{"success":true,"data":[{"ID":728,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1508953976,"CreatorID":4735,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Beyond Boxes, Borders, and Binaries: Thinking with More Complexity","Handle":"beyond_boxes-borders-and_binaries--thinking_with_more_complexity","ShortDescription":"It seems we\u2019re all trapped within our ideological \u201cbubbles,\u201d victims to believing and spreading \u201cfake\u201d and fast news. Let\u2019s start doing something about this lack of nuanced thinking in our classrooms by providing texts that do not reduce ideas down to soundbites. You\u2019ll leave this session thinking about how to help students articulate their ideas with depth and sophistication.","Description":"In both my public speaking and English classes, I\u2019m noticing a pattern in the arguments that students develop and attempt to defend in their writing and presentations: they\u2019re too simplistic, to begin with, and they usually reduce a topic down to a binary of us\/them, right\/wrong, or black\/white. The Common Core standards almost encourage this reductive thinking, boiling down argumentative writing to establishing a claim and addressing \u201cthe\u201d counterclaim, as if issues don\u2019t have multiple sides and many shades of gray.\r\n\t\r\nIn this session, I will share my initial successes and failures in attempting to develop a syllabus that includes texts from a multiplicity of perspectives, as well as the writing assignments and classroom activities I\u2019m developing to uncover and unpack the complicated and complex worldviews contained within them. I\u2019ll show participants examples of the student work that has come out of these readings and assignments, pointing to both areas of growth as well as places of persistently superficial thinking.","Link":["http:\/\/www.nycischool.org\/"],"Audience":["High School","Middle School","Elementary School","All School Levels"],"Practice":"We will adapt two NSRF protocols (Four \u201cA\u201ds Text and Last Word) so that teachers can grapple with and respond to two polarizing texts (excerpts from Ta-Nehisi Coates\u2019s Between the World and Me and J.D. Vance\u2019s Hillbilly Elegy).\r\n\t\r\nWith the Four \u201cA\u201ds Text protocol, teachers will read the Coates text in small groups and then take turns sharing their responses to each of the four following questions:\r\n\r\nWhat Assumptions does the author of the text hold?\r\nWhat do you Agree with in the text?\r\nWhat do you want to Argue with in the text?\r\nWhat parts of the text do you want to Aspire to?\r\n\r\nThen, all groups will come together to share some of their tables\u2019 reactions.\r\n\t\r\nNext, the Last Word protocol will be used after each participant reads the Vance text. When they\u2019re ready, participants at each table will take turns sharing one quote from the text and why the quote made a strong impression on them (in no more than 2 minutes). Then, each of the other participants will get up to 1 minute to respond to the quote and what the presenter said, the purpose of the response being\r\n\r\nTo expand on the presenter\u2019s thinking about the quote and the issues raised for him or her by the quote,\r\nTo provide a different look at the quote,\r\nTo clarify the presenter\u2019s thinking about the quote, and\/or\r\nTo question the presenter\u2019s assumptions about the quote and the issues raised (although at this time there is no response from the presenter).\r\n\r\nFinally, the presenter has one more minute to have the \u201cfinal word.\u201d Now what are they thinking? What is their reaction to what they heard?\r\n\r\nAfter the initial presentation and the two protocols, the group will come together as a whole and share their final thoughts about what role, if any, these protocols could play in their handling of texts from across the political and ideological spectrum.","Presenter":["Thomas Jones"],"PresenterAffiliation":["NYC iSchool (H.S. 376)"],"PresenterEmail":["tjones@nycischool.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":93,"ScheduleLocationID":7,"SubmitterID":4735,"AdditionalComments":"Thank you so much for your consideration! I would prefer to present during one of the earliest sessions on Saturday.","LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":7},{"ID":733,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1509061564,"CreatorID":4735,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Rethinking the Socratic Seminar: Opportunities and Challenges in a Paideia Classroom","Handle":"rethinking_the_socratic_seminar--opportunities_and_challenges_in_a_paideia_classroom","ShortDescription":"Our understanding of the traditional Socratic Seminar often involves forced contributions from unwilling students and awkward, inorganic conversations that might not teach authentic thinking and discussion skills. How do we build an environment that allows K-12 students to engage in genuine, insightful conversations that require listening and higher order thinking?","Description":"I first learned about the Paideia classroom when I taught at a magnet school outside Nashville. Paideia, an ancient Greek word that refers to the educational process that prepares one for citizenship, was infused into our school charter and practiced from kindergarten to 12th grade. A central application of this philosophy is the Paideia Socratic Seminar: 15-20 students in a circle having an intellectual dialogue. Free from hand raising and having to focus on the teacher, students are trained from the earliest grades to engage in respectful, civil dialogue. The process ultimately allows the students to focus on their thoughts, as well as on one other, as they come to a deeper understanding of a chosen text.\r\n\r\nWhen I began teaching 8th grade in a Philadelphia neighborhood school, I decided to bring Paideia with me. The challenges were obvious- this was not an academic magnet school and students have not been trained in the format since age five. Nonetheless, I have found ways to create a similar culture with students I meet eight years into their education. Moreover, students respond positively and show evidence of higher order thinking skills in their follow up assessments.\r\n\r\nThe goal of this conversation is to discuss ways in which students can be given the opportunity to develop civil discussion skills as well as collaborative thinking activities in a variety of school environments. Participants will leave with examples of Seminar texts and question formats.\r\n\r\nA short overview of the Paideia seminar can be viewed at this link:\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=_9GJYauGecw","Link":[],"Audience":["All School Levels"],"Practice":"Group members will participate in or observe an abbreviated version of a seminar around which we will base our discussion.\r\nDuring the discussion, group members will share their experiences and best practices on conducting seminars.\r\nIn the latter part of our session, we will develop open-ended critical thinking questions based on texts of our choosing. \r\nCollaborators will conclude the discussion by exploring some ways they can utilize the Paideia Seminar format in their own classrooms.","Presenter":["Kevin Kelly"],"PresenterAffiliation":["John Hancock Demonstration School: Labrum Campus","8th grade literacy teacher; Temple University School of Education","Instructor of Early Childhood Education"],"PresenterEmail":["kmkelly@philasd.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":94,"ScheduleLocationID":7,"SubmitterID":4735,"AdditionalComments":null,"LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":7},{"ID":743,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1509400864,"CreatorID":4735,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Participatory School Design for Participatory Democracy","Handle":"participatory_school_design_for_participatory_democracy","ShortDescription":"Many of our schools are disempowering and undemocratic by design -- as a result, our communities are disenfranchised and we struggle to enact our power together. We are failing at learning to live democratically. This conversation proposes a curriculum called Participatory School Design, in which youth work with facilitators to re-envision school, then to create the schools that will serve them and their communities.","Description":"Through a process of decision-making by Formal Consensus, Michael and Sean will discuss with Educon colleagues how to design learning spaces together with the students. Student engagement in learning and citizen engagement in democracy are both at a moment of a paradigm shift in America, and they are inexorably linked together. We are developing a design-process curriculum which guides students and facilitators to envision and create new public schools from the ground up, using a deliberative consensus method. Because schools serve to reproduce social structures, we believe that radically democratizing school through reiterative participatory design will have long-lasting impacts on both learning in schools and democracy in communities broadly. Participatory design places the user - in this case the student - as the designer. Our practice is built around a participatory design curriculum, which has been through several iterations but still needs testing, evaluation and feedback. At Educon2018, we would love the opportunity to convene a workshop to do a limited-scale mock-up of our School Design process, treating participants as a \u201ctemporarily autonomous community,\u201d and design a school as if participants would themselves attend that school immediately. This would allow us to simultaneously share our design concepts with participants, and allow us to refine our process based on observations and evaluations.If you are in the audience, you will walk away with a process for creating design elements or design essentials \"with\" students.","Link":["https:\/\/communitylearningdesign.wordpress.com\/about\/","https:\/\/twitter.com\/CLD4democracy?s=09","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/27022796\/","https:\/\/business.facebook.com\/CommunityLearningDesign\/?business_id=153887871870228"],"Audience":["High School","Middle School"],"Practice":"Michael and Sean will jump right into the conversation of school design and frame the conversation that participants are students who are \"in\" a school they are going to design. In Wisconsin, $96,000,000 of federal money is entering the state for 80 new schools over the next five years. This is not a hypothetical or theoretical conversation - but a practical hands-on workshop that will yield actionable value. The group size will dictate the actual activity. An ideal design cohort ranges from 12-30. A group larger than 30 will yield two different design cohorts in which Michael and Sean will facilitate design teams. Both Michael and Sean have experience guiding educators and thought leaders in a conference setting, and the conversation will follow a 15\/30\/15\/15\/15 format in which:\r\n0-15 minutes intro's, context, and directions\r\n16-45 minutes - small group design\r\n46-60 minutes - share out to seek consensus \r\n61-75 minutes - deep dive and next actions (in this phase, individuals are allowed to \"break off\" or groups can intermingle to fully unpack the number one priority item of interest for the new school; participants map out next actions necessary to implement the highest priority)\r\n76-90 minutes - creating the school and outlining Formal Consensus. \r\nThe entire 90-minutes are put onto a Google Doc or other creative commons space so participants can come back and continue the design work.","Presenter":["Michael McCabe","Sean Anderson"],"PresenterAffiliation":["Michael","Director of School Design C | L | D","Principal St. James School Madison","WI","Doctoral student Creighton University; Sean","Director of Teacher Professional Practice C | L | D","Tech Ed teacher Edgerton Middle School","Edgerton WI"],"PresenterEmail":["michael.mccabe@communitylearningdesign.org","sean.anderson@communitylearningdesign.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":95,"ScheduleLocationID":7,"SubmitterID":4735,"AdditionalComments":"I want to thank Educon for allowing me to dream. I attended Educon2013, and drove out through two different storms in order to spend 24-hours among giants. In 2014, Sean and I started dreaming about designing a public school where the students are the designers. That dream is turning into a reality, and we are grateful for the work of SLA and all those who make this unique opportunity happen each year. -Michael McCabe @Teach4aLiving","LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":7},{"ID":730,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1508988554,"CreatorID":4735,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Your Personal Privacy Policy","Handle":"your_personal_privacy_policy","ShortDescription":"Privacy is relative. As our world becomes increasingly digitized and monitored, our attitudes toward privacy should evolve beyond just app settings and encryption. We can\u2019t make the best choices for ourselves or our kids if we haven\u2019t thought about what privacy really means to us.","Description":"Privacy is relative. As our world becomes increasingly digitized and monitored, our attitudes toward privacy should evolve beyond just app settings and encryption. We can\u2019t make the best choices for ourselves or our kids if we haven\u2019t thought about what privacy really means to us. \r\n\r\nMost privacy conversations are framed by compliance and focus on technical solutions. This conversation takes a different, more fundamental approach: regardless of current regulations and technology, what do we want to keep private and why? This essential question transcends hollow concepts like \u201cpersonally identifiable information\u201d to explore more meaningful beliefs along the spectrum of \u201cinformational intimacy.\u201d\r\n\r\nLearning how to manage your \u201cpersonal privacy policy\u201d will empower educators, administrators, parents, and product-makers to approach practical issues of compliance and technology more thoughtfully and proactively.","Link":[],"Audience":["All School Levels"],"Practice":"Warm-up (15 minutes)\r\n- Individual reflection on the guiding question: what does privacy mean to you? (5 minutes)\r\n- Facilitated debrief: participants are asked to share their reflections with the group; presenters will create a shared record on the board (10 minutes).\r\n\r\nSmall group discussion (25 minutes)\r\n- Presenters will frame a conversation by sharing some perspectives on the guiding question as well as a tool: the personal privacy policy matrix (10 minutes).\r\n- In groups of 3 or 4, participants will explore and discuss the matrix. Presenters will suggest critical questions.\r\n\r\nDocumentation and co-creation (20 minutes)\r\n- The matrix will be an open Google Sheet. Presenters will facilitate an amendment process to the matrix based on input from participants.\r\n- Participants will be encouraged to make a copy for their personal customization and use within their family, classroom, school, etc.\r\n\r\nAt the end of the session, the facilitators will co-author a blog post outlining the process and the documentation behind creating a personal privacy policy. The goal of the session is to create a toolkit that supports teachers and students with a practical, realistic framework they can use to both understand privacy on a personal level, and better safeguard their own privacy, and the privacy of their friends.\r\n\r\nAll material from this session will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.","Presenter":["Adam Rosenzweig; Bill Fitzgerald"],"PresenterAffiliation":["Beyond 12 (Adam); Common Sense Media (Bill)"],"PresenterEmail":["adam.lev.rosenzweig@gmail.com","bill@funnymonkey.com"],"ScheduleSlotID":96,"ScheduleLocationID":7,"SubmitterID":4735,"AdditionalComments":null,"LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":7},{"ID":731,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1509039990,"CreatorID":4735,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"The Ethics of VR Usage with Children","Handle":"the_ethics_of_vr_usage_with_children","ShortDescription":"As VR gains ground in education more teachers are finding ways to include it in their curriculum. In parallel, social science research suggests VR has an impact on the user beyond the scope of other mediums. Educators need to weigh VR\u2019s costs and benefits and its impact on children.","Description":"We would like to facilitate dialogue regarding the ethical use of VR with children. VR has great potential for helping children learn (our research has demonstrated some of the possible benefits within classrooms across thousands of children). Yet, at the same time we are noticing that educators may not be clearly considering the potential physiological and psychological impacts of the VR content they are using. Our research has shown that even fairly innocuous seeming content may trigger anxiety in children depending on their lived experiences. How can we maintain the excitement and engagement of using this emerging technology while simultaneously being aware of the potential risks and ethical implications of the content? For instance, VR is highly touted as being a useful tool for empathy. How do we, as educators, scaffold learning around empathy while respecting student boundaries and comfort levels in this immersive environment? \r\n\r\nWe\u2019ve collected data from teachers, students and developers  in over 40 schools and from our work, we feel this is a relevant and important conversation to be having regarding technological implementation. This type of conversation would be useful to encourage dialogue amongst administrators, educators, teacher coaches and technology-focused staff. We will use data from our work, anecdotal stories from teachers and students and research topics from the social sciences as jumping off points for reflective conversation.","Link":["http:\/\/www.foundry10.org"],"Audience":["All School Levels"],"Practice":"The conversational practice we would like to utilize is \u201cWhat? So What? Now What?\u201d The ethics of VR usage with children should be a topic of discussion as more classrooms adopt the technology. Based on our research and that of other researchers and educators, we will engage participants in dialogue about the implications of VR use in everyday classrooms. Conversing about the ethical implementation of emerging technology usage is an important and relevant topic for 21st-Century educators. We would like to create a handout sheet that describes scenarios we have seen in our data and in classrooms to have participants discuss together and then we will debrief as a large group.\r\n\r\nOur plan is to use the following set of prompts to engage participants in both small and large group discussions to further their understanding (and even their own questions) about VR use with children. We will open with a more general research prompt to get at the \u201cWhat?\u201d aspect of the conversation. We then will use actual scenarios (the \u201cSo What?\u201d component) that occurred in our research environments as jumping off points for additional conversations. Participants will share out ideas, thoughts and concerns. We then close, with the \u201cNow What?\u201d of how we can move forward in considering this emerging technology with children.\r\n\r\n\r\nResearch by Bailey and Bailenson (2017) discusses how there is limited research on the impacts of putting children into immersive spaces and then pulling them out. Given the lack of information about this topic, how can we, as educators, be proactive and take a mindful approach to engaging with immersion and our students?\r\nA middle school teacher was very excited to have his students try an underwater VR experience that involves a large, to-scale, sized whale. As adults, we did not experience any negative effects and found this to be a peaceful piece of content. He put all students into the experience and in our data, some students wrote about their anxiety regarding being underwater, seeing a large whale and not understanding what they were experiencing. How can we determine what might be a trigger for students content-wise?\r\nAnother educator, put his students in a 9\/11 experience where they had to try to get out of one of the towers. The students actually felt that this experience helped them to understand the events that day more clearly, however, adults who experienced it felt very uncomfortable. How do we weigh the value of understanding an event that students may not feel an emotional connection to (none of this group were alive at that time) versus the potential psychological impact it may have?\r\nPeople are very excited by the idea of VR for empathy. Our data from students suggests that they believe they will understand places better than people through the use of VR. Why might this be the case? How might VR tackle empathy in ways that other mediums do not?\r\nIn an example of place, students walked out of a teacher-led experience with solitary confinement in a Prisons and Protests class, not seeing people in the VR experience but through their view of \u201cplace\u201d had a strong understanding of the inhumane conditions of solitary confinement. Though this worked well in the upper-class school setting, what might be some implications of content such as this in a more broad socio-demographic group?\r\nBecause there is such a vast array of mixed research on both the benefits (social anxiety, ADHD, physical therapy, phobias, learning, bias, empathy) of VR and the potential drawbacks (anxiety, triggers, false memories in young children, physiological side-effects) as we leave today, how can we ethically and thoughtfully approach the technology as we move ahead?","Presenter":["Lisa Castaneda & Marc Pacampara"],"PresenterAffiliation":["foundry10"],"PresenterEmail":["lisa@foundry10.org","marc@foundry10.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":97,"ScheduleLocationID":7,"SubmitterID":4735,"AdditionalComments":"Please take into consideration that the link to the exact protocol for this conversation was not working. We did Tweet to ask for it, but did not hear back. We are really enthused about discussing this topic and if we needed to tweak it to better fit the protocol, we would be happy to!","LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":7},{"ID":753,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1509546077,"CreatorID":4735,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"Symmetrical Learning: Creating Rich Experiences for All Learners","Handle":"symmetrical_learning--creating_rich_experiences_for_all_learners","ShortDescription":"Sometimes the learning opportunities we ask teachers to offer to students are not the same ones we offer teachers. We share our journey in using Instructional Rounds to create an opportunity for all learners (principals, teachers, students) to engage in a discovery process, and we invite you to consider the symmetry in your own learning model.","Description":"At The Urban Assembly, a network of 21 public schools across New York City, we have embarked upon a journey to ensure that everyone in our community - administrators, teachers and students - have access to rich learning experiences. We know that the best learning involves exploration and access to resources of time and collaboration. \r\n\r\nIn this conversation, we will share our use of Instructional Rounds as an organizing framework to create a symmetrical approach to learning and the impact it has had so far. Specifically, we will share the practice of Instructional Rounds that Urban Assembly Principals engage in, and how one school leader at The Urban Assembly Maker Academy has adopted the practice for school wide and teacher inquiry. As one of the guiding principles of Educon suggests, we strive to create educative experiences that are inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all learners. From there, we will invite participants to consider their own structures for learning, and ask the question: \u201cHow symmetrical are these learning experiences?\u201d","Link":["https:\/\/urbanassembly.org\/","http:\/\/www.uamaker.nyc\/"],"Audience":["All School Levels"],"Practice":"The structure of the presentation will be a focus on sharing the practices in the format of a Presentation of Learning (POL) a structure we use to share our learning. From there, we will use discussion protocols to guide the group towards deeper learning, including a text protocol to discuss relevant research, a time for the participants to reflect on their own practices, and a modified consultancy protocol to provide feedback on next steps.","Presenter":["Alexis Goldberg","Luke Bauer","Pete Wood"],"PresenterAffiliation":["The Urban Assembly","The Urban Assembly Maker Academy"],"PresenterEmail":["agoldberg@urbanassembly.org","luke.bauer@uamaker.nyc","pete.wood@uamaker.nyc"],"ScheduleSlotID":98,"ScheduleLocationID":7,"SubmitterID":4735,"AdditionalComments":"We have had an intensive period of learning about symmetry in learning models through our use of the Instructional Rounds model. We are excited to share this with others, receive feedback on our own work, and invite others to consider symmetry in their own school communities.","LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":7}],"conditions":{"Status":"Accepted","ConferenceID":7,"ScheduleLocationID":7},"total":6,"limit":false,"offset":false}