This workshop is designed to help you and students find all the large and small ways writing can help not only change your life but your students’ lives along with some DOs and DON’Ts on how to properly engage students of color.
Blog Archives
Sharing the Reader’s Journey: Facilitating Book Club Podcasts
As choice reading continues to ensure that students of all abilities find enjoyment in reading, teachers incorporating choice reading into their curricula may seek ways to encourage student voice in discussions. This presentation will offer an idea to be applied for ongoing book club units or end-of-semester assessment. Students reading choice books trace their personal reactions to their reading to determine theme or genre-based connections with peer readers. They then apply podcast knowledge gained through class listening experiences to construct and record discussions of their reading journeys using the podcasting app Anchor.
Culminating Activities to Provide Connections
Traditionally, students have demonstrated their understanding and analysis of a text or topic through tests and essays. However, have you seen other teachers’ social media posts about One Pagers or Hexagons and weren’t sure how to introduce them to students? Hexagons and One Pagers can be used for single texts, to connect multiple texts. to explore themes, and across the curriculum. This presentation will share the basics of each activity and then give participants time to practice each one.
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.
Community in Action
How to add a zinger to the end of a novel unit that deals with hard topics. Go through the steps to create a discussion panel of experts. Your principal loves it, your school board loves it, and your students love it. This conversational piece is the type of activity that students will remember long after they have left your classroom and building behind them. It gives them a safe place to ask questions, make statements, and be heard while receiving wisdom, advice, and encouragement by community members who are experts in their fields.
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.
Neurodivergent: Walking the Walk of Authenticity
Authenticity requires a careful balance of the teacher’s executive presence (Hewlett, 2014) the requirements of subject area, the needs of the students, the students’ individual situations, both biological and environmental. Neurodivergence, on the part of the teacher, the students, or both, adds a bit of spice to the experience. This presentation/discussion will explore using teacher authenticity as an important element of relationship-building as a foundation for learning, maneuvering as a neurodivergent (autistic) teacher to support that authenticity, and modifying strategies to encourage success and accessibility for all in the neurodiverse classroom.
Teaching Consent Through YA Literature
This presentation will take a look at teaching consent through various books. We will define consent, look at songs that both ask for and ignore consent, and dive into books that allow readers to see the four aspects of consent for this unit. Teachers will leave with a unit of work that is valuable and engaging.
Ditching Multiple Choice Tests: Using Problem Based Learning as measurements of student learning through the use of Real World Experiences
Time and time again, students are asked to [recite information at the end of each unit, often in the form of multiple choice tests. But through this practice, the line between information learned vs. information memorized becomes increasingly blurred. Creating a Real World Experience provides students with the opportunity to learn through the use of inquiry: questioning, researching, presenting, and applying their learning to real life. Each Real World Experience is a culmination of literature, writing, history, and of course, civics. Through the accompaniment of both whole class and small group novels, students create genuine displays that reflect what they have learned and how their newfound knowledge can be applied to current events. In this session, you will be introduced to an example of a Real World Experience, which serves as each unit’s summative assessment. We will discuss planning, how to create assignments that align with Standards-Based Grading, and even take a look at a few student examples.
When you put this all together, just make sure you don’t have things separated from their names, etc. It requires some fenagaling in the end, but it looks clean.