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Jeff Zwiers Sessions
- Pre-conference (1:00-4:00): Fortifying Conversations and their Skills Across Disciplines to Develop Content, Language, Thinking, and Social Skills - One of the most powerful developers of language is conversation with others. The pre-conference session will focus on tools for teachers and teacher support providers to take conversation work to the next level across disciplines and grade levels. We will practice using the tools as we observe conversations by colleagues and student conversations in videos. We will also use some time creating and/or adapting tools to meet specific site needs. Please bring any evidence, student work, questions, and challenges that we can address to move forward in our classroom conversation efforts.
- Keynote: Supporting Learning with Authentic Communication: It’s Gonna Take Some Major Remodeling - This keynote helps educators to begin to think about how to restructure instruction and assessment in ways that leverage authentic communication rather than “pseudo-communication,” which has taken over a wide range of curricula and teaching practices in the last century. As students push themselves and peers to communicate and understand complex ideas, their learning extends and expands.
- Breakout Session: Authentic Communication Workshop - This session will be a hands-on workshop session for doing some of the remodeling described in the keynote. We will take common teaching activities and fortify them with three features of communication. I will briefly model this remodeling with reading, writing, listening, speaking, and conversation activities—and assessments. We will then “remodel” in pairs, with a special look at how ELD teachers can collaborate with content teachers in designing powerful activities for both language and content learning.
