Participants will explore the robust Authentic Intellectual Work (AIW) framework and its capacity to transform educational equity. AIW is defined by three essential components: constructing knowledge through disciplined inquiry to produce work that has value beyond school. Research consistently demonstrates that authentic pedagogy benefits students regardless of background, with achievement gains that are positive and virtually equal across demographic groups. This workshop will examine how AIW practices can ensure all students access high-quality instruction and assessment. Participants will: • Understand the three core components of Authentic Intellectual Work • Examine research demonstrating AIW's equitable impact on student achievement • Explore the framework through hands-on application • Consider how AIW practices can close opportunity gaps in their educational contexts The session balances theoretical foundations with practical applications, providing educators with actionable strategies. By structuring learning experiences around authentic intellectual challenges, educators can simultaneously raise the bar for academic excellence while ensuring equitable outcomes. Join us to discover how AIW can transform your approach to instruction and assessment, creating learning experiences that prepare all students for success in school and beyond.
Have you ever considered studying your practice as a Cooperating Teacher? We are excited to bring people together in this session to talk about our mutual yet too often isolated work as CTs and learn more about our plans for a 2024-2025 CT Classroom Action Research group that will provide the opportunity to explore and investigate what CTs know and do, build a cross-program network, and identify future goals/practices for mentoring pre-service teachers through the process of teacher inquiry. We invite you to join our workshop to learn more about this unique opportunity to study and refine your CT practice across the year in a supportive professional learning community.
In this session, you will: * Talk with other CTs about the puzzles, challenges, and rewards of mentoring preservice teachers * Begin thinking about possible research questions related to your role as a cooperating teacher * Learn how the action research process and timeline works so that you can decide if you'd like to give it a whirl at some point in the near future * Hear what past CTs have studied and learned in similar groups * Build connections with other CTs who wish to delve further into their role through teacher inquiry
In this workshop, we will explore a community-centered approach to supporting immigrant and refugee students and families in our schools during this critical time. Participants will examine successful advocacy models from both school-based personnel and community partners. Through collaborative work, teachers will discover support networks within their own communities, compile and share valuable resources, and develop personal commitments based on their values. By the conclusion of the workshop, each participant will have created a concrete action plan that translates these commitments into meaningful support for immigrant and refugee students and families.
The anti-racist cycle of inquiry and action empowers educational and organizational leaders to move from individual analysis of racial inequities toward systemic and institutional changes that address racism. Participants in this interactive session will begin with reflection and move into collaborative conversations, discussing and defining anti-racist leadership and anti-racism. They will then learn about the anti-racist cycle of inquiry and action: the four phases and their interconnectedness. In small groups, participants will brainstorm racial inequities and then consider each phase as an on-ramp as to how the inquiry process might begin. From there, participants will share racial inequities from their professional contexts and potential actionable next steps utilizing the anti-racist cycle of inquiry, empowering them as anti-racist change agents while also reinforcing the value of inquiry as a strategy for capacity- and coalition-building.
You will use computer science and creative technology tools to create a personally meaningful project based on the prompt, "Imagine a world where..." What does your ideal world look like? Who or what inhabits your world? Make an animation or interactive art piece using Scratch, a block based programming tool used in classroom and youth programs around the world. After a short introduction to some computer science concepts and making your project, we will spend time talking about how we might integrate creative technologies and computer science activities into different subject areas and disciplines with our students.
Peter Kirschmann is an Outreach Learning Design Specialist at PLACE. Peter is a designer, educator, and maker interested in creating opportunities for learners to tinker, design, and create personalized and socially meaningful projects. Most recently, Peter was a learning designer... Read More →
A well-informed citizenry is essential to democracy, and media literacy skills provide a pathway for learners of all ages to become more engaged citizens. From developing healthy media habits with our youngest learners to high school students tackling misinformation, media literacy is an essential skill. Educators will explore strategies for guiding students in media mentorship, analyzing media, fact-checking, identifying reliable sources. Attendees will come away with practical tips and free PBS Wisconsin resources to support media literacy across all age levels.
Early Learning Engagement Specialist, PBS Wisconsin
Jami Hoekstra Collins is an Early Learning Engagement Specialist with PBS Wisconsin Education. In her role, Jami facilitates professional learning opportunities for educators around the state of Wisconsin that are integrated with PBS learning media and resources. Prior to her work... Read More →
Nick Ostrem is a 3rd - 12th grade Education Engagement Specialist with PBS Wisconsin Education. With a background in archaeology and history education, he strives to empower learners to see themselves in the past, present, and future. In his role he supports educators and students... Read More →
How about a session that puts reflection to work—not only to look back but to sharpen focus and lean into growth (mindset)?
I’d ask students to revisit the Seeing Like a Student → Seeing Like a Teacher → Being a Teacher thread, not just about a shifting role, but as a cognitive rewiring. What insights from “seeing like a student” still serve you? What new expertise has reshaped your thinking? What have you held onto that no longer fits?
Likely using guided reflection and discussion, I’d scaffold individual, pair and larger group engagements- drawing from program learning principles—(ie SoLD & CRT/ GLB & ZHammond- these likely go across programs - Balancing Cognitive Load, Metacognitive Awareness, Adaptive Expertise, What Students/Self Actually Need…) The goal would be to explore your experience in learning with the strengths and blind spots in this shift—not about what you liked or didn’t, but how your thinking has changed, what served you, and how to use that awareness moving forward.
The Big Idea: Great teachers see like both a student and a teacher—staying curious and adaptive while building expertise and authority. The real skill? Knowing when to shift perspectives, staying flexible without losing direction, and continuing to be your own bus driver—hopefully headed somewhere you mean to go. 🙂
Current cooperating teachers and aspiring cooperating teachers (mentor teachers) are encouraged to attend and learn about the power of building a reflective and question based relationship with teacher candidates. This session will include considering coaching moves that can be fostered to help teacher candidates build their capacity and growth on specific goals. We will also watch a brief video clip to practice collecting data to drive conversations and pre-plan questions for debrief discussions. Then, we will practice these debriefs in mock scenarios. On the whole, we will elevate expertise in the room regarding serving as cooperating teachers on when to be direct versus fostering collaborative thinking with teacher candidates. All levels of classroom instruction and experiences as mentor teachers are welcome.
Teaching Faculty and Secondary Math Program Coordinator, UW-Madison
Pro-active | Communicator | Organized | Coach | Problem-solverDetermined lifelong learner and educator. Dedicated to leading team and individual growth and development, centering equity. Warm demander in all relationships.My purpose is to ensure that all students are seen and valued... Read More →
Explore practical strategies for finding joy while doing the challenging work of an early educator. In this workshop, led by veteran MMSD educators, we'll consider ways to design a classroom environment that you and your students want to be a part of, routines and rituals that really work, how to build meaningful relationships, and other valuable tips for building resilience and staying joyful in the early years of your career.
This workshop guides participants to explore the intersection of multilingualism and neurodiversity. Participants will gain foundational understandings as they explore their own contexts and relevant research. Participants will leave this workshop with practical frameworks they can use as they work to create more inclusive and equitable ESL programs.
Evolving laws and court decisions impact school policies. As a result, it is important for educators to stay updated on recent legal developments. This session explores recent challenges to the school curriculum and discusses teachers' rights in K-12 schools.
Active learning involves putting students at the center of instruction and giving them opportunities to solve, explore, experiment, try, create, and invent. Collaborative learning is inherently active because it requires individuals to interact in organized ways with others to problem solve, practice skills, or produce work together in organized ways. In this session participants will have the opportunity to experience practical, adaptable strategies that can be implemented across all ages and disciplines. Through collaborative activities and thoughtful discussion, educators will leave equipped with actionable techniques to cultivate dynamic, interactive learning environments that can include all types of learners.
Maker education has been in educators’ lexicons for at least a decade (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014), but many still struggle to justify, integrate, and assess for learning through making and tinkering activities in the classroom. In this workshop, which is based on a newly implemented course in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction, participants will grapple with why we can’t afford not to justify, integrate, and assess for learning through making in today’s learning environments. The session will acquaint participants with the theoretical foundations for maker education, including constructivism (Papert, 1990) and sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978; Lave, 1990), then broaden the discussion to contemporary perspectives on how making is an essential strategy for cultivating equitable learning environments (Voussoughi et al., 2016).
Most importantly, we will make together to reflect on the affective experience and learning moments made possible by making and tinkering. Participants will have multiple options for making that will be presented with potential content and standards alignment: a tech-take apart activity that addresses science standards; a textiles project with connections to mathematics standards; and a stop-motion animation activity that can link to social studies and ELA standards. The workshop will conclude with small and large group discussions about the possibilities of bringing making to life with students. We will also address real constraints, such as access to tools materials, gaps in technical knowledge, and the challenges of aligning curriculum and assessment practices with making. Educators will leave with resources and strategies to confront these challenges and make making a central part of their teaching practice.
Introduction (10 mins) Learning theories & critical perspectives in maker education (20 mins) Making station rotations (tech take apart, textiles, stop motion) (50 mins) - Small group reflection - Large group discussion Closing: imagining making in our classrooms & connection to resources (10 mins)
As professionals, teachers should be at the center of creating the policies that affect their daily decisions in the classroom and beyond. Join educational policy scholars from Wisconsin Education Policy Outreach and Practice (“WEPOP”) at UW-Madison in an introductory session called “Teachers as Policy Agents”. We will engage in interactive discussions and activities designed to change the way teachers think of themselves as policy experts, policy makers, and policy advocates. Participants will leave with policy action ideas for an issue important to them and their classroom, as well as tools for building coalitions with others around education policy.
Teaching is an emotional endeavor. As educators, we bring our emotional highs and lows with us into and out of the classroom. How can we work with our emotions kindly and compassionately in order to stay with the rigor of the educational field? Join Tuyet Nguyen and Evan Moss in exploring how mindfulness practice can be a key component of sustaining the stamina to be a thoughtful, present educator with our emotions and with our students’ emotions. Leave with a deeper understanding of how theory and practice support the creation of mindfulness practice as a good human and a good teacher.
Tuyet Cullen has been a public school teacher since 2004. Teaching is her vocation and she is drawn to the delight that comes from learning with and about middle schoolers. She is committed to using mindfulness to support students in their learning journey and to support her stamina... Read More →
This interactive workshop will guide educators through an embodied exploration of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) concepts—including the movement alphabet (flexion, extension, rotation, spring, stillness), pathways, and levels—as tools for enhancing learning in diverse classroom settings. Participants will engage in movement-based strategies that align with culturally responsive-sustaining and trauma-informed pedagogies, fostering safe, inclusive, and engaging environments for all students. Through hands-on exploration, educators will discover how movement can be integrated into various content areas to support multimodal learning, language development, social-emotional learning, and student engagement. Emphasis will be placed on using movement to create spaces that affirm diverse cultural identities, recognize the impact of trauma on learning, and center the strengths of non-dominant communities. Participants will leave with practical strategies to incorporate movement into their teaching practice, helping students of all backgrounds access curriculum in meaningful and embodied ways. No prior movement experience is required—only a willingness to explore, reflect, and move!
This session will explore how you can use low-stakes writing activities to strengthen your classroom community and teach students the power of writing as a thinking tool. We will discuss and practice practical, low-stakes writing techniques that encourage students to use writing to develop critical thinking and communication skills AND promote a sense of joy and fun (yes, we can be joyful and develop skills at the same time). While we know your schedule is probably already overfilled with "must-dos", we will explore ways to integrate these activities in ways that support your learning objectives and fit into what you are already doing.
This presentation will explore the role of race and racism in producing discipline disparities. It will offer restorative justice as a pedagogical and organizational tool to address racial discipline disparities.
A thinking routine is a set of questions or a brief sequence of steps used to scaffold and support student thinking. Project Zero researchers have developed a variety of thinking routines that are applicable across disciplines, topics, and age groups, and can be used at multiple points throughout a learning experience or unit of study. This workshop will introduce the concept of thinking routines, engage participants in the use of one particular routine: Parts, Perspectives and Complexities, along with a hands-on activity, and discuss ways to adapt a thinking routine for participants' classrooms.
Peter Wardrip is an Associate Professor of STEAM Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on research-practice partnerships, assessment for learning and designing maker-based learning experiences. Peter earned his PhD in Learning Sciences and Policy from... Read More →
Research shows that teacher evaluation is professional responsibility that often causes stress, confusion, and leads to cognitive dissonances between teaching philosophies and practice (Potter, 2024; Robinson, 2019). This session will explore common criteria and methods of teacher evaluation frameworks to build greater understanding of how educators are assessed for effectiveness. By gaining a more clear understanding of what goes into evaluations, teachers, particularly in their early career, can build a healthy relationship with these processes and shift their mindset from one of compliance to working toward professional growth. In this session participants will look at how their teaching content and practices connect to these evaluation frameworks, and how the feedback they receive can be turned into professional goals as a means to improve practice and student achievement. Particular attention will be placed on non-tested subjects such as music, art, physical education, and career and technical education, but these ideas can be used in any setting.
What Is Whoopensocker? “Whoopensocker” is an old Wisconsin word that means “Something extraordinary of its kind.” For us, Whoopensocker is an arts integration program that uses improv and theater as tools to teach creative writing. Through games, writing, and performance, we help students realize how extraordinary their ideas are.
Whoopensocker, an arts-based residency project of Dr. Erica Halverson, has conducted in-person residencies in 3rd-5th grade classrooms around Madison for 10 years. In collaboration with PBS Education, Whoopensocker has translated the in-person model into a virtual collection of tools which will be free to use by educators throughout the state in the 2025-2026 school year.
In this session, you will receive an overview of Whoopensocker, be introduced to the virtual tools, and have hands-on experience expressing your good ideas and collaborating with others to create stories and performances.
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.
Early Learning Engagement Specialist, PBS Wisconsin
Jami Hoekstra Collins is an Early Learning Engagement Specialist with PBS Wisconsin Education. In her role, Jami facilitates professional learning opportunities for educators around the state of Wisconsin that are integrated with PBS learning media and resources. Prior to her work... Read More →
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.
I've taught art to people of all ages in community and school-based settings for 26 years, and I am a lifelong maker-of-things. I've been in my role at UW-Madison as a Teaching Faculty member for 10 years and serve as a one-stop-shop for art education majors, serving as their academic... Read More →
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.
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.
Teaching Faculty and Secondary Math Program Coordinator, UW-Madison
Pro-active | Communicator | Organized | Coach | Problem-solverDetermined lifelong learner and educator. Dedicated to leading team and individual growth and development, centering equity. Warm demander in all relationships.My purpose is to ensure that all students are seen and valued... Read More →
