Bright Ideas Conference

I really enjoyed the Bright Ideas conferecne. I felt that I learned a lot in a short amount of time…and for a small price. It was nice that the presenters were people who were in the field or practicing to be in the field. This made it a little less intimidating, and more effective, than if it was a collection of scholars who had little experience in the field of teaching. I felt I could connect with what they were saying and trust their advice.

I thought the key-note speaker was very entertaining. I liked the fact that she read from her books so we could get a feel for her writing style. This made it easier to connect with the stories she told. I also thought it was good to have this start out the conference because it would have been easy to leave the literature out of an event like this, and jus focus on teaching styles. But, opening the conference this way helped me to remember that I am an English teacher, and the content I am teaching shouldn’t get lost in how I teach it.

The first break out session I went to started out on a weak note, but ended strong (at least in my opinion). It was about incorporating mass media into the English curriculum. There were three speakers total in this session. The first two speakers did a tag-team approach and talked about using wikis and “youtube” to help illustrate points in the lesson. To be honest I thought the talk was little too technical for the amount of time they had, I really didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying. They went too fast and didn’t make strong enough connections to implementation for me. The third speaker however I found very interesting. She talked about using concepts and principles from journalism and using them to teach English. She talked abut her CRAP’D philosophy which stands for: Contrast, Repetition, (I cannot remember P, and I lost my folder, sorry!) Allignment and Dominance. She illustrated these points well with visual examples and an interactive activity. She also made strong, clear connections as to how these principles could relate to paper writing. I found her point of view very intriguing and very practical.

The final break out session that I attended was on teaching in urban settings. The session started out wiht a digital tour of one of the speakers’ life. She was a student in an urban setting who was very unsatisfied with how she was being taught. She then became a teacher and when she went back to the same district found that little had changed since she attended classes there. From there the session was another tag-team approach that focused on how to break the cycles of “busy work” for urban students. They talked about approaches to use, how to approach the principal (or whoever) with a new idea for teaching without getting shot down. They also brought in a lot of sociological studies on class differences and language differences. I found all of this extremely helpful and it got me excited to get into the classroom and do my best to make a difference. I felt more prepared for teaching after this session because it came from people in the field and they gave extremely practical methods of how to implement these ideas into an urban classroom. It tasted strongly of critical pedagogy and Jeannie Oakes.

Overall I thougt requiring the conference was a bright idea. It made me feel connected to the teaching community and gave me some good tips for preparing to become a teacher. I strongly reccommend continuing this practice for future classes.