This interactive discussion session will address fears, hopes, and strategies for success in teaching. Student teachers and teachers in their first few years of services 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
This Speaks to Me
The task of nurturing the authentic voices of students within our classrooms can be one of the most important undertakings of teachers at all levels. Activities focusing on the listening, viewing, and reading interests of students can enhance their written and spoken communication skills as well as support social and emotional learning while encouraging the use of instructor provided analytical tools across various disciplines. The activity, “This Speaks To Me” allows students to share what they see, hear, and feel while developing writing, listening, and critical thinking skills. Finally, through practice and discussion participants can decide if “This Speaks To Me” can be a tool to use in their classrooms as well as how it might be adapted across age levels and abilities.
Communicate Extraordinarily with Tier 2 Vocabulary
The interactive workshop will provide participants with research and strategies to implement engaging and meaningful speaking and writing strategies using tier two or high level vocabulary. The purpose of embedding tier two vocabulary into the speaking literacy is to improve student communication skills, especially written communications. Based on research, students write how they talk, and do not advance their verbal vocabulary after third grade. With more exposure, especially to students form low-income families, students can gain a repertoire of specific words to used on a daily basis, where they can identify more words and its synonyms in literature, increasing comprehension and reading/writing stamina.
How to SEL-ebrate Learning: Incorporating CASEL-5 Framework into ELA Content Instruction
During this session, teachers will learn how to combine SEL behaviors and ELA curriculum. We will explore ways to take an SEL framework and use it as a lens for analyzing literature.
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.
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.
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.
Challenged and Challenging Texts and Teaching
Carol Jago taught middle and high school for 32 years in Santa Monica, California. She has served as president of the National Council of Teachers of English and on numerous committees including the College Board’s English Academic Advisory committee, ILA Adolescent Literacy Interest Group, and NAEP Writing Standing Committee.
Carol Jago has published a number of books on literacy and English pedagogy, including her most recent book The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis (Heinemann, 2019). She has written for the Los Angeles Times and many educational journals and online forums.
Carol is the recipient of the International Literacy Association’s Adolescent Literacy Thought Leader award and the NCTE Exemplary Leadership Award.
Book signing to follow