Lara Ervin-Kassab, EdD | Assistant Professor | SJSU Lurie College of Education | Twitter: @drlarakassab
Description
As we return to both face to face and blended classrooms, we need to explore how we are (re)building learning communities, relationships, and safety in our classrooms. This presentation will be an interactive exploration of digital and analog approaches and tools for building relationships with and between students. We will explore the need to critically analyze our own practices and schooling norms so that school becomes a place of healing, rather than perpetuating and compounding the traumas all of us have experienced over the past year and a half.
Chassidy Olainu-Alade | Coordinator of Community and Civic Engagement | Fort Bend Independent School District | Twitter: @ChasAlade
Description
Parent engagement has always been a top ranking tenant of successful K-12 education systems. Effective parent engagement practices benefit students as school-to-home connections promote positive reinforcement of knowledge and skills, allow for extension of learning, and develop mutual support around discipline and expectations. Additionally, the broader community provides schools and teachers with the resources, expertise, and volunteerism to achieve their goals. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, common methods of parent and community engagement included a variety of face-to-face events, in-person opportunities, and one-way communications. Since the pandemic, the ways in which teachers engage parents, families, and the community has shifted to practices that are more inclusive, flexible, and creative in nature. This session will allow participants to walk away with a deep understanding of the role that parent, family, and community engagement plays on the classroom environment and school culture. Participants will understand methods of engaging parents in a post-pandemic school setting and be provided with some best practices for developing two-way communications and collaborations with parents, all the while navigating new modes of 21st century learning, anti-racist curriculum implementation, and meeting the needs of diverse learners.
Betina Hsieh, PhD | Associate Professor of Teacher Education | California State University Long Beach | Twitter: @ProfHsieh
Description
How can we stay connected with our own humanity and that of our students after a year of distance learning? In this interactive presentation, educators will gain a sense of how humanizing pedagogies can be at the core of disciplinary learning and how we can invite students to share their identities, cultures, and experiences using digital tools and multiple modalities to support inclusive, community-grounded instruction in classrooms.
Tammie Visintainer, PhD | Assistant Professor Science/Teacher Education | SJSU Lurie College of Education | Twitter: @tavisint
Description
The intersecting COVID-19 and racial injustice crises have re-exposed the interwoven social, racial, political, and economic dimensions of educational opportunity and the injustices laid bare are many. This workshop will empower educators across disciplines from kindergarten to college as designers and leaders, who have the opportunity to transform inequitably designed education systems by radically reimagining and building learning environments from a foundation of human dignity and respect.
This workshop focuses on the design of equitable, inclusive, and justice-centered learning environments through the creation of design principles. Design principles serve as tenets for pedagogy and practice and as guidelines for the design of future learning experiences. To support this, I will draw from my experience as a science teacher educator and learning scientist exploring race, identity, and learning in science education; a professional pathway built from Black brilliance, generous mentorship, and the wisdom of scholars of color. As such, the workshop will engage in reimagining efforts that center the transformative and sustaining practices of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other scholars of color who inspire the education community to approach teaching and learning from new ethical and pedagogical imaginations.
Workshop attendees will be introduced to design principles and guided through the construction process through an example from my secondary science methods course where teacher candidate’s construct Design Principles for Teaching (Science) for Equity and Inclusion. While science is the focal example, educators from any discipline are encouraged and welcome as this practice is widely applicable. Educators will leave the workshop with an expanded understanding of how to design learning environments that affirm and sustain the identities of minoritized students in/outside of science. This workshop offers hope and possibility for learning communities during the present crises and a reimagining of what they can become moving forward.
Maria Nichols | Author and Literacy Consultant | Twitter: @marianichols45
Description
Talk has the potential to transform classroom culture, literacy learning, and children’s identity – both individually and collectively. Building a culture of talk creates joyful, engaging space for students to think and construct together. This session will create a vision of classrooms alive with talk, and offer strategies for launching talk, and developing the kind of thoughtful, authentic facilitation that honors student’s intellect, teaches into meaning making as a process, honors unique understandings, and helps each student realize the power of their own voice.
Teachers can assign and students can submit, but the real learning comes from the discussions we have in a classroom. It’s in those talks that the mix of content and life skills come alive and not only show students’ true understanding but pushes them to consider other perspectives. Classroom discussions are the perfect foundation for the society we hope to see in our future and we’ll all need to practice how to speak to one another after a year of distance and change.
Rafael Rodriguez | Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports Specialist | Santa Clara County Office of Education | Twitter: @SCCOE
Jessica Simpson | Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports Specialist | Santa Clara County Office of Education | Twitter: @SCCOE
Description
We are at a unique point along the pathway towards rebuilding educational culture. The past year has repeatedly demonstrated that individual educators are pivotal in both the physical and the social-behavioral health and wellbeing of our students and families – what if we could intentionally design activities and strategies that each educator could adapt in order to create more inclusive environments for all students? Participants will have the opportunity to learn how (and why) to incorporate social-behavioral instruction and practice into the initial weeks of school. Participants will also explore how to incorporate identity building, precorrection (both social-behaviorally and academically) and relationship skills with the Positive Greetings at the Door intervention (Cooke, et. al).
We established our free K-12 Teaching Academy in Summer 2020 to support current teachers, teacher candidates, and community partners in transitioning to online teaching as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, our webinar recordings have been viewed nearly 25,000 times and our series has been highlighted on ABC7 News, EdSource, and the COVID-19 CA website.
Join us from Monday, June 28 – Thursday, July 8, for our free Summer 2021 K-12 Teaching Academy webinars, which will feature teachers, administrators, professors, and other practitioners and focus on relevant topics regarding returning to a “new normal” in classrooms in Fall 2021. Sessions include:
Week(s) of Welcome: Intentional, Inclusive Relationships Start Here
The Discussion-based Classroom
Talk as Transformation: Building Equity, Agency and Joy in the Elementary Classroom
Reimagining K-16 (Science) Teaching and Learning During a Time of Crisis: Transforming Learning Environments Through Justice-Centered Instructional and Pedagogical Design
Centering Humanity Through Identity-Informed Collaborative Notebook Activities
Better Together: Partnering with Families and the Community for Student Success
Considering Community and Trauma
The Next Normal: Reimagining Next Year’s Classroom
Bringing Our Humanity to the TK-5 Classroom Through an Ethnic Studies Stance
Queering the Classroom to Foster a Safe and Inclusive Environment: Lessons from Research and Practice
Freedom Dreaming: Ethnic Studies Teaching in the Secondary Grades
Bring it Back to the Classroom: What Did We Learn From a Year of COVID?
Building Culture and Community One Story at a Time
The curriculum brings together education and the social sciences and emphasizes leadership and social justice to support career advancement. The deadline to apply for fall admission is July 1.
“The primary focus of this program is to develop the teacher pipeline, especially for folks who are already working in schools as aides or paraeducators, or for early childhood educators who want to be master teachers or site supervisors,” said SJSU Child and Adolescent Development Lecturer John Jabagchourian, coordinator of the online program.
Though the college began exploring online education options prior to 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic underscored the value of providing SJSU curriculum in online formats.
“This program is designed to provide a high-quality SJSU education to students who wouldn’t typically be able to access the strength of our faculty and programs because of work schedules, childcare requirements and the logistics of getting to campus,” said Heather Lattimer, dean of the Lurie College. “These students bring tremendous strength to the university, and this program is intentionally designed to recognize and value that strength.”
Lurie College students, join Dean Heather Lattimer and Associate Dean Marcos Pizarro for a conversation on Thursday, June 17, from 8:45-9:45am to discuss what’s next in education following the election results! The Zoom link will be emailed to all Lurie College students’ via a Google calendar invitation.
SJSU Lurie College of Education undergraduate, graduate, credential, and doctoral students can enter your name for a chance to join Dean Heather Lattimer and a group of students for great conversation and a complimentary meal each month during the academic year!
Attendees will be selected at random – none of your responses in the RSVP form will affect whether or not you’re selected, but they will help Dean Lattimer learn a little bit about you before the meal if you are selected.
Those who are selected to dine with the dean will receive an email notification approximately 1 week before each meal if once they’ve been randomly selected. Those who aren’t selected for a meal are still eligible to be selected for a future meal. Lurie College students are only eligible to enter their information once and attend at most one meal per academic year.
The next Spring 2022 Dine with the Dean event is scheduled to take place:
