Early Career Teaching Institute

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.

Learning Goals

• Understand the tenets of educational policy and policymaking 
• Understand one's role as a policy agent 
• Develop a next steps related to a policy issue important to your work

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.

Learning Goals

• Practical advice on how to organize and facilitate outdoor learning program as a regular component of the weekly schedule
• How to turn any outdoor ed concept into an engaging game for your students
• Tips for advocating for integrating outdoor learning as a critical component of elementary curriculum.
• Resource sharing and network building: guiding and supporting texts and websites; year-long plan examples; opportunities to network and collaborate with other teachers who integrate outdoor education

“All politics is local” is an often refrain within the world of political campaigns. However, in today's media saturated environment, all politics are local/national/global. This session will focus on strategies and tools for helping young people start with local examples of political messaging via mediums such as local news, their social media feeds, or political advertising. Using this starting point, they will critically analyze the messages constructed in these sources and inquire into why and how they came to see them. This inquiry, for example, includes using available FEC and social media network tools for identifying groups purchasing advertising, who they are targeting, and how effective these ads are. Similarly, they will look at how issues are framed across the state and how they relate to their local context and target audience. Sample versions of these tasks will be modeled in the session and resources will be provided for use in your own classrooms. The goal is to develop informed citizens who can engage critically with a range of political messaging and employ information seeking strategies to understand how policy issues or candidates may impact them locally. Students can also use these skills to employ political messaging to reach others on issues they care about. Implications for this session include a more relevant approach to examining politics authentically, understanding how global/national/state issues impact local contexts, how and why outside groups attempt to influence local politics, and to counter the effects of partisan political rhetoric and the affective polarization it fuels.

Learning Goals

• Model activities that participants can adapt and implement to foster their students' media literacy and inquiry skills while analyzing how political messaging is occurring in their local areas.
• Help teachers develop their own skills and knowledge in the areas of political messaging strategies, affective polarization, and the role of special interest groups in political campaigns.

This session will provide strategies to build a strong culture and climate within the classroom, with an eye on equity, justice and quality instruction for all.

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ty1nxu8I2zwXznSfDuSUuW2OqnijYd1WqMax6QGtR1I/edit?usp=sharing

Learning Goals

• Strategies and ideas to create instructional success for all students.
• Positive guidance techniques, in order to promote a positive, tight-knit classroom.
• Classroom language, routines, rules and vibes that keep students learning and living their best in the classroom.

The skills and practices of collaboration between educators can be a critical component in both student success and educator well being. In this session participants with learn best practices and techniques in the field of educational collaboration. The session is structured for participants to reflect on their  own collaborative experiences while deepening their understanding of additional practices to bring to future collaborative teams & partnerships.

Learning Goals

• Participants will review stages, mindset, techniques, and practices of successful collaborative teams.
• Participants will reflect on previous collaborative practices and plan for future collaborative teams & partnerships.

Participants will learn the fun, simple and satisfying form of making an accordion book. We will discuss a variety of creative uses, adaptations and learning goals for this book form including turning it into a pocket book. Hands-on demos and participants will leave with two small book structures they have created as well as a lot of ideas.

Learning Goals

• Learn ways to enhance learning, creativity and art making through simple bookmaking forms in your classroom.
• Use problem solving skills to come up with unique solutions to adapt bookmaking for your students to use as a vehicle for process and learning.

This is part 2 of a 2 part series open to ECTI participants and Cooperating Teachers. Pre-registration is required. For more information or to register, email conferences@education.wisc.edu.

In this workshop we will dive into principles of equitable math classrooms and discuss practical strategies to foster an inclusive and challenging math environment. Through collaborative problem-solving and reflection we will examine productive struggle and how we develop key math concepts. We'll specifically engage with frameworks that promote inquiry and explore methods to develop students' algebraic reasoning.