session will explain the process of the podcast project, demonstrate the technology tools used, look at samples of the final product, and brainstorm other works of literature that might lend themselves to this engaging alternative to a test or essay.