Deeper Learning 2019

Come together with other educators, school leaders, and student ambassadors from a middle school LBGTQ+ Club to co-create a change package to make your school a safe, joyful space for queer students and allies. Advisors and students from our middle school's student-led LGBTQ+ Club will conduct a quick Gender and Sexuality 101 before facilitating and participating in this process with you. You will break into groups and examine your current school environment for potential areas of growth in inclusivity. Then you'll collaborate with other participants to find creative ways to improve your school setting. Leave with concrete resources and ideas to create a student-led LGBTQ+ club, disrupt heteronormativity, and make sure every student at your school feels welcome.

Educators play a crucial role in helping students talk openly about the historical roots and contemporary manifestations of social inequity and discrimination. Regardless of who you are, your intentions, or how long you’ve been in education, we can all benefit from a one-degree shift.

One degree may seem insignificant but making a slight shift can result in a substantial impact on you and how you see students, their abilities, and potential. A one-degree shift in your awareness, thinking, and perspective can be is the catalyst to changing inequitable systems!

Come to explore the complexity of your own identity and how your commitment to making a one-degree shift can be the first step to making a significant impact for equity in education. Join with others to collaborate, discuss, and build a toolbox of ideas and resources to take back to your classrooms, communities, and professional learning spaces to begin the process of changing education so all students have opportunity and access.

In this interactive workshop, participants will think about their own racial identity development and explore how this influences their work as educators. In particular, we will focus on Robin DiAngelo’s notion of “white fragility” -- the silence, discomfort, and/or defensiveness that many white folks feel when talking about issues of race and racism. How might our racial identities help or hinder our ability to form meaningful relationships with colleagues and students? What structures might allow us to engage with each other productively about race? We will explore these and other questions and, in the process, experience some tools and texts which can be used to bring this work to a range of contexts.

Obviously, talking about racial identity development in relation to teaching is a HUGE endeavor. We would like participants to think of this workshop as a “toe-dip” into these topics. Our goal is that they will emerge with enlarged curiosity along with a desire-- and a few tools--to continue this work.

Whether you are an administrator, classroom teacher, teacher leader or school staff member, if you have a passion for moving your school towards more equitable teaching practices, this session is for you. Participants will share their personal whys for coaching for equity, review culturally responsive practices, then dive into learning and practicing coaching techniques that will help empower the teachers around them to improve their classroom practices.
Links:                     
Slide Deck:  https://goo.gl/bAabEx
Participant Packet : https://goo.gl/ndW5aF

In this workshop, participants will explore the numbers we are using today (base ten numbers) and how humans constructed them in our history. Then based on the understanding of the current number system, participants will be divided into groups to create new number systems (numbers in other bases). At the end, participants will perform operations (addition and subtraction) within the number system they created previously. The topic will be shifted to a growth mindset in mathematics which will help audiences understand the existence of the potentials of mathematics.

Can your school address a real-world problem through the arts? We did! In 2019, Design Thinking Academy mobilized the entire school and multiple community partners to produce "Unwarranted: The Human Cost of Fines," which inspired policy change to end mass incarceration in Delaware. The project was aligned with standards across disciplines in ELA, Social Studies, Math, Performing and Visual Arts, Digital Media, and Psychology. In this workshop, you will learn a step-by-step process to identify a local issue, reach out to community partners, align the project with interdisciplinary learning goals, build a team, create a budget and a timeline, plan all-school design days with relevant visitors, organize meaningful field trips, and leave with a plan to see the project through from start to finish in the 2019/2020 school year.  Teams of 2-5 people from each school are encouraged to attend and work together; no artistic skills are required.

Many educators (like those who attend the Deeper Learning Conference!) are deeply invested in promoting racial/ethnic equity in our schools.  We are committed to understanding how systems perpetuate oppression, and we work to develop practices and networks that resist the marginalization of our students of color and their communities. However, a deep commitment to racial equity means much more than a systemic approach; we must also examine how we, as individuals, bring our personal experiences to our work and to our students.

This session will focus on the unique stress that accompanies racial moments. Racial stress describes the overwhelming feelings that accompany intrapersonal and interpersonal racial conflicts--anyone can experience racial stress, regardless of their racial/ethnic background. We will introduce participants to the theories and emotional/physical effects of racial stress and racial trauma, offering a racial literacy model (Stevenson, 2014) as a tool for reading and healing racial stress in the classroom. Specifically, we will engage participants in authentic racial storytelling; they will journal about past and present experiences and practice sharing their stories in partners and with the larger group. They will gain a deeper understanding of how their personal experiences with race have shaped and continue to shape their responses to racially stressful moments, with an emphasis on how racial stress influences their relationships with students, families, and colleagues in racially stressful moments.

At the end of the session, participants will be able to:
1) Explain the definition and range of racial stress during racial storytelling
2) Learn and explain the definition of racial literacy
3) Describe their emotional reactions during Face-to-Face (FTF) racial encounters and make healthier racial coping and problem-solving decisions in the classroom
4) Understand and explain the Calculate, Locate, Communicate, Breathe & Exhale (CLC-BE) strategy to peers. Specifically, they will be able to identify thoughts, physical reactions, and self-talk during racially stressful conversations and use relaxation techniques to stay present during racially stressful encounters.

This workshop is for educators who are driven by equity and are already determined to interrupt oppressive systems that marginalize students based on race, ability, gender identity, and sexual orientation in our schools.  This experience will be built around educators who do not currently have strong support from their colleagues and leadership around these issues, and are struggling to take more action and get more people involved.

Traditionally, students with disabilities have been relegated to more rote learning experiences. This is in large part due to adult biases on what students with disabilities can learn and do.  Nevertheless, our students with disabilities will enter the same economy and society as their peers and that economy and society demands them to demonstrate deeper learning. Research shows that—with the right accommodations—this group can engage in the same learning as their peers without disabilities.  Furthermore, the great majority of students with disabilities spend the great majority of their time in general education classrooms.  Leaving students with disabilities out of the deeper learning conversation is thus as practically infeasible as it is morally unjust. Our session will identify concrete actions educators, administrators, and local policymakers can take to ensure deeper learning is implemented with equity and inclusion at the fore.  Over the course of the last year, the National Center for Learning Disabilities (NCLD) has embarked on a bold project to identify ways students with disabilities can be fully engaged in deeper learning experiences. Because this engagement requires significant changes in norms and practices, we initially focused on charter schools that were experimenting in engaging their students with disabilities in deeper learning.   We are now exploring what the implications of our recommendations are in traditional, non-charter public schools. Specifically, our goal for attendees is to understand practices that facilitate inclusive deeper learning experiences; know what policies and structures enable and inhibit these practices; and what actions they, their administrators, and their school boards must take to make the practices more likely. 

Dive into empathy work and get ready to do experiments ON YOURSELF to better understand the neuroscience of the brain on bias. Hint: We ALL have implicit bias - our brains are wired for it. Learn what can be done to overcome the brain’s wiring in favor of implicit bias. Participants will demonstrate their understanding of the neuroscience of implicit bias with by creating a bias cleanse plan that puts into play research-based strategies for reducing implicit bias on our shared quest for equity. Participants will review and discuss resources, perspectives, personal experiences and research on implicit bias, including what it is, how to self-identify implicit bias, how to overcome it, how to talk about it and how to cope with it.

This session is designed for folks who have never before written a play. Participants will be grouped into writing teams, and then will learn about the narrative storytelling structure, will explore questions about equity and education, in those teams will write an original one-act play, and have their play performed live by a company of professional actors. Bring your laptop and we'll take it from there!

At EL Education and Equal Opportunity Schools, we believe that students’ sense of belonging is foundational to student success. In EL Education, students’ sense of belonging in Crew - our advisory structure - drives students’ participation in deeper learning activities, specifically their willingness communicate ideas and collaborate with others, and their sense of personal investment or self-direction in contributing to the culture of Crew. At EOS we work to ensure historically underserved students’ have equal access to, and opportunities to succeed in, academically intense high school programs like Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB). Messages that students will or won’t or do or don’t belong in these classes function to mitigate or perpetuate systemic issues around access and achievement in AP or IB courses. In both of these instances, sense of belonging is especially critical for students from underserved communities - and serves as a powerful focus area for teachers and leaders to promote as an engine for more equitable outcomes.

Together, our organizations ask:
Question #1: How can we support leaders and teachers in transforming their learning environments to be more responsive to students’ belonging, especially for underserved students?
Question #2: How can we shift adult mindsets around equity to emphasize the responsibility of the learning environment (teachers, leaders, climate) and student assets?

In this session, both organizations will engage participants in hands-on learning activities that include: analysis of a student Crew belonging survey to lift up disparities/questions; investigation of student and staff perspectives on belonging along a school pipeline to and through an AP experience; application of continuous improvement to consider and test change ideas to address inequities; and, opportunities for session participants to consider how they might transfer learning to test in their own contexts.

Traditionally, students with disabilities have been relegated to more rote learning experiences. This is in large part due to adult biases on what students with disabilities can learn and do. Nevertheless, our students with disabilities will enter the same economy and society as their peers and that economy and society demands them to demonstrate deeper learning. Research shows that—with the right accommodations—this group can engage in the same learning as their peers without disabilities. Furthermore, the great majority of students with disabilities spend the great majority of their time in general education classrooms. Leaving students with disabilities out of the deeper learning conversation is thus as practically infeasible as it is morally unjust. Ace Parsi, Director of Innovation at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, will present the organization's learning around what practices and policies can ensure students with disabilities engage in deeper learning.

This workshop will be a mostly self-directed exploration of the stories students shared with TNTP during our research for our report The Opportunity Myth.  After digging into the stories and key resources highlighted in the report, participants will apply their learnings to develop action plans to provide more equitable experiences to their students. Because this workshop will be "flipped" please read the Opportunity Myth's executive summary as prework. (You can access the report via the link above.)