During this session, teachers will learn how to combine SEL behaviors and ELA curriculum. We will explore ways to take an SEL framework and use it as a lens for analyzing literature.
Blog Archives
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.
The Ethical Frame: Understanding the Relationship of Discourse and the Ethical Basis of an Argument
For teachers who teach argumentation. In addition to effective argument processes (claim, evidence, warrant; logos, ethos, pathos), the way a speaker frames an argument can determine a speaker’s success with an audience. This frame is built with a speaker’s discourse–deliberate and purposeful language choices of a speaker to present an argument. Effective deployment of a particular discourse can redraw the moral and ethical lines that make an argument appealing. This session will provide teachers with a vocabulary and knowledge base for teaching the concept of discourse and the way a speaker’s choice of discourse frames an argument.
What is “real,” anyway? Creating a new 12th-grade ELA course to align with college composition
The co-presenters, a high school and a community college English teacher, collaborated to create a new 12th-grade ELA course under the state’s Transitional Instruction Initiative. The new course more intentionally aligns with first-year college composition. They will share information about the course, their work together as colleagues at neighboring institutions, and how they’ve created a curriculum, along with engaging instructional techniques, to make college a more realistic and tangible option for students that identify themselves as needing extra support in the areas of reading and writing.
Fostering Resilience: utilizing differentiated strategies to support all students in cultivating a growth mindset and becoming metacognitive readers and writers
We need to be pioneers who embrace our resilient spirit. Participants will gain specific ideas to create warm, supportive, engaged, and hard-working classrooms where students feel a strong sense of belonging. These methods can easily be incorporated into any lesson and will strengthen the student-to-student bonds as well as the student-to-teacher relationship in order to help students reach optimum academic success.
How many ways can we come to know a text?
Session D1
This interactive, participatory session will engage attendees in working collaboratively through a short but complex text, engaging all the tools in our repertoire, including, but not limited to, close reading, linguistic analysis, arts-based inquiry, contemporary and historical critical theory, analogical thinking, and reader response. Our goal will be to examine, discuss, and develop classroom approaches that engage a wide swath of strategies, honoring all approaches and equipping ourselves with tools for differentiation.
What’s In Your Bag? Unpacking Implicit Bias
This is a workshop designed for educators at any stage of their career to examine the role of implicit bias, also known as unconscious bias, in both their personal and professional lives. In this workshop, participants will engage in a variety of activities to increase their awareness of implicit bias, and understand the impact of implicit bias on their teaching practice. Participants will learn to recognize how implicit bias shows up in the classroom.
Authentic Responses to Refugee: Pre-Service Teachers, Social Activism, and Assessment Design”
This panel centers on the development of authentic assessments to increase student engagement and improve learning outcomes. In it, pre-service teachers shift students from passive consumers to content creators and social activists, while working with the YA novel Refugee by Alan Gratz. In addition to sharing their research, planning, and discovery, each presenter will bring three carefully formulated questions related to assessment design and their future teaching, which they will pose to audience members. Our hope is that educators from around the state can offer these teacher candidates constructive feedback related to their assessment designs and the instructional units in which they will one day be taught.
Inquiry & Literacy: Using Authentic Problems and Real Student Conversations to Engage Students
We all want our students to be engaged; we want them to be seen, heard, valued AND captivated by the curriculum. However, as the year goes on, activities like bellringers, team-building exercises, and daily brain breaks become less effective and less engaging, and they don’t generate student excitement about the content of the class. What if it didn’t need to be that way? What if curriculum could be authentically engaging? The presenters will share a guaranteed and viable approach to curricular design that centers current, controversial questions; by putting questions that matter at the center of unit design, teachers are empowered to privilege student voice and meaning-making above student compliance.To make school authentic and exciting, we don’t need to ditch the standards or revamp the reading: we need to shift how we think about teaching and learning, including inquiry-based units, discussion modalities that can be applied to any unit, and strategies to enhance student reading, writing, and overall literacy.
Choosing Literary Texts that Matter Now and Writing About Them in a Way that Does, Too: A Writing-to-Learn Activity that Deepens Analysis, Reflection, and Community
This session will explore resources for relevant text selection and guide participants in a writing-to-learn activity that invites them to weave their own narratives into a literary text to simultaneously develop analytical thinking, writing fluency, self-awareness, and classroom community.