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).

But I Just Want You to Tell Me How!: Introducing Inquiry Based Learning to Students in 5th Grade

Session 4
Hilary Hamilton, Nancy Ironside, Tim Boyle

In this conversation, we will be thinking about how to establish a self-sustaining culture of student driven inquiry in middle age students and/or students who are new to project based learning. In our first (half!) a year, Science Leadership Academy Middle School (SLA-MS) we’ve worked to lay the groundwork for students to ask and explore meaningful questions in a variety of thought strains. As is to be expected, some students are catching the “inquiry bug” and are eagerly following their interests. For others, though, this is significantly challenging due to a variety of factors including age, developmental level, current stamina and skill level, and a generally slow adjustment to our “unschooling.” By looking at a few case studies from our school, and learning about experiences in your school settings, we’re eager to think together about how we help students to become more independent and self-sustaining learners. How do we find and ask follow up questions? How do we stick with a line of thinking long enough to reap its benefits? How do we utilize our peers rather than funneling our work through the teacher? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we transfer what we learn from one exploration into a new, or novel, situation?

Designing and Implementing Competency-Based Curriculum to Empower Self-Driven Learners

Session 4
Denis Anglim, Femi Johnson, Charlie McGeehan, Phil Nichols, Samuel Reed, Maggie Stephan, Kiera Williams, U School students TBD

This session is collaborative inquiry into a tension of teaching: building structures that support students’ growth with flexibility to accommodate diverse perspectives, interests, and needs in the curriculum. We will explore this dynamic in the context of a Humanities program at The U School, a Philadelphia public high school.

Speaking to Listen in the Age of Emojis

Session 4
Diana Potts, Karen Blumberg, Mike Ritzius

The skill of effective communication has powerful influence in shaping school culture. Teachers, students and leadership are surrounded by feedback on a daily basis from the classroom to meetings to the playing field. Understanding how to communicate can be the difference between listening to react and listening to understand. How one hears, processes and delivers feedback can be powerful in shaping the tone of personal and professional relationships. In this workshop theory, practice and your experiences will be used to examine what it takes to host effective and productive conversations with colleagues and students.

Student Voices: digital redlining and privacy

Session 4
Chris Gilliard, Bill Fitzgerald, Hugh Culik

Students from Macomb Community College examined the problematic status of privacy in post-secondary education. They identified standardized curricula, assessments, academic advising, and other forms of digital redlining that emphasize training over critical thinking. These findings are developing into a set of student-centered privacy principles that they will refine at Educon.

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