Feeling the stress of trying to ensure all students are meeting standards? As educators, we often find that we wear many hats in order to meet all students’ unique learning needs. The workload can be overwhelming and daunting. In this session, hear from two experienced teachers who can share tips and tricks for effective co-teaching. When implemented successfully, the responsibilities become much more manageable, and both teachers and students win!
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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.
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.
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Digital, reproducible copies of most handouts can be found on the conference website and at http://bit.ly/smith_hnez (links to publicly accessible Google Drive folder). Thank you for attending our session!
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.
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.
Given the increased quantity of, and emphasis on, essays in the college application process, we set out to incorporate best practices and personal experiences to create a program to support our students, who are primarily first-generation college applicants. In this session, we share activities, strategies, and relationship-building techniques, each designed with the needs of first-generation students in mind, to provide you with tools to help your students overcome barriers and pursue their post-secondary dreams.
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https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1FpubSbSsO80QbvmAAwQXzCVTTCoNbQONLWKD2xp14DY/edit?usp=sharing
Argument-centered instruction (ACI) has been receiving heightened attention from education leaders in recent years, as the Brookings Institution study Resolved and the 2024 PBS documentary Beyond Debate indicate. Traditional classrooms are becoming communities of genuine intellectual inquiry, as students engage with challenging texts and content within a framework formed by salient, exigent, rich, and open questions. ACI has been refreshing and in some places redeeming the study of long-form fiction – i.e., the novel. This workshop will use these four great novels to show participants exactly how to argumentalize the teaching of the novels in their curricula: Caramelo, The Great Gatsby, Maus I & II, and Things Fall Apart. This session requires participants to bring a device to the session.
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| The 2005 nonfiction book Status Anxiety by Alain DeBotton has been a meaningful text in my AP Language and Composition class for many years. In the Preface, DeBotton defines status anxiety as a social phenomenon and a great concern. In Part One of the book, DeBotton’s five chapters cover his five causes of status anxiety (Lovelessness, Expectation, Meritocracy, Snobbery, Dependence). In Part Two, he discusses the five solutions (Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion, Bohemia). While reading, my students annotate DeBotton’s use of evidence as well as his methods of development. After having read the text, I ask the students to consider how the world has changed in the past 20 years since the publishing of the text. Their final assessment is an essay which proposes a sixth chapter to part one. What is a modern, topical cause of status anxiety in American culture?
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In this session, I will share a little about my revised composition course. For the first time, I tried cookbooks as the “text” in second-semester composition. This session will explain my process and some early impressions of this change since this semester (Spring 2025) is the first run of the concept. The rationale came from a desperate need to help students engage with writing on their own terms rather than a reliance on ChatGPT.
I am a scholar of popular culture and usually use those types of text in second-semester composition, but that approach was failing me–and my students—with the rise of LLM tools. The idea came to me when I noticed an episode of Kitchen Nightmares on TV. I wondered if that could be the center of the class. I did some research and found that some libraries, including Michigan State University, had a significant historical cookbook collection. I then remembered a fellow scholar at one of the Popular Culture Association Summer Research Institutes I attended who was studying the marginalia in the Bowling Green State University’s library collection of cookbooks. I put the ideas together, and with the help of a $1 per book used bookstore in my community and some donations from fellow faculty, Composition II: Food Writing, rolled out in January. The class process will be discussed in the session. A preview: Each student receives a randomly selected cookbook on the first day of class. That book will be described as “individualized cookbook” in the presentation. The individualized cookbook becomes the text for the class. By that I mean, each individualized cookbook will be the artifact students will use to craft their assignments. COM 102 requires (from the transfer-level codes) a text from which students create arguments and the formal research assignment. Each individualized cookbook is different; thus, students will learn to engage with audience, purpose, context, and the ethos of authorship in a variety of ways.
Learn how to empower students to take ownership of their learning by implementing practical strategies to foster resilience and collaboration. Gather practical, structured feedback techniques to use in your next class activity, and watch your students set and reach their goals, build relationships, and take pride in their academic journey.
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