Early Career Teaching Institute

This workshop will focus on best practices for co-teaching and co-planning between content teachers and ESL/Bilingual Resource teachers. The workshop will include a review of WIDA Can Do Descriptors and for Grades 9-12 and look at different models of coteaching as well as how to leverage both teachers' expertise in the classroom to support multilingual students. This workshop is geared towards secondary teachers.

There are many demands on us as reading teachers, yet we don’t talk often enough about how to nurture a genuine love of reading in our classrooms. Cultivating our students’ sense of selves as engaged and enthusiastic readers must be at the very heart of this complex work. Join veteran teacher, Kara Lawson, in an exploration of instructional moves that help students to see themselves as readers and strategies that help to create a classroom that fosters a love of reading.

Come join this experienced elementary teacher who does powerful outdoor education with her students each week from September through June. With years of experience to draw from, she will share stories, advice, curriculum ideas, and examples of how to do this work in addition to and integrated into regular academic/curriculum responsibilities, what the challenges are, and how to get school leadership on board. She has also conducted action research on this work, worked with community organizations to build an outdoor learning lab on site, and with colleagues across the area has advocated with school and district leadership about the importance of outdoor education especially in schools serving minoritized and marginalized student populations.

What do you do when you want to infuse Indigenous voices and stories into your practice but you don’t know how? Where do you even begin? Join us as we learn from Educator Exemplars featured in Wisconsin First Nations who are committed to integrating Wisconsin First Nation Studies into their instructional practices throughout the year.

Together we will discover how these inspiring teachers have built relationships, used resources, and leveraged the possibilities of both to engage and enhance the experiences of learners in their classrooms and schools. We’ll hold space for reflection on the guidance gained, and time to outline our own intentions for carrying the work forward with those we teach.

This workshop uses Elena Aguilar's book Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators (2018) as a springboard to reflect and build practices to sustain educators in the profession. In this workshop, participants will reflect on the emotional components of teaching and the affordances and limitations of their current habits and practices. This reflection will include grappling with the complex and challenging structures and systems educators work within that often impact the ability to take care of oneself. Then, they will examine strategies and practices intended to cultivate emotional resilience, including engaging in some mindfulness exercises. Finally, participants will create individualized goals related to how they will build their emotional resilience in the next school year.

Teachers with multilingual learners know the benefits of translanguaging, but often find it challenging to bring translanguaging pedagogies into practice. In this interactive workshop, you will explore your own translanguaging stance, and learn about translanguaging pedagogies. Concrete examples for practices and implementation will be shared for both elementary and secondary teachers. Each attendee will receive guidance on implementation of translanguaging practices, and leave with some practical strategies for making translanguaging a reality in their classroom.

In this workshop, educators will explore how bias-based bullying shows up in schools—and what they can do to stop it. Through engaging activities, reflective discussion, and actionable tools, participants will build the confidence and capacity to stand up, speak out, and create inclusive environments where every student feels seen, safe, and supported.

This hands-on workshop explores map-making as a tool for reflection, storytelling, and sense-making. Participants will create three different maps to develop skills in spatial thinking, symbolism, and personal narrative. Through discussion and reflection, they will gain new insights into their early career experiences and explore ways to use mapping in Art, Social Studies, and ELA classrooms.

With the advent of generative AI, teachers are faced with the difficult choice of trusting advanced technologies such as Large Language Models (e.g., Chat-GPT) to take advantage of their transformative potential. Trusting educational AI is getting harder as these systems become less transparent, less predictable, and raise equity concerns. In the workshop, teachers attempt to break the AI grader by giving it inputs that are likely to confuse it. Despite being simple changes to input (e.g., swapping a word with its synonyms), teachers will see how they easily flip the AI grade. Teachers will also have the option to come up with new creative ways to break the AI grader.

This workshop, "Unlocking Literacy: Teaching Beginning Reading with the Science of Reading," is designed to equip educators with evidence-based strategies for teaching early reading skills. Grounded in the Science of Reading, this session will explore the cognitive processes behind learning to read and provide practical techniques for effective beginning reading instruction.

This interactive session will begin with an overview of the Science of Reading on how children learn to read, followed by hands-on activities that model effective instructional techniques. Educators will engage in guided practice with explicit, systematic phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, learn how to incorporate decodable texts, and explore strategies for fostering reading fluency and comprehension. Educators will also examine formative and interim assessments to monitor learner progress and to determine instructional effectiveness. Time will be allocated for discussion, collaboration, and Q&A.

Stop by the Career Center's table and learn about the continued services we provide to our alumni! We support recent alums for up to five years after graduation. We offer assistance with:

• Updating your resume
• Finding and applying for other positions
• Licensure questions
• Searching and applying for graduate school programs
• and more!

More information can be found on our website: https://careercenter.education.wisc.edu/

This session will give educators hands-on strategies to build a classroom culture and climate that is equity driven with a strong instructional focus. A strong classroom culture and climate allows students to learn the very most.

In this hands-on workshop participants will learn how to implement a localized simulation, iPlan, to examine both the impacts of climate change and to engage in inquiry and deliberation on how to mitigate these impacts locally. In iPlan, students play the role of a consultant working with a local city or county to review and revise their zoning plan. Teachers can set the simulation to focus on any city or local area in the US. The simulation includes key indicators that illustrate how land use, in the form of actual zoning codes, can have social, environmental and economic impacts locally. Consultants then create a plan for changing the land use codes (e.g., more green space) to address the impacts of climate change. Once they submit their plan they see projected impacts of their revised land use plan on key indicators (e.g., housing) and get feedback from a panel of different stakeholder groups. Session attendees will participate in activities from the simulation and will be provided with numerous curricular resources for use in their own classes. iPlan can be adapted for any local area on a range of climate related issues suitable for a civics, geography, environmental studies or science classroom. We will also engage in discussions of how to integrate the simulation into your course or as part of an interdisciplinary project. Finally, we will include strategies for using the simulation to have students deliberate potential mitigation efforts for creating climate resiliency in your local communities .

Question-asking is a skill and an art form — and one the cornerstones of intentional, thought-provoking teaching and learning. How exactly, though, do teachers craft meaningful questions? How do teachers know what type of question to employ and for what purpose/s? How do teachers sequence questions to build rich, robust discussion and reflection? This session will expose teachers to different question protocols that support comprehension, analysis, reflection, critical thinking, and feedback. It will provide teachers the space to review the protocols and revise them for their own classroom settings –- building off of the collective wisdom of educators in the room. The session will conclude by reflecting on what instructional decisions (e.g. seating arrangement, tone of delivery, language supports, and scaffolds) could foster success when asking different types of questions.

Do you use cold calling in class? Have you considered what it might mean to "warm" call on students to share whole class? During this session, participants will learn how warm calling is a way to elevate student status and bring more equity to voice in the classroom. Participants will experience a few modeled strategies to warm call on students and reflect on this as a way to build an inclusive community and mathematical identity.