Early Career Teaching Institute

During this session, teachers will hear about different categories for designing a classroom and guidance around intentional classroom setup with specific attention to daily routines and structures to support students. There will also be time for teachers to brainstorm their ideal classroom design and problem-solve with other educators about barriers to setting up their classroom.

Learning Goals

• New teachers will learn different ways to design their classrooms with intentionality around daily routines and student support.
• New teachers will begin to design the layout of their ideal classroom to best suit their needs and the needs of their students.

This session is a celebration and exploration of children’s literature. Participants will have an opportunity to share one of their favorite texts with others. Then, we’ll highlight a subsection of picks from the Children’s Collaborative Book Center Choices 2024 list. Participants will have time to explore some of the best new children’s literature from the last year, and collaborate with peers on ways they could incorporate new texts into their classrooms. We view children's literature broadly and texts may include anything written by children’s authors specifically for children, tweens, teens, and young adults, including picture books, graphic novels, young adult fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Learning Goals

• Participants will share one of their favorite texts with others, and learn about their colleagues’ favorite texts.
• Participants will review a subsection of selections from the Children’s Collaborative Book Center Choices 2024 list
• Participants will collaborate with others to brainstorm ways they might incorporate new texts into their classrooms

This session will support educators in teaching difficult histories of mass violence and/or genocide in ways that are accessible for their students. With the Holocaust as a case study, we will use innovative reflective questions and guidelines written by two teacher-scholars, intentionally scaffolded images, and short, primary source texts to explore what is possible and meaningful for students’ historical learning. This session aims to not only deepen content knowledge of one historical instance of genocide teachers will likely encounter teaching about (especially per Wisconsin’s Act 30 mandate), but it aims to empower teachers in their capacity to facilitate the learning of complex and emotionally-provocative histories more broadly.

Learning Goals

• Teachers will reflect on, discuss, and identify what age-accessible learning looks like in their classrooms.
• Teachers will analyze resources for age-accessibility.
• Teachers will modify or draft learning opportunities about/through difficult histories that are age-accessible for their students.