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).
Most young Americans can't find Ukraine or the Gaza Strip on a map. This is a problem. In order to empathize with other people, we need to *slow down* and learn where each of us come from and what matters to us. We need more empathetic geography.
Teacher mental health is a real thing! It’s no secret that youth mental health is in crisis. Teachers aren’t okay either. Educators experience substantially higher rates of depression than the overall population. Nearly 50 percent leave the classroom within five years. Teaching is considered as stressful as working as an emergency room doctor (Hechinger Report August 2023). Educators are invited to learn more about a unique program "Adult Rites of Passage", which mirrors the siblinghood groups offered to students at South Bronx Community Charter High School. The Adult ROP space provides two functions: one is to learn more about the types of activities that can be conducted in the student space by doing them in groups of adults. The second is to provide respite from busy weeks of lesson planning and give adults a space to unwind, be silly, reflect and connect.
How can you use one-on-one advising to meet young people where they are, build strong relationships and fortify student's confidence, self-advocacy, reflectiveness and prioritization skills? At SBC, we meet with students bi-weekly and set personalized goals. Join us to jumpstart advising at your school/district or take your advising practice to the next level.
The 11th grade STRIPES program at Belmont Charter High School in the Parkside section of Philadelphia highlights how an urban neighborhood can become a powerful extension of the classroom. This conversation will discuss ways that teachers can connect with their neighborhoods in the service of inquiry-driven learning and culturally responsive teaching.
Educators know the needs of students and schools better than anyone, but it can often feel like you’re on an island of your own in your classroom. With this in mind, let’s reflect on how we are already acting as advocates, dig into some deep questions, dream about what could be, see what ideas emerge, and walk through a number of policy tools, tips, and tricks!
What are the elements of PBL, and how can we leverage them for human-centered teaching and learning in our communities?
This session promises a playful and comprehensive exploration of AI's role in forging the future of education. Join us for this enlightening conversation as we explore the rapidly evolving world of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on education.
Join an elementary school teacher, high school student, and college student to consider the strengths teachers at each of those levels bring to the table. What could teachers at other levels learn from each other?
What needs to change in schools -- in your school -- for teens to be truly future-ready? What mindsets, what paradigms, what systems — big and small? We'll ask the big questions, dig in, and unpack the shifts needed at the district, school, and classroom levels. Then we'll shift into accelerator mode, sharing real ideas for catalytic teaching and learning that guide teens to be future-ready.
Participate with friends and colleagues in a deep discussion exploring this question. Let's crowd source responses and create a Medium post before we leave that represents our conversation. Consider street data you notice that says young people matter in schools. Share practices that bring young people to see school as a home of opportunity. What's the spirit that you would like to see inhabit your school and others?
In our highly engaging and interactive session, we will model the ways we integrate Circle of Power and Respect (CPR) into our teacher education course. We will share lessons we are learning about what it takes to build an engaging and connective classroom. We’re excited for you to join us!
Demonstration of culturally relevant project based learning with students ranging from 8th grade to 12th grade in both district and charter schools.
Have a conversation with Chris Lehmann and Matt Kay of SLA as we examine how we continue to embrace process over product and the need for productive struggle in our classrooms and how generative AI tools are changing the nature of student work.
We have heard that teachers are fleeing the profession: retiring early, leaving for consulting jobs, or burning out. But that's not true of all teachers. So just how does one stay engaged and engaging while aging? How might we avoid both burning out and fading away.
How might we keep our bonfires of innovation and spirits of upstart culture thriving in the face of constant pushback and regression to the mean? Unite around a common cause -- improving the teaching and learning experiences for all -- and cast cynicism aside.
We will let the wisdom of Allen Iverson help us define practice, assessment, and re-takes to create more equitable grading structures in our schools.
This conversation breaks down 4 personality types and 10 multiple intelligences that are most prevalent in K-12 students, and helps cultivate the students’ area(s) of interest and potential career exploration.
Using the Equity X Design Framework, we will explore empathy interviews to build collective understanding that can transform communities and practices. In this session, we delve into the art of empathy interviews as a profound tool for gathering insights that go beyond surface-level observations and push practitioners to design their practice at the margins.
Schools all over continue to fight the battle against this century's technologies while they watch learners disengage and, now more than ever, stop showing up at all. Let's talk about learner-centered technologies, learner-centered technology policies, and what "technology" means as we enter this mid-century.
When students engage with educational games they can learn through play. But, when students create games, they learn even more. At Science Leadership Academy there are many student projects that revolve around game creation. In this session we will discuss the different types of game projects that students can do, and hope that you can walk away from this session with a prototype of a game, or project, that you can take back to your class.
An exploration of the process of integrating partnerships into inquiry driven student work and presentation at the Lea School in West Philadelphia.
This presentation/conversation centers on a public school teacher's transition from traditional grading to a system emphasizing student thinking, reflection, growth, and understanding. Influenced by restorative practices, it prioritizes ongoing assessment for both retention and improvement throughout the school year.
Whether hobbyists or side-hustlers, education professionals often turn to art as escapism or income enhancement. How might we turn artistic expressions into opportunities for professional and personal development? Come create while conversing; no skills required.
Research shows that students who develop into strong readers live longer lives, are healthier overall, make significantly more money throughout their lifetime, and have more options for lifting themselves out of poverty. Yet, most high school students who attend comprehensive high schools in Philadelphia come into their secondary education reading at the 5th-8th grade level. The ability for students to access grade-level texts and teach themselves new skills through reading is crucial. So, how can neighborhood schools help students to become literacy leaders? While there has been a great deal of dedication to more efficacious literacy practices in the lower grades, that research has not translated to high school. Nationally, there is no model and very little data to address unfinished literacy skills in older students.
In this conversation, we will discuss the process of knowledge constitution in tradition and AI-driven writing practices. Drawing on Writing to Learn research, I will explore how human beings develop new knowledge and insight through first and second learning processes in the writing process. First, writers learn through memory work and data retrieval. Second, writers learn through sentence and paragraph creation. Thus, if our students turn over increasing amounts of sentence and paragraph generation to AI, they run the risk of missing out on key opportunities to learn. And yet, we cannot hide from AI. Know this fact, we can begin to develop a more "conscious" method of use.
The 12th grade STRIPES program at Belmont Charter High School in the Parkside section of Philadelphia explores themes of protest and change in the surrounding neighborhood through lenses such as storytelling. Collecting and sharing the stories of community elders is one powerful way students gain perspective and connection.
Cross-school collaboration can be a powerful way to expand teacher, administrator, and school capacity. In this conversation, teachers from seven Philadelphia schools - public and charter - share what it took for their Community of Practice (CoP) to introduce a new SEL advisory curriculum in their school communities.
A conversation about seeing failure as an important part of the AI world.
Where do we find joy in our schools, classrooms and communities? How can we center joy, and with that, also elevate inclusivity? In this session, we will explore how to more purposefully cultivate joy and center students’ identities, experiences and perspectives. A collaborative and hopefully joyful conversation uplifting some practices from Gholdy Muhammad’s Unearthing Joy.
In Year 2 of our hands-on program to engage and educate middle school makers: What best practices in STEM, STEAM, Makerspaces, Engineering, and more can be used to create an engaging and educational experience? What outcomes do we value when creating these programs? What did we learn from year one?
Discover how SEL activities can enliven curriculum and deepen student connections. The FirstHand team shares tools from the evidence-based CASEL framework, and how these practices have impacted the outcomes of our informal STEM program. Attendees will participate in a fishbowl discussion called Brave Spaces prompted by a student-created question.
Come join this interactive conversation and discover the potential and pitfalls of AI and Chat GPT in education and entrepreneurship. Through a combination of student presentations( case studies), demonstrations, and interactive activities, participants will gain insights, tips, and actionable ideas for enhancing their classroom practices and side hustles while promoting social good.
In this session, we will unpack every aspect of building a school-wide RWL program, including project design and planning, assessment, partnerships, internship programs and much more!
How might we apply the underpinnings of tabletop and video game design to the demonstration of deeper content knowledge, social-emotional growth, and future-ready skill development? Ideate and imagine while exploring a library of games & resources.
Participants will go through a series of guided conversations and curriculum that helps build a college-going mindset in high school by increasing students' access to college courses through school partnerships.
Join us as we listen to famous songs from the American folk and blues traditions and then write our own songs in response.
Through the Equity X Design Framework, we are going to take a critical look at the idea of belonging that builds a brave space for all children, but centering Queer Youth. We will discuss what it means to design at the margins, what a transformative classroom looks like, what transformative environments look like, and how to co-create & co-design with youth through a design sprint.
Workshop U is a new vision for college built on many of the same ideas that power the Workshop School. As educators, how do we measure what matters and use it to inform our design and iteration? 'Portraiture' is a unique form of qualitative research that has potential to reimagine how we measure impact, collect impact data, and use data for design work in school settings.
Teachers are always looking for ways to have students make meaningful interdisciplinary connections. After years of trying various methods, we have found a sustainable way to incorporate Signature Projects into our curriculum multiple times a year for each grade. Project Innovate, Architecture Expo, Shakespeare Study, Globalization of Chocolate, and Teen Activism are just a few of the project titles bringing in pieces from every subject area throughout the year. Teachers do not have to reinvent the wheel each year! Even when most of these projects are ungraded, we have found that students engage, enjoy and learn from these collaborative, in-depth projects each year!
This conversation will navigate the crossroads of generative artificial intelligence and ELA. Using prompt engineering, students can convert their written thoughts into astonishing AI-generated images and allow educators to view writing through the lens of computational thinking, providing a unique approach to the creative writing process. This conversation will dive into an innovative and enriching exploration into the fusion of creativity, analytical thinking, and collaborative learning.
We experience Moments that shape us from our birth until we soar. It is how we live and reflect on these Moments that will shape us, our connections and our Ideas.
An academic program coordinator and two teachers of dual-enrolled ICT courses lead a discussion of the benefits and challenges of dual-enrollment for high school students.
Participate in a quest bridging the digital and physical worlds, integrating humanistic ethics with cutting-edge tech and tokenization! Navigate immersive, gamified stations to learn how to earn and stake digital tokens, fueling transformative discussions. Supercharge student engagement and co-create a compassionate, tokenized, future-ready learning environment. Be the change in education!
EduCon 2024