EduCon 2025A Better Justice
My students created a student run Youth Court that deals with disciplinary issues in the building and resolves them through Restorative Justice.
Conversations
During each of the six breakout sessions throughout the weekend, a large number of conversations will take place. This site will help you organize your plan for the weekend and provide the relevant information for each conversation. After signing in, search through the conversations below and mark the sessions you are interested in to populate your personal schedule on the right (or below if on your mobile phone).
Building and Sustaining Successful Partnerships
Schools thrive when students are able to connect with and learn from members of the larger community. Community members also benefit from mentoring and embedding their work in schools.Participants will learn about best practices for finding, securing, and maintaining partnerships and seek a new partner for their school community.
Conversation Title Democratic Schools and Learning Environments: What does that mean?
Democracy is idealized but rarely fully realized, especially for young people. Schools offer one context where young people’s voices should shape their education. In this democratic workshop, we will critically interrogate the Four Pillars of Democratic Education, which arise from decades of experience of educators from around the world.
Deja Vu All Over Again
Veteran educators remember the rise of Web 2.0 and the excitement around the potential for collaboration, innovation, and creative technologies. Similar conversations are now happening around artificial intelligence. In this session, we will consider the lessons from the past that we can apply to the present to help lead to the kind of lasting change we envision for our students.
Discovering and Visualizing Data
How can we teach students about the importance of data? This hands-on conversation will integrate math, science, arts, and creativity to introduce a relatable way to teach data, identify patterns, and correlations. Educators will walk away from this session with simple tools to integrate data into every subject in all grades.
Empowerment Through Belonging: Elevating LGBTQIA+ Voices in Education
Join us for an engaging session on fostering equity and mental health support for LGBTQIA+ youth and staff. Learn effective strategies, explore successful practices, and build a supportive community through collaborative discussions. Discover how Affinity Groups and Communities of Practice can create inclusive environments where everyone thrives.
Igniting Potential: Countering Stereotype threat and elevating the Academic Identity for Black and Latino Boys
This presentation highlights an in-school mentoring intervention addressing the achievement gap for Black and Latino males. It shares strategies for boosting academic self-confidence, countering stereotype threat, and fostering racial-ethnic pride. Backed by research and proven outcomes, it offers practical guidance for replicating these programs to improve greater academic confidence and outcomes.
May This Classroom Be a Haven: Creating Classroom Environments that are Protective and Proactive in Supporting Students' Social-Emotional Well-being
More than anything, students need and want to feel safe and seen in their classrooms. Join this conversation to discuss how to construct classrooms that are protective and proactive in supporting students' social-emotional wellness. We will discuss actionable ways to shape classrooms into safe spaces and you'll leave the discussion encouraged and hopeful for the lasting impact we will have on our students, ourselves, and our colleagues.
Powering Up Criticality and Creativity with AI-Guided Writing at SLA at Beeber
How are your students using AI to support their revising and thinking this year? Students at SLA at Beeber will show the work they have been doing on Writing Partners this semester. We will also invite you to power up your criticality and creativity with AI-guided writing.
Project-based Learning in Personal Finance
How many times do we as teachers hear, “When will I ever use this?!” Last year, Pennsylvania joined 25 other states to require all students in the class of 2030+ to complete at least one semester of personal finance before graduation. We intentionally incorporate a variety of math topics within the Personal Finance curriculum to help students answer these questions of “when” and “why.”
Building Anti Racist White Educators
Building Anti-Racist White Educators (BARWE) will lead an interactive session regarding our inquiry series that is dedicated to helping teachers explore their biases, look at their practice through an anti-racist lens, and take action to build community and improve teaching practices with regards to racial equity.
Building Expectations Using Co-created Rubrics
Co-creating rubrics with students helps them understand assignments, increases autonomy over their learning, and offers motivation through ownership of the process. In this session we will explore how and when to co-create rubrics and how to support students in this process. We will also spend some time planning for implementation.
Building Skill and Procedural Fluency in an Inquiry-Based Classroom
As math educators in 2024 we strive to find a balance between mastering procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. We want our students to have strong automaticity while becoming efficient problem solvers in the real world. Participants will leave with practical tools to apply in their classrooms and ideas for how to integrate fluency practice into everyday lessons.
Building the Village - Transforming Family-School-Community Engagement for Return on Relationships (RoR)
Humans of all ages, have the innate desire to connect. When we connect, we trust one another and are able to tackle life's ups and downs. But...we need to create those safe spaces and time for people to connect while tapping into their own experiences and sharing them with others.
Equity Mindsets in PBL
Learn about the 4 Equity Mindsets from PBLWorks that allow teachers to design authentic, meaningful, and cognitively demanding projects and tasks to take student learning to the next level and support them in understanding themselves as learners along the way.
How do you plan?
Planning in an inquiry driven classroom can be challenging! What tools, workflows, and techniques do SLA teachers use to ensure that planning is student-centered and meaningful? How do you plan? Join in on an open and honest conversation led by an SLA teacher about planning effective unit and day-to-day lesson.
Inquiry: Human Superpower for Our Future
Curiosity, questions, wonder - these human qualities serve as powerful drivers of learning in the age of AI. Join me in creating a plan for implementing a more human focused learning environment leveraging the effectiveness of inquiry. Specific classroom resources, action plans, walkthrough rubrics and coaching plans will be shared.
Level Up Literacy: Empowering Advanced Readers with Self-Paced, Engaging, and Cross-Content Units in Early Grades
How to continually challenge advanced readers in early grades? By designing personalized reading units that combine reading and writing, assess for skills mastery through engaging virtual games, foster independence, and interdisciplinary connections. Participants will design their units and will be introduced to baskets of reading and vocabulary assessment tools.
Using AI to Accommodate All Learners
Let’s explore how we can leverage technology—particularly AI—to create meaningful learning experiences, provide tailored support for diverse learners, and enhance the excellent work teachers are already doing in their classrooms.
“Addition by Subtraction: Creating Historic Markers for Philadelphia with Subtractive Manufacturing”
STEAM should not be siloed into one-off spaces or projects. This session will take you through the process of creating a unit that combines subtractive manufacturing with CNC machines, the design process, and ELA standards to create historic markers for people, places, or events in Philadelphia with the students who made them.
Empowering Educators: Effective Coaching Strategies for Leaders and Teachers
Our current educational environment can feel both fragile and sometimes hostile to teachers and leaders, leaving us on the edge of burnout. Coaching can be a tool to reinvigorate and reaffirm educators. Join me for an interactive session designed to elevate the art of coaching in educational settings. As the landscape of teaching continues to evolve, effective coaching is essential for fostering growth, enhancing collaboration, and improving student outcomes. How can we build a framework for coaching that is meaningful, based on trust and support, individualized in goal setting, and reflective? This session will explore proven strategies for leaders and teachers to develop meaningful coaching relationships, promote reflective practices, and drive relevant professional development. Whether you are a school leader, an instructional coach, or a teacher seeking to enhance your coaching skills, this session will equip you with actionable insights and tools to transform your coaching practices. Come ready to collaborate, share experiences, and leave inspired to make a lasting impact in your educational community.
Heroic Perspectives: Using Comics to Foster Empathy and Understanding
Explore comic book tropes of masked heroes and secret identities to empathize with others’ struggles. Use design thinking in this interactive session with creativity stations and a discussion circle. Participants will create and share original comics and develop classroom ideas for addressing local and global challenges.
Insider View of Inquiry & PBL
Join SLA students and an SLA teacher to experience and examine learning in a classroom centered on Inquiry & PBL.
Make the Invisible Visible: Multimodal Tools & Models for Fostering Agency in Daily Learning
In this conversation, will explore tools and visual strategies, such as learning cycles, project pathways maps, illustrated concept briefs, and more, to make the process of learning transparent and accessible for students. Participants will have the opportunity to share their own favorite tools, respond to and critique provided examples, and explore new ideas for making the invisible visible.
Meaningful Making With Middle Schoolers (Year 3)
In Year 3 of our hands-on program to engage and educate middle school makers: What best practices in STEM, STEAM, Makerspaces, Engineering, and more can be used to create an engaging and educational experience? What outcomes do we value when creating these programs? What did we learn from the past?
Motivating Kids to Do Deep Thinking in Mathematics
A conversation about classroom practices and teacher moves that support independent thinking and wondering about math.
The Paradox of Tolerance and Care
We know that the coarsening of the national dialogue has an effect on schools. All over, schools have reported an increase in hate speech. How do we take care of all our students in a time when adults on the national stage engage in hate speech that we would not allow in our classrooms?
Who gives a crap? Fostering academic motivation in tweens and teens
Drawing from interviews with young people all over the country, plus secondary research in positive psychology and education, this workshop lays out some basic principles for building sustainable motivation in the classroom and creates space for educators to collaborate and apply it to their context.
Write Out: Poetry for the Planet
Write outside during a conference about the future and the now of schools? YES! Join us to explore what it means to be human when living, learning, and teaching alongside machines. What better way to explore and embrace our questions about the implications of AI and other technologies than to go outside and write together.
Cultural Storytelling with Physical Computing
Explore how to combine cultural storytelling and social justice with robotics in this hands-on workshop using Hummingbird kits. Educators will learn to create interactive student-led projects that celebrate cultural heritage, advocate for change in community spaces, and empower students with voice, agency, and technological skills.
Empowering the Next Generation of Global Citizens
Join us for an engaging conversation designed to inspire and equip high school educators to embark on the journey of international exchange programs. We will discuss our current exchange programs, the logistics behind running them, elective courses that we have designed to support these programs, and lessons that we have learned as we have expanded these exchanges over the years.
Good Faith Responses to Bad Faith Arguments about Classroom Race Conversations
How can good teachers respond, in good faith, to bad-faith arguments against discussing race in the classroom? In this session, we figure out how to win over the "middle third" of parents who doubt that their children should be thoughtfully discussing race.
Human-Centered Wellness
Explore human-centered wellness in schools, focusing on strategies to support the holistic wellbeing of students and staff. This conversation will offer practical approaches for fostering emotional, social, and physical wellness, building resilience, and creating balanced, connected educational environments that prioritize the growth and engagement of all community members.
Leveraging Student Interest to Engage Learners: An Exploration of Sneakerhead Culture
We will be learning how to engage students in learning by leveraging a topic of interest (sneakers, sneakerhead culture, etc), use various principles of culturally responsive pedagogy to address the needs of our students in our curriculum writing, talk about how we build relationships with our students organically and of course you will leave here having a jumpstart knowledge on a little bit about sneakerhead culture and the history of sneakers to flex on with your students.
Reducing Teacher Burnout and Boosting Retention
Philadelphia Learning Collaborative’s approach to increasing teacher retention creates opportunities for educators to build skills, networks, a sense of autonomy, and to take on leadership roles. Experiences like help to retain a talented corps of educators. Come hear from teachers energized by these strategies and apply them in your school.
Teaching Adulting Skills Throughout Your School
Explore with other educators how they teach (or don’t) life skills in their classrooms. Learn from students what they most want to learn, and discuss tricks to sneak these adulting lessons into your existing curriculum and school day. Hear from existing and former students how adulting lessons have impacted their transition into their independent lives.
We’re All Coaches: Enhancing Teacher Support in Non-Traditional Roles
Educators in various school roles—principals, tech specialists, librarians, and more—can support teachers by adopting coaching techniques. This interactive session invites participants to explore facilitative, dialogical, and directive coaching styles through role-play, reflection, and collaborative resource-building, empowering them to foster growth and innovation in their schools.
Why Would Young People Come to Your School if They Didn't Have to?
"Why would learners come to your school even if they didn't have to?" Let’s map how school communities create experiences that draw students into owning their learning. When students become full partners in design processes, the community’s culture changes. Join us to collaboratively build a field guide on the spot.
Conversations for Change: Harnessing the Power of Classroom Dialogue
Research shows the power of classroom conversations. In this session we will explore how to facilitate effective conversations across grade levels in order to promote active participation and build students' agency, independence, and confidence.
Culture Eats Everything, or How the Hell did We Get Here!
Walking into our space, visitors exclaim that, “It feels different in here!” We break down with you our big decisions and many micro choices that have led to the creation of a human-centered learning space focused on community, respect and support for each other and divergent ideas.
Engaging High School Students to Build the Future Public Health Workforce
Public health is in a state of social transformation. To meet the demands of the ever-changing field of public health and of the public it serves, education must transform. This conversation focuses on the importance of early engagement of high school students to develop a future-ready public health workforce.
Presence in Practice: How We Show Up Matters
Presence in Practice: How We Show Up Matters invites educators to engage in reflective dialogue about their impact on their learning community in a variety of educational roles. Through reflective questions, participants will explore their professional identities, fostering inclusivity and deeper understanding. Participants will also be encouraged to build connections among participants to strengthen collaborative growth among educators.
Recruiting & Retaining Diverse Educators in the Wake of the Great Resignation
Discover how South Bronx Community Charter High School reimagines teacher recruitment with its Community Beacons Program, fostering diversity and equity. Learn actionable strategies to attract and retain educators through relational recruitment, embedded mental health support, and mentorship programs tailored for today's education challenges. Leave equipped to enhance your school’s educator pipeline.
Thinking Outside the Box: Can ALL Students Become Proficient Readers?
Sub-literacy is rampant for students of all ages and ability levels, negatively impacting their full participation in school and in life. This problem can be solved. Join us and EBLI students to discuss how! We'd like to hear your insights, solutions, and action steps and share about what we have discovered.
What if Senior Year Didn't Suck?
Remember having “senioritis?” For those of us who work in high schools, we anticipate the onset of this familiar affliction each Spring. But what if Senior year didn’t need to suck? What if that languishing feeling could be replaced with purpose and preparation for the next phase of life?
7 Steps to Find Joy and Purpose in Teaching
Even the best teachers feel they aren’t doing enough. We need to allow ourselves to stumble. We are pulled in many directions with new curricula, pedagogy, assessments, etc. that can be detrimental. Let’s work through seven steps of teaching so we can thrive in the complex world of K-12 classrooms.
Authentically Building Empathy in Elementary and Middle School Lessons
In this conversation, we will explore the role empathy plays in the Design Thinking Process. We will look at creating lessons that juggle standards and interdisciplinary connections, while still including the empathy component.
Centering Student Stories Through Windows and Mirrors: A Deeper Look at Decentering Whiteness in Education
Research shows that critical conversations push white teachers to understand their own identities and the identities of their minoritized students. The SEED project uses Windows and Mirrors to foster dialogue, enhancing cultural competence. This conversation will share findings on white educators' growth after SEED. Participants will also experience SEED protocols.
Experience the Synergy: AI and Poetic Creation
This interactive workshop explores the powerful combination of AI-guided writing and poetry. Participants will learn to harness AI as a means to enhance their creative writing process. Through hands-on activities, educators will discover how to integrate this innovative approach into their classrooms, fostering creativity, critical thinking, and digital literacy.
Nurturing Neurodivergence
Many Neurodivergent people struggle to thrive in school, because too many schools perpetuate deficit mindsets about brains that work differently. What if we asked new questions that challenge fundamental assumptions and nurture Neurodivergent identities? Let's explore these new questions and what they mean for creating radically inclusive learning spaces.
