The Ohio Conference of Teachers of English Language Arts

Last Friday and Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend the Ohio Conference of Teachers of English Language Arts (OCTELA). The conference was in Columbus and several members of my cohort attended with me.

On Friday, I went to a few different breakout sessions that really stood out to me. The first breakout session I attended was titled “A Year of Argument.” In this session, we discussed noticings and claims we found in different advertisements, then went on to write an 11-minute essay about an argument we had recently.

This session was interactive and gave me ideas for my future classroom. In fact, yesterday in my ENG 304 class I had to give teaching presentation with two other girls in my cohort and we modeled our lesson after the ideas we learned in this session.

Photo of some of the members of my cohort and I at lunch
on Friday.

During lunch on Friday, Jordan Sonnenblick was the keynote speaker, and he talked about why he wrote Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie. I found his talk to be very inspirational. Sonnenblick wrote this book for a particular student because he wanted to give her a book to read that matched the events in her life, and when he couldn’t find a book to do that, he wrote one.

While I had heard of Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie before this conference, I had never heard the story behind it. What made this experience even cooler was that I was able to hear it from the author. It was truly inspirational.

After the keynote session, I also went to Sonnenblick’s breakout session on the 3 levels of creative writing. One thing that he said in this session that stood out to me, was “If you hate revision, then start with vision.” After my field experience last semester, I saw that most of my students really disliked the revision process.

I think that using this quote in my future classroom could help my students recognize that if they have a plan for where they are going with their writing, they may not need to revise as much. While this strategy may not work for everyone (I know that in my writing, I rarely have a clue where I intend to go until I start writing), I think that it could help some students.

On Saturday morning, the keynote speaker was Penny Kittle, who is famous in the world of English Language Arts education for her books and teaching methods. During her talk, she touched on The BookLove Foundation, which is a Foundation that supports teachers who want to foster a love of reading in their students.

Later in the day, I attended Kittle’s breakout session where she talked a lot about using mentor texts as a way to have students write. In this session, she gave us a lot of different texts to use and several different ideas that she uses in her classroom.

After this session, I went to hear my professor from last semester, Dr. Tom Romano, present with two students from my cohort on the Social Justice paper that I had to write for his EDT 427 class. Having the chance to hear and support my peers presenting at OCTELA was incredible, especially since both of my peers did a wonderful job presenting their topics.

What I liked most about OCTELA, was that most of the presenters are currently teaching, which made the information and lessons they presented very relevant, which means that I have a lot to add to my “teacher toolkit.”