This is a workshop designed for educators at any stage of their career to examine the role of implicit bias, also known as unconscious bias, in both their personal and professional lives. In this workshop, participants will engage in a variety of activities to increase their awareness of implicit bias, and understand the impact of implicit bias on their teaching practice. Participants will learn to recognize how implicit bias shows up in the classroom.
Blog Archives
Authentic Responses to Refugee: Pre-Service Teachers, Social Activism, and Assessment Design”
This panel centers on the development of authentic assessments to increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes. In it, pre-service teachers shift students from passive consumers to content creators and social activists, while working with the YA novel Refugee by Alan Gratz. In addition to sharing their research, planning, and discovery, each presenter will bring three carefully formulated questions related to assessment design and their future teaching, which they will pose to audience members. Our hope is that educators from around the state can offer these teacher candidates constructive feedback related to their assessment designs and the instructional units in which they will one day be taught.
Inquiry & Literacy: Using Authentic Problems and Real Student Conversations to Engage Students
We all want our students to be engaged; we want them to be seen, heard, valued AND captivated by the curriculum. However, as the year goes on, activities like bellringers, team-building exercises, and daily brain breaks become less effective and less engaging, and they don’t generate student excitement about the content of the class. What if it didn’t need to be that way? What if curriculum could be authentically engaging? The presenters will share a guaranteed and viable approach to curricular design that centers current, controversial questions; by putting questions that matter at the center of unit design, teachers are empowered to privilege student voice and meaning-making above student compliance.To make school authentic and exciting, we don’t need to ditch the standards or revamp the reading: we need to shift how we think about teaching and learning, including inquiry-based units, discussion modalities that can be applied to any unit, and strategies to enhance student reading, writing, and overall literacy.
Choosing Literary Texts that Matter Now and Writing About Them in a Way that Does, Too: A Writing-to-Learn Activity that Deepens Analysis, Reflection, and Community
This session will explore resources for relevant text selection and guide participants in a writing-to-learn activity that invites them to weave their own narratives into a literary text to simultaneously develop analytical thinking, writing fluency, self-awareness, and classroom community.