2025 NCTE Annual Convention Workshops
Registration is required to attend a preconvention workshop.
All workshops will take place at the Colorado Convention Center, Thursday, November 20, 8:00 a.m.—12:00 p.m.
W.1 — Citizen Rhetors: Cultivating Real-World Literacies through DIY Curriculum
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), Literacies and Languages for All (LLA)
Audience: Secondary
How can teachers and students co-create a responsive, flexible curriculum that fosters authentic literacy? This workshop explores California State University’s Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum (ERWC) as a model for DIY curriculum that prioritizes teacher autonomy, student agency, and rhetorical agility. Participants learn strategies for adapting any curriculum to empower citizen rhetors.
W.2 — Crack Open the COCO!: How to Facilitate Deeper COnnections and COnversations in the Classroom
Strand: Rainbow
Sponsored by the NCTE Asian Caucus
What if classrooms could be spaces where no questions about race, sexuality, and gender were dismissed -- where students and educators could dream together of honest and open dialogue? This workshop explores the importance of addressing these topics through open-ended discussions, educating and guiding teachers to advocate for meaningful yet critical conversations.
W.3 — Deepening Vocabulary Acquisition - a Structured & Joyful Approach to Teaching Literary and Domain Language and Increasing Knowledge of Etymology and Morphology
Strand: Literacies and Languages for All (LLA)
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Teacher Education
This interactive workshop will give educators practical structures and ideas to connect vocabulary research to practices teachers can incorporate inside of any curriculum. The three overarching sections of the workshop include: literary vocabulary, word consciousness (etymology and morphology), and domain vocabulary. We’ll explicitly support multilingual learners inside of this work.
W.4 — Denver Teachers Dreaming Reclaiming Education: Dreaming through Multimodal Testimonies for Repair, Solidarity, and Social Action
Strand: LGBTQIA+, Literacies and Languages for All (LLA), New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Teacher Education
White supremacist curricula have disproportionately impacted Black and Brown communities. This multimodal plática invites teachers to dream in an interactive, intergenerational ‘playground' workshop inspired by Black and Brown Chicana Feminist perspectives. We will facilitate a hands-on workshop using literature, personal experiences, translingual and transmodal tools to resist white supremacy.
W.5 — Denver Writing Marathon
Strand: National Writing Project (NWP)
Audience: General, Teacher Education
After hearing a brief introduction from the facilitator, who founded the New Orleans Writing Marathon 30 years ago and has led Writing Marathons across the country, participants take part in a three-hour Writing Marathon—writing and sharing their work in small groups around Denver before returning to the meeting room to reflect on the process as a community of teachers/writers.
W.6 — Dream Boldly of an Un-Grading System
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Middle, Secondary, College, Teacher Education
Teacher-author Sarah Zerwin and five teachers from across the country will outline steps to move students towards the “22nd century skills” of self-driven learning and growth beyond numbers in the gradebook. This workshop provides opportunities to begin the process of boldly decentering the grade—and themselves—in the classroom and offers specific, practical steps to implement right away.
W.7 — Dream Boldly: Creating Cuentos to Recognize and Celebrate All Students' Dreams of Honoring their Cultures, Identities and Family Histories
Strand: LGBTQIA+, Literacies and Languages for All (LLA), National Writing Project (NWP), New & Early Career Teacher, Rainbow
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Secondary, Teacher Education
In this workshop, we will help participants to dream boldly to promote the introduction of what a Cuento is, and share strategies and insights from Cuentos Projects. We will facilitate key aspects of the Cuentos Project for the audience to experience including AI and digital Cuentos. Participants will be able to take project strategies back into their classrooms, families and communities.
W.8 — Dreaming Together: Crafting Lesson Plans that Empower Students to Envision New Stories for Themselves and The World
Strand: Early Childhood Education, New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Secondary, Teacher Education
In this workshop, teachers will enjoy practical tips and inspiration to draft lessons that empower student storytelling, using strategies shared by Essie Brew-Hammond McCabe, leveraging 15 cumulative years teaching ELA to incarcerated adolescents and students newly arrived to the U.S., with insights from 2023 Orbis Pictus winner Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, author of Blue and YA novel Powder Necklace.
W.9 — Dreaming Together: Using Books and Interactive Activities to Build Communities Through Reflection, Friendship, and Healing
Strand: Literacies and Languages for All (LLA), New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Elementary, Middle
Join us in dreaming of more inclusive, supportive classroom communities! Authors, teachers, and experts will guide you through research-based books and activities that empower students to share their dreams for representation, friendship, and healing. Leave with ready-to-use strategies that help students voice their visions for a more equitable world while building stronger classroom connections.
W.10 — Fostering an Affirming and Inspiring Culture of Reading: How to Welcome and Engage Readers in Your Classroom
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), Literacies and Languages for All (LLA), New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Secondary, Teacher Education
This workshop introduces a community approach to supporting students’ reading identities and engagement. Attendees learn related research and practical ways to involve school community members in building reading culture in classrooms that values belonging. There is an emphasis on designing joyful experiences for students to be leaders of their learning. Attendees receive practical resources.
W.11 — From Dream to Reality: Expanding Literacy Practices with Digital Tools
Audience: General
Sponsored by the NCTE Assembly on Computers in English
In this Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workshop, participants will explore critical AI use as writers, multilingual and digital storytelling, and multimodal interpretations of texts. Attendees will engage with digital tools like ChatGPT, Magic School, Poe, Scratch, and Canva to promote creativity, inclusivity, and critical thinking in the English classroom.
W.12 — From Goals to Graphics: Using Creative Tools to Visualize Curricular Trajectories for Students
Audience: College
This workshop empowers faculty to use free and accessible digital design tools such as Canva to produce creative, student-facing visuals of their courses’ curricular trajectories to foster productive conversations about learning outcomes, transfer, and growth mindset.
W.13 — Build Your Stack® Reading Room
Audience: Elementary, Teacher Education
We know how important quality children’s literature is in our classrooms. NCTE believes that teachers are the people most equipped to choose books for their classroom libraries and to use for instruction. Join NCTE’s Build Your Stack® for a special workshop to deepen your book knowledge in community with other PreK-5 teachers! Participants will have access to a carefully curated collection of new books and be given space to comfortably engage with the texts in their own ways and to discuss their thoughts around the books and how they might be used in instruction with others. A group discussion about children’s literature’s place in the classroom, teachers as readers, resources for finding quality books, and classroom strategies for building classroom libraries will be interspersed with dedicated reading time. Attendees will leave with a few books to share with their students.
W.14 — Goal Setting and Future Planning in the Composition Classroom
Strand: New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: College, Teacher Education
Research indicates that apathy and societal disconnect are keeping students from reaching their academic goals. This presentation offers a research-supported lesson plan to help students set goals, plan for their futures, and form meaningful connections while improving their writing and fulfilling their composition requirements.
W.15 — Perchance to Dream: Empowering Students to Take Risks with the Folger Method
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), Literacies and Languages for All (LLA)
Audience: Middle, Secondary, College, Teacher Education
In this half day workshop, participants will explore the Folger Method, a language and performance based way of teaching and learning. Participants will leave this session with strategies that will empower and embolden their students to think big, take risks, and engage directly with Shakespeare’s language.
W.16 — Scholarly Podcasting for Teaching and Research
Strand: Research
Audience: College
This lively workshop is for teacher-scholars from all subfields in English and the Humanities and offers participants a case-study of avant-garde critical scholarship emerging in the direct-to-audio podcast format, followed by an opportunity to sketch and then workshop preliminary ideas for either faculty or student-produced podcast episodes and/or audio essays.
W.17 — Sharing Practices to Help Students Dream Big: A Workshop for Imagining Possibilities in Literacy Curricula
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), LGBTQIA+, Literacies and Languages for All (LLA), National Writing Project (NWP), New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Secondary, Teacher Education
This workshop considers possibilities for expanding curricula to foster ownership and choice. A panel of K-12 teachers will share how they incorporate authentic reading and writing that align with curriculum expectations and are responsive to students’ identities, interests, and needs. We’ll re-imagine instructional possibilities to support student-driven learning and examinations of the world.
W.18 — Teach Like an MC: Utilizing a Hip-Hop Pedagogy to Activate Love, Joy, and Liberation in the Classroom
Strand: New & Early Career Teacher, Rainbow
Strand: New & Early Career Teacher, Rainbow
This interactive workshop explores hip-hop pedagogy as a student-centered approach that fosters collaboration, amplifies student voices, and nurtures critical consciousness. Educators will learn to integrate hip-hop’s creative elements into their teaching, empowering students to dream, create, and transform their futures.
W.19 — Teaching as a Radical Act: Exploring the Legacies of James Baldwin and bell hooks in Teacher Education
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), LGBTQIA+, New & Early Career Teacher, Research
Audience: General, Teacher Education, Research
This workshop explores the transformative teachings of James Baldwin and bell hooks, focusing on how their work can inspire teacher educators to foster critical thinking, equity, and joy in their classrooms. Participants engage with Baldwin’s and hooks’ philosophies, exploring strategies for cultivating liberatory pedagogy and reimagining teacher education as a radical, justice-centered practice.
W.20 — The Democratic Dream: Document Based Inquiries (DBIs) to Promote Critical Literacies and the Dispositions of Democracy in Our Classrooms and in Society
Strand: National Writing Project (NWP)
Audience: General, Teacher Education
In the world of AI, information pollution and anxiety, we can create classroom spaces of hope and agency for ourselves and students. Document Based Inquiries (DBIs), a strategy for engaging students with short text sets on any topic, promotes critical reading and thinking. Teachers will learn to create document-based inquiries to support the dispositions of democracy at any phase of instruction.
W.21 — The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: Dream Stories through Reading/Writing Connections
Strand: National Writing Project (NWP), New & Early Career Teacher
Audience: Elementary, College, Teacher Education
In this session, we will use dreams to unlock the storyteller in all of us. Through a writing workshop, we will share students’ and teachers’ writing and multimedia stories about dreams. Participants will create, share, and celebrate their own multimedia dream stories. Please bring a pen, notebook, and a device for recording for audio or video storytelling.
W.22 — The SWIRL Method: Supporting Multilingual Learners as they Speak, Write, Interact, Read, and Listen
Strand: New & Early Career Teacher, Rainbow
Audience: Elementary, Middle, Teacher Education
The SWIRL method helps K–12 teachers create opportunities for multilingual learners to engage in the five core competencies of Speaking, Writing, Interacting, Reading, and Listening. Through SWIRL, MLLs become more confident, proficient communicators in an asset-based, culturally-sustaining classroom. The SWIRL Method provides time-tested scaffolds and strategies as a framework for effective ELD.
W.23 — To Boldly Dream: Envisioning Future Classrooms
Strand: English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE), LGBTQIA+, National Writing Project (NWP)
Audience: General, Teacher Education, Research
The presenters invite you to engage in a collaborative experience to go where no session has gone before - a bold dream of the future classroom. Before determining how we can make our classrooms inviting to all, we must know what that inviting classroom looks like. Making our dreams a reality will take effort from all of us. Participants will leave the workshop with inspiration to effect change.
W.24 — Write from the Beginning
Strand: National Writing Project (NWP)
Audience: Elementary
While much of the emphasis has been on the science of reading and how our youngest learners begin to read, what about their writing? Knowing that we write to read, finding ways to incorporate writing into our reading instruction can build stronger readers and writers. In this workshop participants will take part in a variety of writing strategies that can be implemented in the elementary setting.
W.25 — Writing as a Catalyst for Growth, Healing, and Transformation
Strand: National Writing Project (NWP)
Audience: General, Teacher Education , Research
In this workshop, you will learn how to use writing to build personal resilience, access clarity, heal, and spark passion. In addition, we will explore how we can weave transformative writing experiences into our classes to help each of our students learn more deeply and create a healthy sense of self. This is an experiential workshop; bring a favorite pen/pencil and notebook.