We all know that teachers cannot “pour from an empty cup.” This rhetoric of self-care is all too common. But amid the fast pace of the school system, what are we actually supposed to do to refill our cups? The obstacles to self-care are made worse because much of what the dominant culture calls “self-care” simply helps us cope within antiquated systems rather than truly promote sustained well-being. This cultural confusion around self-care keeps teachers stuck in cycles of exhaustion, overwork, and disconnect. The steeply increasing rate of teachers’ chronic stress and burnout makes clear that we must prioritize real self-care practices—boundaries, self-compassion, power, and processing feelings of guilt. Centering our humanity in this way creates the groundwork for life-giving teaching practices, classrooms, and communities.
Drawing on ten years of teaching English in Illinois public high schools and the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Pooja Lakshmin, Sarah Bland holds space for teachers to use reflective writing to create a real self-care plan that will support their well-being throughout the school year. Further, participants will be invited to practice short guided meditations to foster self-compassion. Engaging with reflective writing and guided meditation in this way is an act of self-care, community care, and love that naturally shifts how we engage with ourselves, our students, our curriculum, and our school communities.
Session materials:
Suggested: Bring a laptop with Google Suite
Together we will explore a curriculum rooted in identity for middle school students that empowers them to not only critically craft their own identities, but more thoroughly develop critical thinking skills in order to enact social change. The curriculum integrates social emotional learning with common core, while being non-linear and revolutionary. Texts, skills, and activities centered on identity allow students of color, in particular, to take control over their identity formation, and also allows white students the chance to authentically reflect and understand their own positions of privilege in contrast. Paired with seminars, collaborative writing, and individual reflections through an active revision process, this cyclical curriculum engages students by returning to concepts and skills in order to deepen their holistic development throughout the year. The intersection of SEL, ELA, and equity is of utmost importance as our students, and the world around us, continue to recover from the upheaval of a global pandemic. Corrine Ulmer has over a decade of direct experience developing and implementing advanced middle school curriculum that offers practical takeaways from Elise Zerega’s background in pedagogical research that explores the intersection of SEL and academic achievement.
Some districts engage students with a severely limited classroom experience using scripted curriculums, while others engage students with curriculums that allow for broad student choice. Panelists will discuss their experience on this student engagement continuum. Where do their districts fall? What successes and challenges have they experienced? How have they worked around the challenges and capitalized on the successes?
Panelists
- John Barrett, Pleasant Plains Middle School
- John Hartzmark, MacArthur High School
- Cindi Koudelka, Fieldcrest Community School District, Aurora University
- Nicole Boudreau Smith, Adlai E. Stevenson High School
- Julie Hoffman, Springfield Public Schools & University of Illinois at Springfield
Explore how local news can be used as a powerful tool to teach reading, writing, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving skills, while serving as a motivational hook to help students seek out information and connect with peers and the broader community. Our federally-funded unit connects reading and thinking skills with the writing process using a student-centric, project-based approach.
To highlight some features of the highly versatile featured unit, students develop reading and critical thinking skills through interactive modeling of cognitive skills and corresponding writing assignments. Built-in prompts engage students in peer-to-peer discussion about local issues. A culminating group project invites students to engage in collaborative problem-solving with their peers as they formulate a personal cause, select and analyze news articles, and produce an essay and a creative work aimed to advocate for change within their own community.
Participants will learn a reliable process for evaluating news articles in a non-biased manner. They will explore unit materials, including reading and writing activities, grading rubrics, student work and notes from teachers who have taught with the materials previously. This unit can be tailored to meet the needs of any classroom, and provides ample opportunities for cross-curricular connections, community involvement, and meaningful communication with peers and the broader community.
Our students use text to correspond with each other more than ever, often churning out micro-epistles while we teach our most engaging lessons. But while research overwhelmingly suggests that handwriting stimulates brain development and correspondence boosts mental health, snapping bypasses many of these benefits, due to the brevity and screen-dependence of the medium. When given the opportunity to turn a text into a real letter, however – one with an elevated salutation, advanced vocabulary, and ornate sentences, students will scribble seriously for half an hour, phones forgotten in backpacks. Engaging this activity in preparation for reading novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein will allow students to playfully encounter the language of the 19th century, consider new words and their shifting meanings over time, and compose heartfelt and often hilarious missives (if only to scold the dog for soiling the “citadel” of their bedroom).
In this workshop, participants will examine sample letters, both from Frankenstein and from online archives of Victorian-era correspondence; next, they will draw from an extensive word list in composing letters of high emotion and elevated language. At the end of the workshop, participants will discuss further implications for how such writing generates authentic stakes, stimulates discussions of word usage and parts of speech, and increases student confidence in the otherwise daunting task of reading 19th century texts.
Video-computer based games emerged as consumer products in the 1970s and now surpass movies, television, and music in terms of worldwide profits. Many of the original text-based games, such as Zork and Deadline had a genre based literary quality to them, and 50 years later we still see literary storytelling in this medium, with both major corporations and independent developers delivering significant texts using varying levels of technology and sophistication.
At the lower level of this, developers often produce low cost material that effectively deals with social and personal issues our students are interested in. Papers Please is a multi-platform game that examines issues around immigration and documentation. One Night, Hot Springs looks at the experience of being trans at a hot spring, while This War of Mine allow us to be a civilian in an urban combat zone (and is a text in Polish history classes). New and exciting games come out frequently, and this is a rich area for texts, which are sophisticated and meet students “where they live.”
We have successfully used video games in the writing classroom, and we are proposing a workshop that presents a number of short low-cost (or free) games to the audience, along with a variety of ways of using them in the classroom. As part of the experience, we would like to engage the participants in an actual lesson in relation to one of the games being presented.
In today’s educational landscape, it is essential for students to have meaningful opportunities to engage in humanizing and antiracist pedagogy. Art can serve as both an entryway and an escape route to help students understand and challenge oppression. As texts, art can reveal our reality, highlight the difficulties of marginalized groups, and provide a space for antiracist discourse and action. In our classrooms, the examination and creation of art as story and justice allows students to confront the realities of racism and other oppressive forces in our everyday lives and challenge themselves and others to think critically about the ways in which it manifests in our society. Art can act as an entryway to ignite dialogue, inspire voice, build community and foster collective action. Additionally, it can also be used as an escape route to explore and express the complexities of racism and its implications, as well as a means to escape oppressive structures. . In this session ELA teachers will learn how to use art in ten ways in our antiracist ELA classrooms.
In an attempt to bolster enrollment and lower stress for both students and teachers, we have designed an AP Language and Composition class using a writing workshop model empowering students to explore topics that matter to them. Our AP Language and Composition pass rate exceeds 95%, and our enrollment in the course continues to grow each year. The course is designed to help students analyze everything from social media posts to peer-reviewed academic journals in an authentic, yet rigorous manner. Students complete nearly all work within the class period which helps to minimize student stress while maximizing time for in-class conferencing with the teacher. This session will focus on sharing ideas and strategies to help high achieving students who are often extremely busy and stressed find joy in researching, analyzing, and writing about issues they care about.
