Pre Conference Sessions

Learning That Transfers: Designing curriculum for a changing world with Julie Stern

Are you tired of your students only scratching the surface of learning? Explore the learning transfer model to help students acquire, connect, and transfer their learning to new situations. Join best-selling author Julie Stern, for this engaging, hands-on session that will leave you inspired and ready to empower your students for our ever-changing world.

The Learning That Transfers framework is a way to help students and teachers alike to sift through the complexity and ground us amidst constant change. This pre-conference seeks to foster a sense of calm and purpose, equipping participants with concrete steps to foster agency and adaptability with your students. Teachers will draft and receive feedback on concrete strategies to use in your classroom for surface, deep, and transfer learning. Leaders have the option to draft and receive feedback on an implementation plan for their setting.

Leading from the Middle: a pre-conference experience with Ewan McIntosh

It's impossible to be agile enough for the current climate without quality leaders throughout the system. What does it mean to Lead from the Middle? In this pre-conference, Ewan McIntosh gives a taste from NoTosh’s award-winning programme, Leading from the Middle.

This session will excite and enable aspiring leaders, as well as those working in senior positions today: understanding how to make decisions with and for students, their families, and the reputation of your school is the responsibility of everyone.

"I have developed skills in leading "from behind". Without a specific role, I am learning how to coach and mentor individuals and my team through strategic and authentic methods. Many of the ideas shared in this programme have helped me develop those strategies and methods." - Kimberly Porter, American International School of Budapest

"I've learned how to get people to buy into my project, while also seeing that I don't need to have it all figured out: the best thing to do is just start and see what happens." - Greta Stacy, American School of Doha

Bolstering Students' (& Educators') Emotional Wellbeing and Sense of Belonging with Phyllis Fagell

In this interactive workshop, Phyllis will guide participants through activities that educators can use in the classroom or during advisory time to connect with students and help them build trusting relationships with one another. Participants will leave with concrete strategies that help students develop social and coping skills, sustain optimism and feel empowered to safeguard one another’s well-being. To help minimize misunderstandings between staff and students, Phyllis also will dispel myths and share research about the developmental phase.

Specific, hands-on activities will focus on normalizing middle schoolers’ struggles and creating age-appropriate structures for constructive discussion of interpersonal issues. It’s difficult – but critical – to strike the right balance between giving students a sense of agency and overwhelming them, as tweens can’t tend to anyone else's well-being if they’re unable to tend to their own feelings and needs. The same is true for adults, so Phyllis will give participants tools for preserving their own well-being, creating a support network for themselves, and managing their own reactivity so students “catch their calm.”

Making Health Intersectional and Interdisciplinary: the health class we all deserved to have in school with Justine Ang Fonte

Imagine a world where our children thought about their body kindly, fed their eyes, ears, skin, and mouth with kindness, and were treated by others kindly. Sounds pretty wonderful, right? So what is getting in the way of that being a reality? Disconnection. As humans, we are wired to connect so when we feel disconnected, we turn to food, substances, and technology. Our students want to belong but there are systemic structures of oppression that make them feel othered, marginalized, and unseen. In this pre-conference, renowned health educator, Justine Ang Fonte, will cover the greatest hits of her middle school health class that is inclusive, comprehensive, and brave. Embracing the various identities of our students and invoking those into all academic subjects, welcomes them into school as a place they can be empowered with the knowledge of how their amazing bodies work, how they engage in their life relationships with safety and empathy, and to advocate health to be the human right that it is as a global citizen. Workshop topics during this pre-conference include:

• Intersectional Health

• Understanding Mental Health

• The Spectrum of Gender

• Sexually Explicit Media Literacy

• Health at Every Size

Please note, this session is open to all teachers, not only those who teach health!

The Hidden and Vital Role of Executive Function: how to support our most challenging students by integrating brain-based strategies into the classroom with Bethany Febus

Executive function challenges are the often-invisible factor underlying a disconnect in the classroom. When educators focus on behaviors alone, this can lead to well-intended but ineffective organization-oriented solutions (e.g. assigning seats in the front row or providing planners). Executive function challenges are not easy to remediate, but there are simple strategies that teachers can weave into their curriculum as well as teaching styles that will not only benefit students with neurological differences the entire class as well. In this workshop you will learn how to identify underlying executive function challenges through archetype case studies (i.e. disorganized, riled up, & spaced out), play with exercises to implement in the classroom, and engage in interactive discussions on how to balance the needs of struggling students with the needs of the entire class.

Learning Through Research: Building Bridges, Making Connections, Supporting Students for Success with Joana Bárbara and Albert Fernandes from CLIP, The Oporto International School

In this session you will explore how Oporto International School is actively embedding creative learning into the curriculum; promoting an authentic student-centered, inquiry-driven, collaborative pedagogy through a Learning Through Research (LTR) contextualized Middle School curriculum with the goal of connecting students to success.

LTR provides students with lifelong skills and prepares them for their professional careers by exposing real-life events. The essence of LTR is the ability to allow students to develop effective skills in leadership, decision-making, creative thinking, trust-building, communication, and conflict management across all areas. Ultimately, the fundamental objective is that students be autonomous, proficient, curious, and open to different points of view, taking with them the necessary long-life skills that will ensure success.

The session facilitators will exemplify how to bridge interdisciplinary class curriculum while also supporting collaboration and enhancing creativity in our students with engaging hands-on activities.

A Taste of Porto: Exploring the local area to support students in making meaningful connections with Susana Varela from CLIP, Oporto International School

Explore the captivating historical city of Porto, a UNESCO world heritage site. In this session, co-created with Oporto International School senior students connected to their coursework for Travel & Tourism, we will share how students can be engaged, supported, and challenged to make meaningful connections through experiential learning in their local area.

We will consider how we can engage middle school students and support them to make connections between subjects through gathering information about the life of the local area as part of a multidisciplinary project, where students can evaluate different solutions to solve current and relevant contextualized problems, whilst maintaining the heart of the local area.

By exploring the city, along with some senior students from Oporto International School, this session intends to impact pedagogical practice, so that participating educators will be inspired to adapt this experience to their own context.

This pre-conference has a limit of 20 participants.