EduCon 2.6Building an Openly Licensed World Civilizations Curriculum
In this working session, we will collect, organize, write, and/or curate activities and materials to create a comprehensive, openly licensed World Civilizations curriculum.
Conversations
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).
Civic Knowledge: The School's Role in Democracy
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?
College & Career Ready? What does this really mean and look like?
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.
Creating Communities of Care Among Diverse Learners
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.
Elementary, PBL & Public Schools. Is it possible?
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.
Empowering Critical Relationships with Media
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.
Empowering Student Voice in the Humanities Classroom: Creating Space for Meaningful Discourse
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.
Face-to-Face With Our Public
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!
Facilitating Change in Traditional Settings
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.
I'm the Other Woman! - Finding Yourself Online
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!
MakerEd Design Sprint
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.
Read This! Watch This! Do This!
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.
Starting from scratch (sort of): bringing old ideas of inquiry and project based learning to life in a new building.
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.
The Mindful Teacher
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.
The Right Tool for the Job: Promoting Student Choice
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.
