This promising practice share highlights grouping students based on friendships and connection to foster social connections even in these remote times. Students collaborate with the same group in Breakout Rooms to work on fun group assignments such as creating Kahoot games. This has led us to a stronger community even in these difficult times.

Facilitator(s):Tania Mohammed, Nina Kogut-Akkum

This promising practice highlights an online version of a notebook. This strategy makes the online classroom feel more authentic and gives more accountability for both the student and the teacher.

Digital Notebook Template

Facilitator(s): Kara MacDevitt

Facilitator(s): Suzanna McNamara, Annie Smith

Facilitator(s): Taylor Overturf

Facilitator(s): Martin Castro

Facilitator(s): Nisa Nuonsy

This promising practice share will highlight MyOn, a reading comprehensive website which incorporates all subjects from Science to Technology to Social Studies, as well as English. The quizzes MyOn provides helps you assess whether or not the student is understanding the story, and will decipher if the student should go up a lexile level or decrease a lexile level. It is a way to help ESL students learn the target language as well as strengthening their basic literacy skills. The website includes diagnostics tests, projects which include writing and benchmarks, translation read into their first language as well as target language which can serve for differentiation.

Facilitator(s): Meriem Hadjahmed, Nexcy Richardson

Facilitator(s): Tara Lewis

Facilitator(s): Gallia Kassiano

This promising practice share highlights a hands-on science project that students can complete remotely. Due to lack of materials it has been hard to have students complete science projects that are not based on simulations. This project allowed them to create their own pendulum out of any materials they had around the house while allowing them choice of materials. It was a great activity for students to stretch themselves and be creative. Students built a pendulum at home and used it to measure time. The students were very creative! The project was done in conjunction with the math department, who used the period of a pendulum formula to calculate the length of their pendulums. Students then “timed” themselves with the pendulum during a short activity.

Facilitator(s): Lucy Blackford

Facilitator(s): Alex Porter

The recruitment process for the NYC Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) is sometimes difficult to achieve in a regular year. It is even more difficult during this new virtual world which caught us by surprise! Come hear about how we adjusted our strategy and increased our effort to find recruits for the program. By not giving up and cultivating perseverance in students and staff, we were able to get it done. In the end, through SYEP, students from all backgrounds were brought together to focus on the same target and idea. Participants will walk away with ideas about how to enter into or maintain their own SYEP initiative during times of uncertainty.

Facilitator(s): Jesus Martinez

Intended Audience:  All educators

Category(ies): Remote Collaboration

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Are you overwhelmed with all of the tech strategies being thrown at you? Do you find that students struggle with understanding and completing the tasks you send them? Do you find yourself wondering, how can I take advantage of tech strategies to engage my students in remote learning? In this workshop we will explore how something as simple as formatting a google slide can create a more inclusive learning environment. Our workshop will address the digital literacy gap for students and teachers alike. Participants will partake in a mini-lesson which has been formatted and scaffolded to engage all types of learners. We will then discuss the scaffolding and differentiating strategies used in the lesson, and learn how to format our own lessons. Participants will also have time to apply these strategies to their own curricula and plan with the support of their peers. Teachers will receive a toolkit that details how to use functions of google slides (plus more) to break down what they want students to do and scaffold it in a way that is abundantly clear to students.

Facilitator(s): Alia Elsayed-Dilone, Cynthia Vele

Intended Audience:  The intended audience of this workshop are teachers who feel stuck when using technology to engage all students; all are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Collaboration, Teaching basic technological literacy

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How can we support Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education in a heterogeneous class? What does this look like during remote learning? How can we support SLIFEs to become independent learners? In this workshop we will explore how to support SLIFEs with literacy and tech literacy through a user-friendly book creating program. Participants will explore the online tool Book Creator, and walk away with strategies to use in their classrooms, hybrid and remote. Participants are encouraged to bring their class materials to start creating their own teacher template using Book Creator.

Facilitator(s): Areum Kang

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Language Development

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Building a sense of community over the computer and in small class sizes is challenging. Not everyone uses social media, and staying fully engaged over a screen can be daunting for both adults and students. In this workshop, participants will get the chance to explore a variety of activities that can help students and staff stay invested in the school community. These activities can be done on social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, but they can also be done via Google Classroom, a school website, or any other internal platform that brings staff and students together. We will showcase successful examples from our school and the educational community at large. If possible, Student Government officers will give testimonials about how the Spring and Fall activities kept their morale high. We will answer any questions about the logistics, administrative/staff buy-in, and more. Participants will also get the chance to plan a student engagement campaign of their own.

Facilitator(s): Jacqueline Thomas, Yanira Roman

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Collaboration, Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education

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Are you looking for meaningful ways to incorporate student voice and empower young people to help each other? Whether you are experienced with Restorative Justice, or new to the concepts and strategies, we’ll share how we are working with our students so that they can facilitate Circles in their Advisories. We will provide a foolproof template for planning circles, as well as lessons that we use to teach students how to become facilitators. You’ll meet a few of our current student circle keepers and hear them talk about the impact of student led circles. Participants will walk away with new tools and strategies for empowering students to take ownership of restorative justice in their school.

Facilitator(s): Heather Cristol, Sarah Cunningham

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education, Student leadership

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How can we teach physical education and health remotely? In this workshop, participants will explore different ideas and units for teaching physical education and health education remotely. We will explore units in nutrition, muscle and exercises, and cardiorespiratory fitness. Participants will walk away with a toolkit of remote games, strategies in classwork, and tools for engaging students in an online setting.

Facilitator(s): James Leung

Intended Audience: This workshop is intended for Physical Education and Health teachers, but all are welcome!

Category(ies): P.E./Health in Remote Contexts

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How can we move students beyond sentence frames and starters to generate oral and written sentences about the content they are learning? How can we make small changes in our approach to syntax in order to have a big impact on student writing? Social change is rooted in a vision of what is possible and fostered by a sense of belonging and voice. Supporting students to gain control over the ways they can use language to communicate and express their ideas reinforces the value of those ideas and perspectives. This workshop focuses on making explicit the relationship between ideas at the sentence level. When students have powerful language tools, they gain more power over their own agency and voice. In this workshop, we will examine a range of approaches for sentence level comprehension and production. We will present a set of interactive sentence tasks that support students to internalize and generate simple, compound, and complex sentences across all content areas. These can be used in both in-person and online classrooms. Participants will have opportunities to practice the strategies and discuss with peers.

Facilitator(s): Suzanna McNamara, Annie Smith

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Language Development

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When we value speed and content over relationships we fail to make a connection with students that can help them apply interpersonal skills that will lead them to advocate for themselves. Working with trauma-affected students is a difficult balancing act but its benefits are far reaching and impactful. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that childhood trauma is far more pervasive than previously believed and is often invisible. This workshop will explore how trauma disrupts brain development. Participants will engage in discussions on SEL practices that benefit all children, building critical skills like self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and an openness to teamwork and cooperation.

Facilitator(s): Jal Raval

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education

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How can we teach students to use models to structure essays and develop analysis? When we teach students how to use models, they learn a process first. Students are given feedback and directed to reflect on how they use the model to revise their writing structure. Once the model is mastered, feedback can be focused on higher level critical thinking skills like analyzing information. In this way, students build the self-efficacy skills needed to become independent learners. Once students can organize their writing we can free up space to really dive into how to build the analysis in argumentative writing. These models can be leveraged for writing assignments across contents and should result in higher-level writing. Using models fosters a mindset change in students that builds not only writing skills, but also confidence, self-efficacy, and the skills needed to become independent learners across content-areas.

Facilitator(s): Lisa Sacco

Intended Audience: This workshop is intended for ELA teachers and teachers who teach argumentative and multi-paragraph writing, but all are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Language Development

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Want to share and discuss some challenges to the work of developing a post-secondary readiness team? Want to learn about some successful strategies or examples that have arisen at an Internationals School around this work? Want to have a bank of resources and materials that can help you in developing post-secondary readiness at your school? Want to join a session that does not end at the workshop because the goal is to start a network of educators in our schools that want to commit to regularly supporting each other, sharing ideas, helping to problem-solve, and generally being there for each other in times when it feels like you’re the only one doing this work at your school? This workshop may be for you!

Facilitator(s): Martin Castro

Intended Audience: Teachers, counselors, and school staff involved in or interested in developing a stronger post-secondary system in their schools and among our Internationals network; all are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Collaboration, Post-Secondary Readiness

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Welcome to the Hey Listen Games: Teaching With Video Games Workshop! Video games are rife with educational potential, but are very rarely implemented in our classrooms in meaningful ways. What are often used in schools are “educational” video games. This workshop is not about that! We will instead focus on how “entertainment” games that our students are already playing can be utilized as educational resources. The video game industry is the largest entertainment industry in the world and every teacher has gamers in their classroom. We need to bring their own passions into the room in order to get them excited about education. This is especially true during a pandemic with so many of our students stuck at home with only video games as a source of pleasure. If you are a gamer, or have considered teaching with video games but don’t know where to start, then this session is for you! This workshop will focus on lessons in Social Studies, English Language Arts, and Social-Emotional Health.

Facilitator(s): Zachary Hartzman

Intended Audience: All are welcome, but it is recommended that participants have basic knowledge of how to use modern video game consoles and/or game digital distribution services on computers.

Category(ies): Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education

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As teachers, we use daily writing in all subjects to help our students focus, make personal connections in anticipation of unfamiliar material, build skills, and practice solving the problems posed by our disciplines. Daily writing is available to us, too, not only in our role as teachers but as individuals seeking outlets for self-discovery. Formal studies and anecdotal evidence have shown the power of a daily writing practice to unravel confusion, untangle mental and emotional chaos, soothe our minds and hearts, and promote honest conversations with ourselves. In this workshop, we will write in response prompts and activities; review some of the research that supports the health benefits of writing; discuss strategies for using daily journals as a resource for teaching ideas and other creative projects; explore ways to use journals to overcome procrastination, resistance, and blocks; and use poetry, prose, and images to collage. You will come away with your own writing, a reading list of books that can help support a personal journal writing practice, and multiple writing activities that can be used in your classrooms, along with an understanding of how low stakes writing builds writing stamina and creative thinking and aids problem solving.

Facilitator(s): Pamela Gordon

Intended Audience: Teachers seeking a safe, non-judgmental space in which to explore and sort out, through writing and some collaging, the multitude of experiences the past year has visited upon us; all are welcome!

Category(ies): The efficacy of low-stakes writing for personal discovery and academic support.

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How can we best support immigrant youth while they are transitioning and settling into our country, and how can we grasp the necessary knowledge on trauma and the sociopolitical and geopolitical context of this transition? In this workshop, school personnel will explore the tools to intervene and alleviate the effects of trauma in the classroom with expertise, empathy, and confidence. This workshop looks forward to pushing for collaboration and dialogue among school personnel and teachers. All adults involved in educating young and newly arrived scholars to the country should be involved in these efforts. We (educators and school personnel) are all in need of tools for listening, empathizing, and supporting immigrant students to succeed. The purpose of this workshop is to offer teachers an entry point to address, study, implement strategies, and advocate for the well being of students inside and outside classrooms and schools. This session is offered as a starting point not only for teachers, but also for school personnel to internalize the complexity of trauma in adolescents, particularly immigrant youth.

Facilitator(s): Laura Garriguez, Katie Applegate

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education

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Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the task of creating student-centered projects? How can we scaffold towards larger projects, by using smaller, more manageable mini-projects? How can a cycle of student choice and repeated themes help increase engagement and understanding? In this session, participants will explore these questions through multiple examples from an ELA classroom. Participants will see examples of smaller, less time-consuming projects, that eventually lead students towards a larger portfolio, including real examples that address the following driving questions: How are the challenges of the past reflected in the present (or vice-versa)? and How does investigating diverse primary sources help us make reasoned arguments about our past (and present)? Participants will be able to see and discuss the ways that choice and repetition contribute to an accumulation of student knowledge, skill, and engagement. Participants will be able to apply these ideas to their own classroom.

Facilitator(s): Eric Bradshaw, Lydia Langer

Intended Audience: All are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Language Development, Experiential Learning, Teaching basic technological literacy

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How can we design remote interdisciplinary or disciplinary experiential projects using science and physical exercise curricula? In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities of designing an interdisciplinary PBAT project or disciplinary PBAT project which can be done remotely. We will look at students’ Science PBAT papers and identify various skills that were practiced and presented in the projects. We will explore different strategies and examples for integrating physical exercise concepts into science classes. Participants will have time to discuss and bounce ideas about developing projects that can be accomplished remotely without stressing about the distribution and use of classroom materials for data collection. All the resources that went into developing these projects will be shared with the participants.

Facilitator(s): Tamanna Talukder

Intended Audience: This workshop is intended for science and PE teachers, but all are welcome!

Category(ies): Experiential Learning

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This workshop will highlight the year-long interdisciplinary curriculum between English and Art on the theme of perspective. We will showcase a case study on teaching Gender Norms and empowering students to share their own perspective on gender constructs. The session will include a discussion of how to approach this subject matter in your classroom as well as work time to create curriculum about contemporary conversations through an interdisciplinary approach.

Facilitator(s): Sarah Stahl, Lionel Cruet

Intended Audience: Teachers of Art, English, Social Studies, Advisory and Counselors are encouraged to register, but all are welcome.

Category(ies): Interdisciplinary planning curriculum and approach.

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Are you familiar with the Desmos’ Classroom Activities? How can we use games and puzzles to foster collaboration and critical thinking during remote learning? Through this workshop, participants will get a brief introduction to Desmos, a free website that can be used to provide students with opportunities to practice and develop mathematical skills. Then, participants will be able to participate in some games and puzzles as students, while simultaneously seeing what the teacher dashboard looks like, and how to use it to engage with students. By the end, participants would have explored how to use games and puzzles through Desmos to have students collaborate with each other to build critical thinking skills as they build community. If time allows it, participants will begin to explore how to create our own activities using Desmos.

Facilitator(s): Juan Perez, Mehmet Zubaroglu

Intended Audience: This workshop is intended for math teachers, but all are welcome!

Category(ies): Remote Collaboration

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