Let’s celebrate the mighty voices of our young people! This session will provide hands-on strategies for uplifting and expanding students’ personal narrative writing. Whether it’s a stepping stone to the college essay or a fun way of building community, storytelling techniques can enhance students’ creative expression as well as promote an inclusive space to excavate compelling stories based on their lived experiences. We’ll be exploring multi-genre forms including flash narrative, poetry, and graphic memoirs. Participants will enjoy an interactive experience that they can bring back to their own classrooms. No prior storytelling or visual art skills necessary.
Blog Archives
Transforming Teaching with Student-Facing AI: What Used to Take Days—Like Grading Assignments—Can Now Be Done Instantly, Using Data to Inform Instruction and Enhance Engagement in Literacy
This session will explore how AI tools provide real-time feedback and scaffolding to enhance student engagement and save valuable time! By leveraging AI-powered platforms, educators can offer personalized support that meets students at their level, keeping them motivated and engaged. These tools generate data that drives instruction, allowing teachers to maximize small-group time and focus on targeted support. AI-powered tools like Snorkl, Brisk Teaching, and Notebook LM offer instant feedback, personalized support, and interactive learning experiences. Integrating these tools helps teachers meet the needs of diverse learners in literacy while using data to inform and guide instruction, maximize instructional time, and foster deeperstudent engagement. Exp lore how AI tools enhance literacy through real-time feedback and interactive support, with real classroom examples from grades 3-5. These examples can be easily adapted in classrooms at any grade level and across content areas.
Three Minute Poems: Mining, Crafting, Polishing, Sharing
This session will guide you through timed writing protocols designed for instant results. The initial goal is to show how students can write—in as little as ten minutes—a spontaneous, no-pressure poem draft. A draft they may eventually choose to revise, edit, polish, and even publish. The long-term goal is to help students and teachers develop a creative writing practice that resists writer’s block and channels the spirit of discovery. You will leave the session with tools to help you and your students start, develop, and finish a poem.
From Margin to Center: Moving Students’ Voices to the Middle of the Page
In research and other text-based writing situations, student voice is often marginalized—the result both of students’ reluctance to claim authority over somewhat unfamiliar topics and of the cold formality of stereotypical academic language. This session will equip teachers with ways to help students gain confidence and authority in their own perspectives while understanding their relationship with other authors and texts, allowing young writers to join ongoing (written) conversations that are meaningful to them.
Teaching in the Crosshairs: A Study of Literary Censorship and Self-Censorship in Secondary English Language Arts Classrooms
Curriculum control and literature suppression in ELA classrooms is nothing new. But the current climate has increased the struggle to balance academic freedom with external forces looking to restrict teachers’ autonomy. As censorship efforts grow, a subtler yet equally troubling trend is emerging: teacher self-censorship. This session will explore how and why educators are limiting their own choices in the classroom and what we can do about it.
From Pages to Possibilities: A Novel Approach to Amplifying Joyful Latine Voices
Representation matters—and joyful Latine stories transform classrooms for all students. This session shares fresh, creative ways to bring vibrant Latine books into novel studies and classroom libraries. Participants will learn about high-quality books featuring Latine representation, activities to support them, and actionable ideas to amplify student voice, pride, and literacy through authentic voices.