Participants will be provided with the latest developments related to English language arts and reading education in Texas. This TEA workshop will include the most up-to-date information about resources for students and teachers, including details about the online programs for accelerated instruction available through Texas SUCCESS and the new professional development to aid in identification of students with dyslexia. Information about the SBOE’s process to review and revise the ELA/R TEKS will also be included.
Varied experiences of three energetic fiction writers—Varian Johnson, Linda Urban, and Jeff Anderson—will be shared in this practical, interactive workshop. Hear about their idiosyncratic writing process approaches to crafting tone, characters, and more. Marinate in revision, inspiration, and author’s purpose with real-world writing processes. Ask questions and leave with something you can do in your classroom next week.
Picture books and classrooms go hand in hand. In fact, you could say that the picture book is the teacher’s best friend. Not only do picture books provide hours of enjoyment for the students in the classroom, but they also provide countless opportunities to teach the required curriculum. In this workshop, Karin Perry will highlight many picture books (both old and new) and provide examples for ways these books can be used as mentor texts in order to encourage student writing.
Have you wanted to be more involved in the ELAR/SLAR TEKS revision process but just did not know how to do it? This workshop provides a platform for participants to express thoughts about the first draft of the revised ELAR/SLAR TEKS. Attendees will get a closer look at the TCTELA TEKS Forum and some of the most repeatedly deliberated discussion threads related to the ELAR/SLAR TEKS revisions. Participants will work in facilitated, grade band focus groups to engage in face-to-face dialogue related to these pivotal thread topics. Facilitators will capture the collaborative dialogue of each group to share with the SBOE and TEA, ensuring that the voices of ELAR/ SLAR teachers and professionals are heard.
Luncheon Entertainment Provided by:
Del Valle High School Jazz Band
DIRECTED BY TOM GUYTON
AND
Del Valle High School Choir
DIRECTED BY NICOLE SCOTT
General Session I Agenda
Welcome: Cindy Benge
Officer Nominations:
VP Elect: Margaret Hale
VP Elect for M&A: Kristen Stapp and Kelly Tumy
Recording Secretary: Lori Elliot and Karen Green
A Conversation with Kim Pinkerton and Donna Bahorich
Keynote Speaker: Linda Urban
Is it possible to go overboard with strategy instruction in comprehension? In this session, we will explore apprenticeship in the classroom: showing students how to choose the right tool to promote understanding. Included are ideas for facilitating engaging discussions of texts with examples of formative assessments in mono-lingual and bilingual classrooms.
Educators now have many technologies available to them to make their classrooms more engaging. However, students who experience barriers to printed text, such as visual impairment or physical or learning disabilities, are too often missing out on these experiences. This session will highlight some accessible tools and their benefits.
Project-based learning (PBL) asks students to learn 21st-century skills in a collaborative setting. But what happens when the project is based on students’ choices in a game of history, risk, and imagination? Participants will leave this session ready to play an interactive, educational game using a complete set of rules in a TEKS-based, cross-curricular and multigenre PBL unit for secondary English classes.
Have you ever pondered presenting at a TCTELA conference? Curious about writing an article for our award-winning journal, English in Texas? Want to get your students’ work published in English in Texas? Get your questions answered at this informative session hosted by friendly English in Texas editors and authors, as well as TCTELA board members.
Join the Legislative Action Committee of TCTELA in this interactive session where we will cover such topics as how to participate at both the state and national levels in discussions about issues impacting ELAR classrooms, the NCLB/ESSA reauthorization, the current ELAR TEKS revisions, and the big picture regarding assessment.
Any early literacy teacher knows there is program after program teaching the alphabetic principle. We invite early literacy teachers and decision makers to explore the environmental sound approach. Come and learn how to make your classroom pop, fizz, and thump as your students experience early literacy in a whole new way.
Explore ways to support learning in intermediate classrooms with poetry. Use focused poetry to build an understanding of this genre, while also creating a classroom community. See how technology can support poetry instruction and turn it into a way for students to rush to your class to share their ideas.
In this session, participants will look at a new suite of strategies that help students read nonfiction texts. Attendees will learn the nonfiction signposts and the ways to encourage students to develop their own text-dependent questions and engage in conversations about texts that deepen understanding.
Capturing the aesthetics of everyday life is commonplace to today’s digital natives. Instagram provides learners with a platform for capturing moments. These moments, translated into photo essays, offer opportunities for critical analysis and composition. Participants will review photo essay assignments and lesson plans, view students’ products, and learn pedagogical strategies.
Texas Commission on the Arts/The Young Masters, a joint program of the Texas Cultural Trust and the Texas Commission on the Arts, helps children to expand their unique talents in the performing, visual, and literary arts. Spend an hour getting to know recent scholarship recipients and finding out more about this visionary program.
This session is underwritten by the Texas Cultural Trust.
Committee chairs and attendees interested in joining a committee are welcome to attend.
ADOLESCENT LITERACY COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To support effective reform in adolescent literacy and to contribute to the reconceptualization of classroom practice, staff development, and assessment as outlined in NCTE’s policy research brief on adolescent literacy reform. Chair: Allie McCarron
LEGISLATIVE ACTION COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To raise awareness of legislative actions and events of specific concerns to English language arts educators and to work through the TCTELA board to promote and address issues of concern to appropriate agencies and entities. Co-Chairs: Angie Kissire and Tracy Kriese
STATE OF THE PROFESSION COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To support the use of high quality, locally designed programs to promote teacher knowledge and expertise; to provide resources for flexible, ongoing professional development, including mentoring, that meet the needs of the individual teachers to ensure effective literacy and teaching; to promote awareness of areas and issues relating to ongoing research and advancements in the state of the teaching English language arts. Chair: Jessica Riley
SPECIAL NEEDS LEARNER COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To promote a collaborative educational community that takes into account the improvement of literacy development for all students. Chair: Maria Webb
EARLY CHILDHOOD COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To support the early childhood community of teachers, students, and parents and to foster and promote involvement of early childhood teachers in TCTELA affairs. Co-Chairs: Lynne Glynn and Karin Perry
MULTICULTURAL AWARENESS COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To raise awareness of multicultural events, books, speakers, authors, and trends to support TCTELA’s effort to promote cultural diversity and integrate multicultural perspectives. Chair: Malaika Easton
BILINGUAL ENGLISH AND SECOND LANGUAGE AWARENESS COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To raise awareness of issues and special concerns related to bilingual and ESL learners and to promote a collaborative educational community that seeks and promotes excellence in the teaching of bilingual and second language learners. Chair: Maureen Ucles
TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To respond in a timely manner to the needs of English language arts educators concerning the use of technology in the classroom and to promote awareness regarding a pedagogical approach to the use of technology in the classroom; to promote a collaboration between English language arts and other disciplines, with an emphasis on technological and scientific writing. Co-Chairs: Donalyn Miller and Donna Brown
PRESERVICE TEACHER COMMITTEE (AD HOC)
FUNCTION: To involve preservice teachers in professional and leadership development through TCTELA prior to entering the classroom. Chair: Diane Miller
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
FUNCTION: To support research-based professional development that reflects the core values and mission of TCTELA. Co-Chairs: Julia Haug, Katrina Jansky, and Valerie Taylor
In order for students to transfer new found knowledge, they must have multiple opportunities to practice applying this knowledge in meaningful ways. In this interactive session, participants will learn to utilize the Reader’s Notebook to enhance students’ comprehension and to aid in the transfer of skills learned during workshop minilessons.
Many schools and districts across Texas and the country use balanced literacy as their literacy curriculum framework. But how truly balanced is that framework? In this session, participants will be guided in the balanced literacy framework as to what parts have the most impact in school-wide literacy reform, raise sustainable student achievement, can be best aligned with state standards, and most important foster growth in our students to become successful lifelong readers and writers.
In this session, the presenters will demonstrate a variety of techniques using pictures, photographs, picture books, comics, cartoons, and advertisements that can be used to involve students in the exploration, evaluation, and reflection of images.
This session will examine how lessons focused on social justice motivate students to read deeply and write with purpose. Participants will take part in a middle grade lesson, examine student work, and discuss the power of studying local social justice history.
General Session II
Welcome
Business Meeting
Executive Secretary’s Report
Resolutions from Committees
Recognition of Outgoing Officers and Committee Chairs:
English in Texas Editors, VP of M&A, Past President, Recording Secretary
Introduction of New Officers: English in Texas Editors, Recording Secretary, VP elect of M&A, President-elect
2017 Conference Announcement: Kim Pinkerton
Mercedes Bonner Award: Roni Dean-Burren
Keynote Address: Varian Johnson
Individual blogs give students a platform for sharing their writing with peers, parents, and the wider world. Revision and editing become relevant and real as students use their own posts to apply classroom instruction. Two teachers share what has worked, what hasn’t, and how to get started. Handouts include a parent permission letter, “blogging bootcamp” lessons, and evaluation rubrics.
Join us to hear four stories of research shared by TCTELA members. Explore how four current studies in Texas universities can impact your classroom practice. Better yet, discover how you can integrate research into your teaching life and possibly partner with a university in your area.
Throughout the poetry study, students learn to visualize their thinking and use their visualizations to write poems. In this session, participants will engage in interactive visualization activities as well as learn different crafts and techniques to engage and excite young poets!
We have become more confident writers, readers, thinkers, and collaborators because of the use of blogs, connecting with friends, colleagues, and highly respected authors via Facebook, Blogspot, Edublogs, and Twitter. Because of these digital connections, our students, the digital natives, now connect with a wider audience.
This presentation explores how student-created visual texts can support close reading and comprehension skills, and help students gain ownership over challenging texts. Participants will receive copies of lessons and assignments for classic and contemporary texts and see student examples based on Paradise Lost, Beowulf, Shakespeare, and contemporary science fiction.
Writer’s notebooks can be a source of fear or enthusiasm. Share the experiences of two teachers who collaborated to implement writer’s notebooks with students to guide them in developing their written expression. Participants will learn how to engage students as they compose and provide opportunities to craft authentic writing.
In 1998 at the 33rd TCTELA Conference in San Antonio, I presented this prewriting lesson designed to help students write about the people and places they call home. Since then, teachers across Texas have adapted and used the lesson and have commented on its effectiveness. In this session, I will revisit this prewriting lesson with consideration for its implications for the high-stakes testing environment in which we now work.
Can writing workshop work in an era of STAAR writing? YES! Participants will learn the top 10 reasons workshop works, discuss key structures and strategies for workshop, and collaborate on how to talk to colleagues and administrators about the research behind workshop.
Luncheon Entertainment Provided by:
Westlake High School Harp Ensemble
DIRECTED BY AYREN HUSLIG
Should we accept late work from students in writing workshop? What penalty, if any, should be assigned to that work? How can we best create systems around grading and assessment that encourage student writers and build trust within our writing communities? Four high school teachers share the work that came as a result of considering these questions, as we evaluate how the systemic policies we implement in writing workshop impact our students as writers and as people.
Does the idea of conferring leave you hyperventilating? No brown bag needed! This session focuses on conferring strategies to develop growth and independence for readers and writers in the secondary classroom. Participants will leave with ideas to make conferring manageable using a variety of record-keeping and assessment tools.
In the feedback loops that drive our instruction, we must be intentional about using specific language to move readers and writers towards independence. But do you ever struggle with the right words at the right time? Come explore how to shift your responses to student efforts and choose feedback that parallels the increasing responsibility you are scaffolding them toward.
The words “This year, we will use portfolios” invite frustration in ELA classrooms because portfolios cause teachers to rethink their use of time, instruction, and assessment. This session will provide ideas for organizing, maintaining, and evaluating portfolios; answer frequently asked questions; and discuss examples of the “real world” implications of e-portfolios.
Phonemic awareness and vocabulary are key components of effective early reading instruction. In this interactive session, early childhood teachers will learn and practice effective, practical strategies for developing vocabulary and phonemic awareness simultaneously in order to cement student understanding as well as maximize instructional time.
PLC is either another trending buzzword or a living community where the experts—teachers!—move from dreaming to doing. Participants will leave with ways to facilitate effective, informative meetings, so that teachers can use their learning to improve student outcomes.
Increase achievement and meet the challenges of rigorous expectations through genre-specific, close reading strategies. Participants will apply strategies to analyze a rich variety of texts that engage students in multiple readings. Attendees will participate in hands-on strategies to help students consistently gain a deeper understanding of complex texts.
The participant will engage in reading strategies joined with practical technology applications that will deepen reading, its meaningfulness and relevancy. Based on Readacide by Kelly Gallagher, we as educators need to implement varied reading opportunities and improve our literature instruction beyond multiple choice. Providing the merge of reading skills along with technology will create an authentic experience for both the student and teacher.
The achievement gap between students of color and white students is well documented. In this interactive session, educators will learn to use writing as a means of providing marginalized students with better opportunities to achieve. We will review the latest research, and participants will leave with ready-to-use classroom strategies.
Before The Hunger Games, before The Chocolate War, before Challenger Deep, Suzanne Collins, Robert Cormier, Neal Shusterman, and many other authors produced incredible books for readers. In this session, presenters will book talk the early books of these talented writers, demonstrating the genius beginnings of their writing. Come and learn about those early, not-to-be-forgotten books.
Writing IS a mode of learning; however, writing can also serve as a way to help teachers hold on to their compassion and motivation to teach. In order to be reflective practitioners, teachers must be engaged in writing that inspires them, renews their passion for the craft of teaching, and uses listing as a strategy for time management—all of which will replenish their energy to teach. Participants in this session will leave with writing prompts to use with their teams, departments, and faculties along with a time management strategy that will boost teachers’ productivity and performance. As educators, we must encourage and support each other. Writing serves as a way to nurture what’s in our hearts for teaching.
How can teachers make administrators, students, and themselves happy? Reading teachers have so many plates they have to juggle. How are you supposed to differentiate, gather and use data effectively, keep students engaged, teach your standards, and teach the reading behaviors students need in their tool box in order to be powerful processors of information?
Are you considering a graduate program? Have you always dreamed of pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree? Are you a lifelong learner in search of your next challenge? Join us to hear life hacks, survival stories, and personal journeys through graduate school. Q&A time will be provided.
When we think of shared reading, we typically think of Mrs. Wishy-Washy and enthusiastic kindergartners. In this session, Kathy will help to expand our vision of shared reading to include older students in addition to our youngest learners. Kathy will share ideas for a variety of ways to use shared reading to support children as they learn how to understand more deeply, to read more fluently, and to talk more about texts. She’ll show some examples of work in classrooms, including work with informational text, and she’ll provide many ideas for how to implement a comprehensive shared reading time, characterized by engagement, joy, and ambitious yet fair expectations of children.
From letting the writers speak first to the importance of developing rapport, learn from this overview of the recognized experts on the student-teacher writing conference. Discover what they have to say about making those conversations work for both you and your students.
How do you jump-start your students into becoming authentic readers? Are life-long readers born or created? This session will provide ideas and strategies to help all of your students become avid readers.
This session explores research-based integration of the arts and literature through close critical reading and sensory observation of visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and textual details in poetry. Participants will explore how textual detail and historical context embody the meaning of the literary and poetic form through the observation of art, music, and dance.
Throw away your well-worn poetry unit and join us as we explore ways to integrate poetry in all its wonderful forms throughout your school day and year. These research-based and classroom-tested activities will leave your students with a deeper understanding and passion for reading and writing poetry.
Do your students act as if their writing is etched in stone—lasting, permanent, ready to be handed down through the ages? Do you ever beg to differ? In this interactive session, we will take a conversation-based, hands-on approach to making wise revision decisions.
Entering college students believe that high school graduation, placement exam scores, and a college acceptance letter guarantee success. These students are unaware of gaps between high school requirements and the demands of college-level writing courses. At North Central Texas College, a quarter of the students who take College Composition earn grades below “C” or withdraw, and 30% of incoming students cannot take Composition I until they complete developmental writing courses. Therefore, high schools and colleges must create interventions. This session offers strategies for establishing partnerships between colleges and high schools so that students can successfully “cross the bridge” into college composition.
The paper described in this session will explore ways in which preservice teachers in a Southern state university, in a required, disciplinary literacy course, conducted a think-aloud assignment, the aim of which was to model and unpack disciplinary literacy approaches.
This study focused on whether or not one summer-mandated program in Texas improved student test scores. It also compared the summer program’s curriculum and instructional strategies to the best practices of teaching reading and writing.
Interpretation of the results suggested that, although the summer program appeared to help 60 percent of its attendees pass the retest, it was not effective for the 40 percent of attendees who failed the exam a second time. Also, 47 percent of non-attendees passed the exam on their second try without attending the summer program. These results suggest that the summer program had limited educational significance.
Are you looking for new ways to engage the “Eye Generation?” Would you like to learn innovative visual thinking strategies that can easily blend into your language arts curriculum? Come learn how to elevate the dialogue in your classroom, encourage your students to think critically, seamlessly compare texts, and support your learners as they write thoughtful responses. Participants will come away with a wealth of easy-to-implement teaching tools as well as unique sites that will augment visual literacy in their classroom. Please bring a laptop or tablet to this session!
Fort Bend ISD has been conducting a large scale pilot of the WordPlay Shakespeare eBook across the district, and across student skill levels. We will present early results and findings, as well as emerging techniques for using eBooks in the classroom.
The writing process is a series of levels—like a video game. The process is the learning experience! Could the principles of gaming work in the classroom? Follow one teacher’s attempt to raise motivation by making a “game” out of the writing process. Neuroscience shows how and why games can improve learning.
This session will focus on the relationship between the events of “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin, and the Histories of William Shakespeare, along with character analysis of the Martin characters but widening the scope to include all of Shakespeare’s plays. This helps show how to use current pop culture to teach literature.
Attendees will be presented with the “focus areas” for improvement in the AP English Literature and AP English Language courses. Discussion will include exploration of possible curricular adjustments and pedagogical approaches to these areas as well as data related to the expectations of higher education. Participants will also have the opportunity to ask other questions about the AP program and receive programmatic information from the director of AP English.
Students tend to swim along the surface of text rather than diving into the deep end of meaningful engagement in reading. This session will describe a unique approach to engaging students in the critical thinking process within and across texts and beyond multiple choice into short answer responses.
Read-alouds have a place in the secondary classroom! This session focuses on effectively planning and using read-alouds for both reading and writing purposes. Participants will leave with ideas on how to tie picture books and excerpts from texts to the TEKS and incorporate them into their teaching.
The presenter will describe generic questions that might be asked of any poem before indicating what questions particular poems might call for. For example, he will present specific questions about Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled” and A.E. Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young.” He will then distribute copies of John Crowe Ransom’s “Janet Waking” about which to formulate questions in groups before sharing results with all in attendance.
Kinesthetic storyboarding provides structure for writing while encouraging creative exploration. With a few tools and a gradual release model, teachers can help students master effective narrative, then expository writing techniques. The presenter will explain the technique, then guide attendees through a sample lesson using the technique. At the end of the lesson, the presenter will facilitate a discussion of ideas for differentiation of the technique for different maturity levels and genres.
This session will present a series of minilessons that prompt students to discover an issue they would like to change. Students then brainstorm collaboratively, discussing relevant reasons for change. Students then create a letter outlining an issue that is relevant to them and address it to someone they believe will act on this issue.
From children’s Holocaust diaries to Rwandan dance troupes, creative expression has played a vital role in survival and resistance during and after genocide. In addition to historical and geographic content, this workshop will empower educators of all age groups to encourage artistic expression as a learning and healing tool.
From essential questions to the final assessment, learn how to build interdisciplinary thematic units. The end result: Students will learn how to synthesize and make connections between and across different genres and disciplines of texts. Participants of this session will leave with fresh ideas on how to create their own interdisciplinary thematic units.
This session will draw on the work of Varian Johnson and others to help teachers use literature to address the social and emotional needs of gifted learners. Since literature is a natural reflection of our lives, it serves as an effective way for gifted learners to begin a conversation about issues they face, such as perfectionism, over-excitabilities, and imposter syndrome. This session is appropriate for educators at all grade levels since a variety of examples will be used.
The presenters will share new children’s and young adult literature texts and critique dominant images of adolescence. Based on a synthesis of practicing and preservice teachers’ experiences, the presenters will recommend titles for mentor texts with popular culture and new titles and approaches for critical youth studies projects in literacy and teacher education.
Using a Critical Race Theory epistemology that draws upon sociocultural conceptions of literacy and poetry as research, this study explored how former Black male students (NYC) aged 20-30 remembered their secondary schooling experiences and how their respective literacies impacted their perceptions of Black masculinities and education.
The Central Texas Writing Project is one of several providers who are working with TEA’s Write for Texas Initiative. Presenters will describe how CTWP Teacher Consultants are coaching secondary teachers arranged in “cubes”—one ELA, one science, one math, and one social studies teacher—at San Marcos CISD.
Call it close reading, call it deep reading, call it analytic reading—call it what you like. The point is, it’s a level of understanding that students of any age can achieve with the right kind of instruction. In this session, we articulate an instructional plan, squarely built on research, that includes:
1. Purpose & Modeling
2. Close & Scaffolded Reading Instruction
3. Collaborative Conversations
4. An Independent Reading Staircase
5. Performance
Attending to the information presented in the text, while recognizing assumptions, background knowledge, and biases held by the reader, helps the reader deeply understand that which is being read. Close reading is an instructional approach that teaches students to engage in all of these behaviors. As part of close reading, students encounter a text and read that text several times, often for different purposes and based on different questions. As part of close reading, teachers and students ask questions of the text. Some questions can be answered without having read the text; others require a deeper understanding and evidence from the text. In this session, we focus on questions that require repeated close readings in order to be answered. These questions include general understandings, key details, vocabulary and text structure, author’s purpose, inferences, and opinions and arguments.
In this session, author and teacher Kristi Mraz will empower teachers to reclaim the most important aspects of education: creating independent, motivated, engaged, and resourceful students. In the world of “college and career ready,” rigor is too often interpreted as academic drills, developmentally questionable expectations, and an increased emphasis on academics to the exclusion of all else. It is up to us, the teachers, to redefine rigor in a way that encompasses a whole child’s growth, while creating and maintaining joy and independence.
During this session, Mraz will outline the research and studies that support the claim that social emotional growth, play, and interpersonal skills are essential and critical aspects of successful classrooms. Academic instruction alone is not enough to develop active and engaged citizens. Additionally, teachers will learn and practice strategies that build resilience, flexibility, optimism, and empathy in their students, and have opportunities to see how this work folds seamlessly into an already cram-packed school day and enhances the instruction already in place.
Teachers will have opportunities to see these strategies in action in classrooms, and develop (or further develop) an understanding of how play enriches and extends academic learning. This session will focus heavily on the practical day-to-day choices a teacher can make to build her classroom into one of joyful, independent growth. Mraz will explore how traditional teaching structures— conferences, small groups, and class conversations—can be used to develop powerful habits of mind. She will also highlight less common instructional methods: storytelling, self talk, and reflection that can create lasting impact in classrooms. She will discuss how charts, technology (like iPads and computers), and picture books teach towards a powerful mindset, alongside their traditional academic purposes. Teachers will leave with a toolbox of techniques, tips, and tools to become an agent of change.
