The Bright Ideas Conference
I am going to divide this post into three categories. They are:
A) The Keynote Speaker
B) Policy Changes: A Critical Approach
C) Reading Your Way To Understanding
A) The Keynote Speaker:
Honestly, I was truly disappointed with the keynote speaker. Granted, her writing was very moving and touched the entire crowd deeply, I still found her speech was lacking in both concrete suggestions for teaching writing/reading AND in form. As far as her suggestions, I wrote down the following
1)You can’t write if you don’t read…
2)Try “and” instead of “But” as in “I like this piece but…”
3)You can’t write if you don’t read
I find this list to be disappointing considering she spoke for about an hour. I felt it was mostly a shameless plug for most of her writing, which was not what I came to the conference for. Forgive me for being bitter, but I thought the conference was supposed to be about new and fresh ideas on how to teach writing and reading, not rehashing a writer’s old stuff and clapping for how many awards she has.
B)Policy Changes: A Critical Approach
The two sessions I went to both dealt with policy changes, but the first one was more about the concrete details of what happened to make the current educational policy what it is today and what changes are coming in the future. I honestly got a lot of out this first session as I did not have a lot of background knowledge on everything that is currently happening as far as curriculum policy and state-wide type mandates. The three speakers were all involved in creating the current english content expectations. I honestly feel like I know a lot more about why the standards were creating, which in most senses were a creation to stop the knee-jerk type reactions that go on a lot in the classroom. If I took one thing important away from the first session it was that educational policy is much more complex than just NCLB or the MME. There is a lot of behind the scenes happenings that we do not get to see much as just average people/teachers and the only way to have a say in it is to help create it and ask questions.
C)Reading Your Way to Understanding
The second session on Understanding Policy focused much more on what to read to stay up to date on what policy changes are being implemented. The topic seemed too broad at first, but when the speaker started laying out books and I saw not only Jeannie Oakes but also James Gee (two influential authors to both of my blog topics) I got really excited. The true comprehension of the second session was that understanding policy changes really only happens once you make a group effort to get a concrete comprehension. The planning happens as a group, the implementation (for the most part) happens as a group, so staying up to date should also happen as a group. I got super excited when the speaker also referred to me about RSS blogs and what I was doing with mine. I had the whole attention of the session while I talked about how influential Jeannie Oakes is and how James Gee is reshaping my outlook on technology in the classroom with his works on video gaming and its usefulness. To see a bunch of people with PhD’s coming up to me afterwards with questions about how we are using RSS’s and how I thought they could be implemented in the classroom was definitely an ego boost. Not to mention that we all agreed that the best way to stay up to date and communicate with colleagues is via RSS instead of email so there is a comprehensive list of questions. YAY for rss, right?
Anyway, the conference for me was pretty much a success. I learned a lot of information on policy and how not only its made, but how to keep up to date on it. Though I was going on no sleep (because I had to close at work the previous night/morning) I had a good time speaking with some of the most knowledgeable people I’ve met as far as teaching practices and implementation of state standards.
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