Get every student in your class writing and talking about complex, creative, personal and debatable topics. How? Transition from engaging journal prompts to various discourse strategies. Observe the positive difference these activities make in your classroom community and in their extended writing projects. Learn and practice these ideas in an interactive workshop and be inspired!
Blog Archives
To Build a Story: Eleven Questions for Beginning Fiction Writers
How can you help your students write a good story from scratch? You offer them the basics of storytelling, one step at a time. With each step, you prompt them to build a story that is uniquely theirs. This workshop combines narrative theory with practical writing advice to help teachers help their students write an entertaining and emotionally resonant story.
Building Authentic Collaboration: Our Experiences as Dual-Enrollment Instructor and Embedded Librarian
Human Resources expert Tim Baker, in his 2019 text on performance and development strategies, theorizes 5 “pillars of authentic conversation” that allow colleagues to effectively collaborate and to “keep it real” in their working relationships. By identifying authentic approaches to task-focused conversations and people-focused conversations, Baker lays out a plan for co-workers in any environment to strategize, carry out their plans, address unhelpful behavior, build trust and appreciation, and move into the future. Faced with teaching dual-enrollment speech and composition classes in area high schools, the session presenters (a community college instructor and librarian) discuss their experiences as they formulated a strategy for collaborative teaching. They describe the Embedded Librarian role as it exists at their school and how their approaches to these shared courses have evolved along the way. Weaving in Baker’s terms and definitions of authentic conversation, the presenters share what worked and what didn’t in their collaborative teaching. The session also offers assessment data from when two of the dual-enrollment courses taught by the presenters were offered by high schools without a media center or librarian in their buildings.
Mimicking Isn’t Thinking: Putting Thinking Back in Writing Instruction
Students emerged from Covid classrooms, but not unscathed. More than ever, they were not engaging in their own learning. Our course team decided we couldn’t keep lamenting the fact that our tried-and-true approaches weren’t working anymore; we needed to adapt to teach the students in front of us now. Inspired by a book for math teachers on getting kids to think, we adapted our own approach to writing instruction.
Designing Assignments that Resist ChatGPT
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.
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.
Let’s Talk Narrative
Personal narrative is often seen as an extra unit of writing because of the pressure on teachers to focus on informational and analytical writing. When we look at authentic writing, however, personal narrative is often blended with other genres. This session will focus on how writers often incorporate personal stories for the purpose of answering questions and feature lessons and activities from our upcoming book, Narrative as Navigation.
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.
Novel Selection in Secondary Settings: Curating Inclusive Texts
In the last four decades, literacy scholars and national educational organizations have emphasized the need to include more diverse and inclusive texts for our students. However, teachers have also experienced increased calls for censorship and book banning in the last decade. This presentation will address two questions: how do secondary English teachers currently select books for inclusion in their curriculum? How can teachers ensure access to diverse and inclusive texts?
The presenter will share the results of a pilot study about how teachers select novels in their classrooms and share multiple resources (evaluative checklists, book awards, and online resources) to help curate inclusive classroom libraries, comprised of texts featuring protagonists representing diverse racial, linguistic, gender, and disability communities. Participants will be asked to share their experiences with text selection, reflect upon the criteria they would like to use to determine which novels to teach, and evaluate their current novel choices.
Attendees are suggested to have access to Google slides.
Cultivating the Next Generation of Teachers
A session to empower and celebrate the vocation of professional educator. We will celebrate what we do, brainstorm ways to celebrate young teachers (in particular) and brainstorm ways to keep young teachers in the field of education.