Workshops

Is writing something you love to teach or dread? Love it or hate it, writing is a necessity in education, regardless of the subject area. This workshop will explore how writing can be taught effectively through a number of venues including rap music, Post–it notes, commercials, peacock feathers, props, sports programing, and social media. Learn how to effectively teach writing and have fun too! 

After hearing a brief introduction from the facilitator, who founded the New Orleans Writing Marathon 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 Anaheim before returning to the meeting room to reflect on the process as a community of teacher/writers.

During this half-day interactive poetry writing workshop, participants will read and write poems that cultivate critical Hip Hop and spoken word literacies. The workshop will demonstrate practical Hip–Hop–Based Education strategies for teachers who want to learn about using Hip Hop and spoken word poetry in the 6–12 classroom. #HipHopEd

As social media deepens divides and the stories we tell become more important than ever, young people need to be empowered to take action. Critical media literacy enables students to understand the dangers of fake news, see representation in a new light, and expose the media’s political economy—then to use their new skills to create their own lighthouses to guide and protect their communities.

In this collaborative workshop you will review/revise the principles (developed by past workshop participants) for decreasing the impact of colonization on students and countering the racism and inequity inherent in English education. You will apply the principles discussed and developed to samples of your own work: lessons, materials, curricular projects, and professional development activities.

In this Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) workshop, participants will engage in digital literacy practices that encourage meaningful thinking, writing, and doing in a digital age. Attendees will be led through activities centered on digital storytelling, source evaluation, accessibility, critical media literacy, and mindful technology integration.

We often work with students on the basics of character development and other elements of story in creative writing, but what about telling a personal story? Many students struggle with writing personal essays, so a full-blown narrative can be overwhelming. In this workshop, we will explore the personal narrative from a different perspective—researching our family history using Ancestry Classroom.

In this interactive workshop, presenters will guide teachers through narrative inquiry to identify connections between their lived experience and teaching practice. Teachers will gain instructional practices and methods to illuminate their students’ dreams and strategies for co-creating learning communities where all dreams can be seen, nurtured, and protected. We welcome educators of any age group.

In this workshop, participants will explore the practice of investigative literacy, that is, the practice of using texts to create investigative, problem-solving units that not only expose students to a multitude of varied texts, but also engage them in big questions around social justice, human behavior and psychology, and world affairs.

Anti–bias and anti–racist work requires a personal uncovering of bias. This half-day workshop will be an engaging and interactive process for learning about ourselves and finding our inner light. Through spoken word poetry, independent writing prompts, small group discussions, and whole group processing, participants will leave with practical classroom strategies.

This work session is designed around determining how we may consider how our time is spent so that we may keep our light on and stay rejuvenated in our teaching. When asked what educators need, the most common response is more time. While we can’t add more time in a day, we can look at better ways to spend our time and continue to support our students.

Everyone has the ability to lead! Participants will develop the techniques to strengthen their learning environment through holistic, social emotional learning, and equitable practices. Participants will explore what leadership is and be given strategic tools to improve their leadership capabilities, along with a comprehensive guide to schoolwide improvement and overall education reform.

Participants will learn through hands-on experiences about a research project in which elementary school teachers learned about integrating science and literacy through student-centered instruction with insects through inquiry, ecological justice, and citizen science with the book, Butterflies Belong Here, written by Deborah Hopkinson. Deborah will be joining us for this workshop.

Co-constructing inquiry units that break down white supremacy culture in literature by highlighting the brilliance of communities of color and focus on collective action and care. By first decolonizing our ideology through self and interpersonal work, we will develop an awareness to identify marginalized voices in texts and work to co-create collective action projects to address these issues.

In this half-day workshop, educators will plan to implement Culture and Climate strategies from Learning for Justice’s Critical Practices for Social Justice Education publication. Through an interactive and collaborative workshop, educators will map Critical Practices onto their existing evaluations and make a plan for how to create safer spaces for their students and colleagues.

Participants will be involved in creating a crosswalk of the new Literacy for a Digital Age framework with the new Standards for ELA Teacher Preparation, creating an online repository of exemplar curricular approaches as well as potential online publication opportunities for reflection on implementation of the crosswalks in their work as teacher educators.

This workshop illustrates how radical Black Love Praxis can be utilized to nurture liberation and affirm Black lives and the Black Literary Heritage. The workshop will be grounded in the following questions: (1) How can ELA educators reconceptualize love?; (2) Why is it necessary for ELA educators to recommit to a love praxis as we work for equity, justice, and anti-racist education?

During this workshop you will learn how to create a podcast with your students from beginning to end, with free editing tools, content curriculum, and ways of funding a classroom podcast studio. Attendees will hear from NPR Student Podcast winners before discussing example podcasts and the implementation process. Join us, and expect to walk away as a part of a collaborative podcasting community!

In this hands-on, interactive workshop, participants learn to use digital gaming and physical theatre activities to teach Shakespeare’s tragedies and to connect the plays to social justice issues. The workshop is led by a Shakespeare scholar who is one of the creators of Play the Knave (https://www.playtheknave.org), the mixed reality Shakespeare video game this workshop explores.

In this workshop, presenters share digital tools that can support place-based storytelling in language arts classrooms. Attendees will interact with student produced data stories focused on family migration histories and try out different approaches that support the inquiry-based activities we used to scaffold students’ learning (such as data visualization, oral histories, and community mapping).

Participants will learn about and then engage in a hands-on exercise that models how to engage ENLs in active learning with Shakespeare. This exercise ties directly to ELA content standards and is designed to promote SEL development, and it can be applied to any play or novel.