Session Description

Social studies educators do more than teach students about the people and events that shaped Texas. They help students understand leadership, civic responsibility, and their own role in their communities. This session explores how educators can recognize students who demonstrate those qualities in their everyday actions.

Participants will learn how the Lone Star Leader Award recognizes students who demonstrate leadership, academic success, and involvement in their schools and communities. Using Texas history, government, and civic experiences as a foundation, the session will explore how students can move from learning about Texas leaders and the decisions that shaped the state to reflecting on their own leadership and responsibility to their communities.

The session will highlight how educators can recognize leadership through initiative, service, collaboration, responsibility, and positive influence, and how a nomination for the Lone Star Leader Award can open the door to meaningful leadership and service experiences that help students continue to learn, lead, and contribute.

The classroom is a place where students should learn with intellectual rigor, emotional engagement, and ethical reflection, and come to understand that their own views and choices matter. As we prepare for a new school year, this session will engage in meaningful strategies for slowing down and creating a reflective classroom that is willing and able to navigate challenging content through the head, heart, and conscience. We will experience strategies for bravely engaging in challenging content while creating learning environments where all students feel they belong.

Primary sources within your TexQuest resources, Britannica and Gale In Context, provide first-hand insights into history and valuable comparisons to current events. In this session, participants will explore practical strategies for discovering primary sources, TEKS-aligned articles, reference materials, images, and videos within these digital platforms. Learn how to leverage built-in accessibility and scaffolding features including text-to-speech, real time translations, adjustable Lexile levels, text highlighting/annotation tools, and seamless Google/Microsoft integration, to differentiate instruction, empower diverse learners, and elevate historical inquiry in secondary classrooms.

Ever wonder how to run station rotations without the classroom chaos? Step into your students’ shoes as an instructional coach and U.S. History teacher team up to lead you through a hands-on World War II station simulation. After diving into the activity, we’ll pull back the curtain to share the secrets of making stations work—from smart planning and easy management tricks to keeping secondary students genuinely engaged.

Join Socorro High School art teacher Abel Saucedo and student artists Angely Silva and Sofia Aguilar as they share their experiences participating in the Mexican American School Boards Association (MASBA) Art Competition, where they earned first- and third-place honors.