Kass Minor is an inclusive educator who is deeply involved in local, inquiry-based teacher research and school community development. Alongside partnerships with the Teachers College Inclusive Classrooms Project and the New York City Department of Education, since 2005, she has worked as a teacher, staff developer, adjunct professor, speaker, and documentarian. She has contributed content to Heinemann Education Blog, inclusiveclassrooms.org, and has been featured in Teaching Tolerance Magazine. Her work is inspired by the communities that surround her and motivated by the idea that every adult can teach, and every student can learn. Most recently, along with her partner and husband, Cornelius Minor, she has established The Minor Collective, a community-based movement designed to foster sustainable change in schools. Within the past two years, The Minor Collective has worked with multiple cohorts of schools across all grades and community sectors in New York City, including parents, teachers, school leaders, and students to redefine what it means to develop affirming, welcoming school culture and instructional practice through the lens of racial justice, decolonization, and liberation.
As experienced classroom teachers, teacher educators, and literacy researchers, we have been looking at tried and true literacy pedagogies to uncover layers of learning opportunities. In this session we will examine literature circles for their possibilities of purposeful play with human and non-human participants. We will consider the role of the teacher and the materials in facilitating a sensory, culturally/geographically, textually provocative, embodied learning experience within literature circles for K-12 students.
The children’s book What Do You Do With An Idea? is a favourite of Steacy Pinney’s, whose own idea is to change the world by helping youngsters read with confidence and joy. Calgary Reads, a research-driven, collaborative approach to children’s literacy ensures that young children experience the magic of regular read-alouds. As self-described “possibilitarians,” Pinney and her team look for novel ways to promote children’s literacy. The newest idea, The Children’s Reading Place & Book Bank, has enabled Calgary Reads to give more than 100,000 books to children over the last three years.
What is joyful literacy? What are the characteristics of environments that support joyful literacy? We invite you to think about your own literacy experiences and inspiring spaces you have encountered, as we convene to “think differently about how we can get books into the hands of kids” (Calgary Reads, 2017).
Participants will explore a variety of joyful literacy spaces, including a virtual tour of Calgary’s own Children’s Reading Place. We’ll use a reflective and inquisitive process to ask ourselves:
How do these spaces invite you into literacy learning? How might you feel in this space?
What are the intentional provocations that invoke children to reading? What invitations do you see that help you imagine new possibilities for your own spaces?
What materials (books, tools, signs) do you see your own literacy identities reflected in (texts-as-mirrors)?
Where do you see opportunities to learn something new through the materials (texts-as-windows)?
How do books exist outside both of these to act as ‘sliding glass doors’?
What windows, mirrors and sliding glass doors can you discover that would invite your students’ identities to be welcomed into this space?
What aspects of multimodality invite you to participate?
What are the characteristics of a joyful literacy-rich classroom and school?
How does this space act as The Third Teacher?
What similarities to your own space can you identify?
What possibilities for your space are you thinking about?
What questions does this space bring forward?
After participating in this inquiry, we will take the opportunity to create ‘Possibility Blueprints’ to bring your learning back to your own schools and classrooms.
“We are not decorating learning spaces. We are designing them to amplify learning” (Hare and Dillon, 2016).
Objectives:
To gain clarity on why all children deserve to read joyfully and confidently and the rippling effects of that literacy
To create an actionable set of ideas with accompanying rationales for crafting joyful reading spaces
To find inspiration and extended learning supports for future movement
Topics will include: the benefits of reading and building reading identities, barriers to access and book deserts, exploring materials to spark joy, and creating curriculum connections. Topics will emerge as the session progresses to incorporate the learnings of the collaborative community.
Target Audience: ELCCs and K-3 Educators
Alexandra May (M.Ed, B.A) is the Director of Programs & Initiatives at Calgary Reads. She has worked for years in the fields of Childcare and Education in organizations around the city such as Gymboree Play and Learn, The YMCA, The City of Calgary, the Calgary Public Library, and is the Founder and Past Director of Rhyme & Reason Early Learning. She received her degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Calgary and studied at Lancaster University in the UK. She received her Masters of Education in Educational Psychology and Multiliteracies Pedagogy, and currently teaches in the Early Learning and Child Care program at Bow Valley College. She is an active volunteer in collective impact initiatives in Alberta as well as with the ECMMA and in various Community Arts programs in Calgary. Alex is happiest working with children, who make much more sense to her than grown-ups.
As you are introduced to Calgary Reads’ newest MOOC, you will also be invited to become part of a wider movement-making strategy – we are setting out to help every child read with confidence and joy by grade three, so that we can all enjoy the advantages of a more literate society.
Participants will have their practices refreshed with the latest in literacy research and evidence, re-centered around reading aloud and reading together, and renewed by the collaboration of a group of accordant colleagues to move forward with the initiative.
Our session will:
Deliver a quick survey of the current literacy landscape
Provide an introduction to the pee wee and wee read models
Sample the tools that will help caregivers and educators participate in the movement
Help to inspire participants to action
Supply materials to complete the wee read and pee wee read models and to share with others to do the same
“The whole world opened up to me when I learned to read” – Mary McCleod Bethune
Objectives:
To gain clarity on why all children deserve to read joyfully and confidently and the rippling effects of that literacy
To create an actionable set of ideas with accompanying rationales for participating in the wee read and pee wee read movement
To find inspiration and extended learning supports for continued literacy advocation
Topics will include: benefits of reading and building reading identities, barriers to access and book deserts, strategies and tools for calling-in to literate practices, and curriculum connections. Topics will emerge as the session progresses to incorporate the learnings of the collaborative community!
Target Audience: ELCCs and K-3 Educators
This session will support teachers in the design of online synchronous and asynchronous student discussions within a Division III & IV context. Hyperdocs will be used to support a Conversation Roundtable protocol as a high impact literacy strategy to nurture culturally and linguistically diverse students. Participants will be asked to examine a short text and practice the protocol from the perspective of their students.
Christopher Blais is a life long learner, passionate about empowering teachers to leverage technology to personalize student learning. He has an MEd in Technology and is a gr 3/4 teacher and Technology Learning Leader at Buffalo Rubbing Stone in Calgary. Christopher has spent his career teaching and leading at the elementary level, infusing robotics, 3D printing and coding into his work. He believes young learners have tremendous potential and embraces risk taking and continual growth in practice to support learning. Currently he working with a team developing online content for gr 1-5 CBE students.
As a Technology Learning Leader within CBE, I provide instructional leadership on integrating technology into practice. I’m passionate about supporting emerging writers through leveraging technologies such as Minecraft Edu, Hummingbird robotics, Scratch coding and 3D printing. My approach highlights exemplars of student success coupled with curricular connections and clear learning intentions. I will address pros and cons of these technologies, sharing first hand experience of working with students in relation to the literature.
The importance of the class library, read alouds, and book matching.
I will discuss formative assessment strategies that highlight the importance of teacher observation, conversations, interviews and one-on-one conferences. The importance of formative assessment as a teaching and learning tool. Comparison between formative vs summative and why formative is more meaningful and useful to teachers, students and their families.
We will be talking about classroom management, number sense, literacy, fine motor skills and social emotional learning all benefit from the use of rhyme, rhythm and movement in the early childhood classroom. Let Susan do the research for you and come away with an action pack of ideas to implement in your classroom. From classics to new material, you are guaranteed to find something that grabs your students’ attention!
My thesis research involves how my personal relationship with writing has impacted how I "teach" writing. Research suggests that ELA teachers often choose their subject route because they consider themselves "readers" rather than "writers". I would like to explore with participants their writer-teacher identity, what our beliefs are about writing and teaching writing, and how this is realized in our work with our students.
Looking at strategies that I use in my classroom with the an analogy of working out.
Exploration of the tools available to users of Google Classroom, and then a discussion about what were pitfalls or successes when giving feedback in a virtual environment.
I will outline how a school can successfully meet all students' learning needs by coordinating staff and resources in a way that maximizes their efficiency. Participants will see how the idea of a common intervention block can be implemented by any school and how staff can be utilized to give maximum support to struggling students while still providing purposeful learning for all. This framework can be implemented in a single grade, a combination of grades or across an entire school. In this structure all students, no matter what skills they are struggling with or what grade level they are working at, are grouped in such a way that their individual needs are met and they can make maximum progress in the development of their literacy skills.
Changing our approach to Home Reading - including 'Home' as an active partner in the learning to read journey; changing teacher roles from that of "Tracker of Home Reading" to the role of "Championing Home Reading"
I work in an alternative school where literally every student has an individualized learning program. I also teach (and have taught in the past) multi-grade classes from Grade 1 to 11, primarily in Language Arts and Social Studies. Observing this continuum has provided a rich opportunity to observe skills and habits that serve students well across the years and across the curriculum, as well as to notice areas of struggle and deficit. For the past 20 years I've been developing a program of study in what I call "scholar skills" that can be embedded in almost any classroom or course situation and fortify students' confidence, abilities, and success in learning. It's the "how to learn" that makes the "what" take on new energy and meaning.
How to teach students to read using Structured Literacy practices instead of leveled readers.
Incorporating new texts into classroom can be very intimidating, and part of that is because of the need to build assessments to suit the texts and the grade level. I'd like to lead a breakout session going over a unit I've made for English 10 using the music of Somali-Canadian musician K'Naan, an essay he wrote for the New York Times, and a track from the Hamilton Mixtape. I'd like to talk about that and touch on using the Alberta Program of Studies to build levelled assessments.
Why is there a <w> in <two>? Why don't we spell <does> like "duz"? How can we expect correct spelling from students when English is so full of crazy exceptions? Or is it possible that the English spelling system actually makes perfect sense? This session will introduce Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) and show how we can use it to find logic in spelling by teaching morphology, etymology, orthography, and phonology. These all work together to prove that our spelling system makes sense. Leave with lesson ideas for incorporating these concepts with your students.
Join me in discovering how I make learning visible with my students and my own children. As an educator, I use photographs to: 1) document children's learning, 2) build visual literacy skills, and 3) develop verbal storytelling proficiency by highlighting big ideas such as characters, setting, and sequence. Please bring your camera, a tablet or a smartphone (you shoot with what you have!) Together we will be building basic photography skills to help you create authentic learning stories.
The presentation is about the oral traditions of the Blackfoot people and how we can use that way of knowing to better help our students (all students). Do we simply rely on reading comprehension tools (F&P) to assess students’ comprehension, or are we looking for other avenues to assess their comprehension of text?