During each of the six breakout sessions throughout the weekend, a large number of conversations will take place. This site will help you organize your plan for the weekend and provide the relevant information for each conversation. After signing in, search through the conversations below and mark the sessions you are interested in to populate your personal schedule on the right (or below if on your mobile phone).
Using open educational resources, like open textbooks, can both save money and increase student success. But using OER also unlocks new pedagogies unavailable to teachers who use textbooks and other curriculum from commercial publishers. In this workshop, Dr. Wiley will discuss the research base behind "killing the disposable assignment" and demonstrate how using OER allows student assessments to take on value and meaning for students and teachers alike.
TBD
This session is for educators who want to explore starting or improving an Advisory Program in their schools. Participants in this session will unpack what their ideal Advisory program would look like while examining questions around some of the ways an Advisory program can create challenges for teachers and students as they create a new dynamic for interaction in their schools.
SLA Students and Teachers will lead a roundtable discussion on inquiry and project based learning.
Give your classroom back to your students! When you give authentic choice and control to studentsm you let students learn on their own terms. Students get to digest what they learn rather than have it thrown at them. What happens when you give students control of what they learn, how they learn, and how they are assessed?
This panel will discuss the increasing importance of global education in today's classrooms. The four National Resource Centers at UPENN will share the latest trends in global pedagogy and resources available for Educators to facilitate a global curriculum.
Students find multiple avenues for expression through the Arts! Join this conversation to explore how the Arts enhance learning and create connections in traditional and inquiry-based lessons. Discussion will include research-based inquiry models, interdisciplinary connections, and how to incorporate the Arts, even when outside your comfort zone.
Collaborating around the topic of changes in a stable and successful institution can be difficult for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is motivating a sense of need for continual improvement. This session aims to open a dialogue among participants on both philosophical and technical means to facilitate these conversations among faculties.
Do spiders fart? What do the footprints of a robin look like? Do ants climb trees? These questions were all inspired by our study of our schoolyard at the Mission Hill School. Come discuss why no school should be without outdoor learning, how inquiry isn't just for science, and how letting children lead an investigation will take your thinking deeper.”
Leaders give and take from a range of networks, helping them to infuse their organizations with new ideas. Often lost in talk of networking, though, is that it requires particular habits of participation. Participants in this session will practice the network habit by writing, peer editing, and contributing media in a 90-minute workshop. We will write a book on the spot and publish it soon after. As an added bonus, participants will walk away with a new network from which to learn.
How can we impact student achievement in a World Language classroom by providing a curriculum rich in the arts? World Language teachers often struggle with how to engage students, particularly with regards to speaking and writing. In this session, we will demonstrate multiple activities that use the arts as a vehicle for generating ideas, enthusiasm and creativity.
Are unions impeding or accelerating the pace of innovation and reform in education? How are unions affecting the way teachers are valued by parents and the public? What can be done about these issues? Come to this session and we'll find out ... together!
As experience designers, teachers have the ability to imagine, create, test, and improve their classes, projects, program and spaces each and every session. What does it mean to prototype ? How do you assess and improve each experience? How do you create a curriculum "on-the-fly?"
Join us for a story-sharing session about your work. So much of our professional knowledge is gained through the experiences we relate to each other – which in turn influence our horizon of possibilities. Let’s gather to tell and listen to our stories of innovation in schools.
Technology allows us to take advantage of a boundless classroom where learning happens anywhere, anytime. However, the crucial first step in developing this new learning ecology is to see students as partners. Join this conversation and consider how to prepare and nurture a culture of learning that encourages student agency.
This workshop explores through dialogue the challenge of making real connections in a world where education is increasingly leveraging technology as a tool to teach.
Educators from the new SLA campus inside Beeber Middle School will discuss the successes and challenges they have experienced opening up a new school with the same SLA Core Values and pedagogical approach.
The arts engage students in deep, inquiry driven, project-based learning experiences, but are often hard to capture and assess. If the trend is, “What is measurable matters,” how do we make our case for difficult to measure “subjective” areas? What can we learn from arts assessments about interpreting students’ learning?
Everything happens somewhere in the world. When we hear about an event in "Iraq" it's helpful to drill down and see the street corner we're talking about -- or get as close as we can come. Taking the time to think about where others live and what their lives are like helps foster empathy. During this conversation, we will collaborate -- using tools such as Google Earth and YouTube videos -- to create online maps that help us empathize with the world (the US is less than 5% of the world -- students should know that)
This conversation will center around ways to integrate "MakerSpaces" where students can tinker, hack, and create during the school day AND get credit for it.
How can leaders promote the power of informal learning within the organization? This conversation builds off a National study of principals and virtual learning as a means to enhance professional learning, organizational change and innovative teaching and learning practices. Discussion will focus on reimaging the future of the learning organization.
Design Thinking gives students the benefits of seeing change happen, leading group-life , and understanding the value of empathy in problem-solving. It's a great tool, but seriously where do I get started? This is a conversation around how teachers are doing DT and how you can implement it where you are.
Are you a designer of assessment or a survivor? Have you ever been shocked to discover after learning episodes are complete that learners did not, in fact, learn? Do your assessments: Motivate and compel student questions, self-direction and calibration? Enable teacher-student partnership? Communicate “You can do this; I can help?”
How the propaganda, progressivist, and behaviorist movements have shaped the institution of schooling and have largely subverted the very principles of freedom and intellectual development that schooling purports to uphold.
This conversation will introduce participants to writing and making as an interactive and engaging process. Presenters will share resources, strategies and web links, for the Boys Write Now and Save Our Skills summer literacy programs for grades 1-12.
The phrase. Common Core, has been uttered so many times in the past 12 months that I think it might be the next 'word' added to the dictionary. Having standards is not the same as standardization, the subtlety of which seems to be getting lost in the national conversation around Common Core and standards implementation. Join me in a discussion surrounding standards implementation and the difficulties with standardizing instruction.
What if we behaved as if teachers were competent and capable of growth?
Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom brings together examples of classroom practice and curates them into a collection looking at the principles of Connected Learning woven throughout. Unique in its focus of in-school examples, this ebook and related conversation acknowledges the emerging nature of this work, inviting inquiry and exploration.
The World Wide Web makes possible for the first time in human history the sharing of educational resources on a global scale. This conversation will explore the implications of sharing educational resources through the web.
We have been promised for years that technology would make our lives easier. With the emergence of cloud computing, omni-access, and Chromebooks that "just work", this is finally the truth! Come discuss all the ways 1:1 programs with Chromebooks and Google are connecting classrooms with ease.
Students have SUPERPOWERS. Often, these powers are hidden by the structures and constraints of school. How can we work, as educators, to unleash students' hidden talents and dreams? This session will engage you in interactive activities, games, and conversations to explore the world of student-driven learning.
SLA softball and girls basketball coaches will lead a conversation about the benefits of athletics, ethic of care in extracurricular activities, and helping students to balance athletics and academics. We will discuss using athletic participation to increase academic performance and improve socio-emotional well-being.
In this working session, we will collect, organize, write, and/or curate activities and materials to create a comprehensive, openly licensed World Civilizations curriculum.
What is the school's role in imparting civic knowledge? To what extent should schools be passing along "democratic knowledge?" How can schools prepare children to participate in the democratic process?
This conversation will about sharing a performance task based approach to teaching, learning, and assessing. Skills like effective communication, problem solving, analysis, and reasoning are the real characteristics of being prepared for life, work, and academic pursuits. We'll see what it takes to develop these skills in our classrooms.
In this conversation, teachers and principals from Ashoka’s Changemaker Schools Network will share specific strategies that they use to build community among diverse students, teachers, and families. Building community is one of the first steps in cultivating empathy and changemaker skills in students.
Is PBL just for grades 6-12? In this discussion we will challenge whether or not authentic problem based learning is possible in a public elementary school. We will look at three components: curriculum, aesthetics and norms and flesh out each component to arrive at a working model of PBL in an elementary environment.
Your students are spending more time consuming media than any activity other than sleep. This conversation will center on how understanding and applying a hierarchy of consumption, critical analysis, and creation of media can help teachers determine the most beneficial uses of and approaches to media in the classroom.
Humanities classrooms hold vast potential for rich discourse. This connects students to each other and their world, and also encourages intellectual curiosity, and life-long learning. Empowering student voice is an intricate and involved pedagogical practice, and yet so vital to creating safe and dynamic classroom spaces. Be prepared to craft many ideas and strategies to deepen teaching and learning in your humanities classroom.
It's no longer enough for educators to engage our students; if we believe in the mission of meaningful public education for all, we must directly engage with the public as a whole. Come to this conversation to brainstorm about how we can best do that!
Creating new schools is one way to introduce a more modern pedagogy, but most systems need to facilitate change in existing traditional systems. Join us for a conversation around how to facilitate that change, share stories of what's working and brainstorm possible pathways for making change in the traditional systems and structures of school.
More and more headlines creep in of educators being fired for their online postings. We walk a fine line between being our true self and being our "image". Why? Do we need "professional" social media accounts and personal ones? What is our responsibility as educators online today? Let's talk!
Move beyond a shopping list version of Maker Culture and design projects for "Monday, not someday." With the support of veteran educators with MakerEd experience, participants will form small teams for MakerEd design sprints that bring everyone’s expertise and esoteric knowledge to bear on challenging topics for your class, grade or faculty.
Let’s have a conversation about the landscape of online learning for students and faculty. In this session, online learning experiences will be shared and analyzed.
Two co-founders of The Workshop School, a new public high school in Philadelphia, will lead a conversation about what project based learning looks and feels like when you have a chance to start a school. Simon Hauger, principal and co-founder, will talk briefly about the thrills and tensions of being a teacher at heart while working as a school district administrator in a new school; Michael Clapper, teacher and co-founder, will talk briefly about the thrills and tensions of trying to start a new school from a seat in a classroom.
Most professional development is geared toward supporting our students, but what are ways can we support ourselves? By introducing practices such as meditation and mindful awareness, we will explore how to manage our stresses to be more present for students. Discussion will also include how to share these practices school-wide.
In this session we will talk about how to manage a classroom so that students can be in charge of their own learning. We will look at how teachers can use technology to encourage student choice and explore how to manage a classroom where students are sometimes using different tools.
SLA counselors, Karina Hirschfield and Zoe Siswick, will discuss the role of the advisor in the college process.
5th-8th graders came together on Wednesdays to experiment with a promising application, Aurasma, that makes creating interactive experiences a snap through layering virtual objects over images in the Greene Street Library. What was gained from this experiment? How can you harness the potential of augmented reality in your school?
We describe the work done to prepare for a successful 1-1 laptop roll-out this year at The Baldwin School. We will identify the biggest challenges we faced, describe how we faced them, and encourage audience members to share their own strategies.
How do you get students thinking on a deep level with surface level skills? How do you get to the interesting questions and meaningful activities when you're learning primary skills? In other words, how can we encourage students to play Mozart (or feel like they are), when they only know Chopsticks?
Schools and school systems struggle to strike a balance between the many expectations they carry: basic skills, exploration, college and/or career preparation, citizenship and many others. What (and who) is education for, and who gets to decide?
We've heard a lot about how wearable technology could impact medicine (http://www.livescience.com/39207-google-glass-surgery.html) commerce (http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/5341-glasspay-bitcoin-mobile-payments.html) and personal health (http://www.inc.com/scott-jones/future-of-wearable-technology.html)...but how about the classroom?
Traditional teacher education has focused on preparing teachers with content knowledge and field experience - but what about connectedness and networking? How can we redesign teacher ed to help pre-service and new teachers learn to and through networking with "experts" (i.e. teachers!) in the field?
How can we organize schools that empower teachers to be responsive to the individual curricular and social needs of students? What would a school led by teachers look like and what conditions need to exist to create such a place?
Engagement doesn’t have to be elusive. In this interactive session, we will design a learning environment to maximize cognitive engagement. Synthesizing current research about the brain and best practices in instruction, we will continue an ongoing reflection about what school means and our roles as educators.
Come hear from SLA students and their teaching team about the joys, challenges, and lessons of adopting a workshop model for English class—including thoughts about how to bring the traditional model into the digital age.
Amazing things happen when educational programs define their own goals and pull resources from inspiring community partners. Whether sewing with circuits or gazing through the observatory of a science museum, these opportunities can redefine a student's learning experience. In our conversation we'll discuss how this programming can be designed and implemented.
Whose voices are heard in education (education reform, education technology) circles? While it might be easy to identify (and lambast) the "corporate" voices, are we truly offering and supporting diverse voices in response? Who gets to speak "for" students, for teachers, for change? How can we do better?
What does "therapeutic school" mean and how does it look? Learn how one small therapeutic school uses understanding, intention and awareness to do our best work, and how to apply frames and perspectives from therapeutic school to your own setting.
Are you entering in a BYOD or 1:1 initiative? Do you have questions about what to expect when your students have access to information at their fingertips? Come discuss with us all that goes into planning/implementing a successful BYOD/1:1 initiative.
What if school was a base camp for wonder? How could you create the conditions for wonder in school? What implications would that have for the expedition that students would take through their education? What are the infinite possibilities for imagining, designing, and creating when learning is based in wonder?
Augmented Reality is the practice of taking 2 dimensional objects in the classroom and making them into 3 dimensional and 4 dimensional live learning objects. We will talk about what changes occur when we shift the culture in our classroom from a flat 2D paper to a 3d or 4d surface that allows the classroom to expand beyond its four walls...
Using examples of studio-based learning projects, learn how to infuse design thinking elements into the classroom and get students to work on and solve real-world challenges. Learn about and discuss how the studio model and multidisciplinary collaborative projects enhance inquiry-based learning and interest from students.
Have you ever looked at your school experience through the eyes of a student? Have you lived as a student for a day? As educators, we are "designers" of the student experience, yet do we understand how the implications of our design directly impact our students? In this session we will look at our schools through the lens of a student. What can we do to make sure that we are designing the best possible learning environment for them?
This conversation will focus on the ongoing development of an interdisciplinary curriculum involving math and physics.
Part photowalk, part art exercise, part respite from the intellectual gymnastics of the day, this session is for anyone who enjoys expressing themselves with a device that takes pictures (including smartphones, tablets, etc.) Our subject will be SLA itself. No prior experience or expensive camera equipment required, just your passion for photography and a desire to improve your craft.
A discussion about the meaning of student ownership (empowerment) of learning and how it’s related to and contrasts with student engagement. In addition, some practical applications to foster student ownership (empowerment) in the classroom. Participants will have the opportunity to plan activities and develop measurable goals associated with student ownership (empowerment) of learning.
Based on our forthcoming book, which provides school leaders with a hands-on guide to rethinking practices to create truly innovative schools, this session will present a framework and step-by-step guide for school transformation. School leaders are invited to bring their whole team along to engage in several exercises to kick-start the process.
Hybrid teachers, who spend 1/2 their time in the classroom and 1/2 their time in stewardship of the profession, can help colleagues enrich K-12 education. How can hybrid teachers develop their educational leadership while they are supporting students, collaborating with colleagues, negotiating employment contracts, etc.? Participant recommendations will evolve into an opt-in article for publication.
A conversation facilitated by Dr. Bobbi Kurshan of Academic Innovation @ Penn GSE. This is an opportunity for educators to engage in meaningful dialogue with current education entrepreneurs about what educators of all stripes want from EdTech.
Society could use more effective leadership, but what institutions teach it? We know how to teach it, but almost no institutions focus on leadership first. If you'd like to see a school teach the skills for leadership (probably post-graduate) or have experience starting schools or teaching leadership, please join.
Why is it that the people making the decisions are rarely the ones having to live with them? Join a conversation led by students at the NYC iSchool to learn how we can make schools and our classrooms places that are created both for and BY students. Find out what it’s like to be in a community where student voice and student choice are a main priority and walk away with plans (both big and small) to incorporate student voice in to your school community and classrooms.
This workshop will ask participants to consider standard assignments within their classrooms or colleagues' classrooms and think about how they can be re-imagined given what we know about the importance of choice, our understanding of motivation, and the electronic devices available to them.
Gamification refers to using elements of game design, specifically video games, as a model for instructional scaffolding. Join us in exploring how gamification can be leveraged to create an instructional cycle that supports challenge-based inquiry, differentiation, and cooperative interdependence, as learners "play" to unlock "powers" for greater learner autonomy.
Positive Psychology is the scientific study of what makes individuals and communities happy. This session will center around how to infuse classrooms and school environments with more joy--for learning, for life pursuits, and for building lasting relationships. Be prepared to workshop practical, useful ideas to infuse into your school. C'mon, get happy!
Are iTunes U Courses a new disruption in education? Our teachers said goodbye to textbooks and hello to collaboratively building courses in iTunes U, becoming course designers, creative problem solvers, better researchers, collaborative team members, and authorities about content as it relates to curriculum standards and student needs.
Preparing students for citizenship gets less attention these days than it deserves. Let's try to rectify that as we talk about what democracy demands from its citizens. From old-fashioned brainstorming to Google Docs collaboration, we'll build ideas to bring democracy beyond content and into the fabric of our schools.
It's time to for progressive, connected educators to start building a larger movement for modern learning in schools and communities. Let's talk about how to do just that.
Please join this conversation to imagine what is possible for schools and classrooms. "What if Schools..." is a prompt to encourage us to think beyond traditional models of school structure and strategy. With each other as resources for innovation, we can develop new lenses through which we can imagine education. The source of innovation is within each other, our experiences, and our ideas. Therefore, please join this opportunity to push for transformation of traditional school models.
EduCon 2.6