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
Teaching Authentic Reading with Metacognitive Tools: The Double-Entry Research Log
Kayla Greenwell, MA will lead an interactive workshop utilizing the double-entry research log (DERL) while explaining the pedagogical theory and neuroscience behind the learning tool. The DERL is a reading tool based on the design of 1980s dialectic journals with updates based on recent developments in cognitive science. While applying cognitive science to the classroom is not new, the changes are usually broad. The DERL is meant to be a simple tool that teachers can incorporate into their classrooms immediately.
Teaching Students about “Asians”
Representation of Asians in the West often follows the same script: model minorities, mother/daughter conflicts, and oppressive traditions. In this session, attendees will explore and workshop many different materials, ranging from entire units on media stereotypes to individual readings and assignments that can be plugged into existing units, that teach students how to problematize Orientalist assumptions that fuel Asian racism today.
Handling Heavy Texts with Care
| Many of the most frequently taught works of literature include death, trauma, and other topics that can feel daunting for new teachers to approach in the classroom. Focusing on a literacy methods course with a fieldwork component in Chicago Public Schools, this presentation explores how pre-service teachers learn to navigate teaching literature with heavy content. With Krik? Krak! by Edwidge Danticat as a focal text, the presenter will share classroom strategies that help teachers reflect on their teaching philosophies and design lessons that balance paying attention to social-emotional needs and building literacy skills. |
ELA & AI: The Obstacle Course of Future Pedagogy
Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is disrupting, if not overthrowing, five thousand years of human communication, encompassing the entire existence of the English language. ELA educators must clearly understand the role genAI will play in our classrooms and adapt to technological trends in a vigilant yet open manner.
This session will highlight numerous areas of genAI and how they correspond with English education. Additionally, the presentation will discuss and question our current understanding of genAI and how that affects our understanding of what it means to educate students.
One of the main goals of the presentation is to critically examine the correct role for genAI in ELA education and tangle with the philosophical implications of this moment, and seek the middle ground between accepting all technological innovations without thought and living in a neo-luddite, sequestered classroom space.
It Does Happen Here: The Literary and Cultural Roots of American Authoritarianism
It hardly seems arguable that U.S. national politics have, for nearly a decade now, veered in a decidedly and intensified authoritarian direction. That nearly half the nation seems to crave autocratic rule and repression is not, in fact, a brand new development. Despite the fact that prominent trailblazers in American literary study such as F.O. Matthiessen defined American literature precisely by its strong democratic impulse and individualist spirit, one finds from even a cursory study of the U.S. literary tradition a powerful and canonical anti-democratic politics—relentlessly so. In the works of such writers including T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner, one finds unapologetic supremacist values. Even the romantic individualism of Emerson and Thoreau endorse autocratic behavior, eschewing the rule of law that is a key principle of democracy. This seminar invites us to scrutinize closely as teachers of literature what values we are transmitting to our students as we teach U.S. literature, reflecting on how the institution of literary study itself has participated in creating our current national condition.
Culturally Responsive Teaching Standards, Practices, and Resources for the HS English Classrooms
In March of 2021, the Illinois State Board of Education adopted a set of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards for the purpose of better preparing future teachers to create culturally rich spaces and curricula that are welcoming and supportive for all students. While the new standards are an important tool for teacher education programs, there does not seem to exist a similar set of standards for practicing teachers in Illinois. While research suggests that culturally responsive teaching is a practice of many high school English teachers regardless of a required set of standards, we wanted to determine the extent to which this is happening using the CRP standards as a lens for teachers to consider the ways in which they are already embracing culturally responsive practices.
Specifically, our session will first share the results from a survey and interview with several high school English teachers in Illinois about their perspectives on and teaching habits related to the CRP standards. Then, we will share a repertoire of resources that we have curated and created to support teachers in their continued implementation of the CRP standards and culturally responsive practices in general.
The CEIT Paradigm for Non-fiction Writing
In non-fiction writing, there are only four basic “moves” a writer can make. An acronym to help student writers remember them is CEIT, for claim, explain, illustrate, and tie-back. First, you can make a claim. This claim may be called a thesis, a topic sentence, a theme, or a main idea. Second, you can explain that claim. Third, you can illustrate the claim. In literary criticism, this would be evidence from the story that supports your claim. Finally, you can tie the example back to the original claim. That is, you can briefly analyze how this example illustrates your theme. In addition to making these four basic moves, you can also signal them. “In other words,” signals explanation. “For instance,” signals an illustration. “This is an example of wisdom because” signals a tie back. When a thesis statement includes multiple parts, those parts can be made the core of subtopic sentences in a single-paragraph essay, or topic sentences in a multiple-paragraph essay. Each subtopic section can be explained, illustrated, and tied back to the subtopic sentence’s idea. In addition to the signals mentioned above, time or order signals can further clarify structure, such as first, second, finally, and so on. Once students become adept with the CEIT paradigm, they can choose which features to use and which to leave out. This presentation will thoroughly explain the CEIT paradigm and use student examples to show how it applies both simpler and more complex essays.