I Say Conference, You Say...Boring?

Last Saturday, I attended a conference at Miami’s Voice of America Learning Center in West Chester. This was a teacher conference that was put on by the Ohio Writing Project, and was titled Practical Strategies for Teaching Literacy.

Several members of my cohort attended the conference with me, in addition to a lot of English teachers from the surrounding area. While going to this conference meant waking up at 7AM on a Saturday morning, losing sleep was well worth the experience I had.

Members of my cohort and I at the conference
last Saturday.

To start off the day, I attended the Keynote Conversation with Tanny McGregor. Her talk was titled “Closer Reading, Deeper Thinking.” During her talk, she made a distinction between the phrases “closer reading” and “deeper thinking,” which is something I’d never really pondered before. She prefers to use the phrase “deeper thinking” because she thinks that a text, plus student thinking, equals real reading, which is something that I agree with.

After the Keynote Conversation, I attended a breakout session titled “Multigenre: a Festival of Voices” which was given by Angela Faulhaber. I really enjoyed this session, particularly because I know that for my EDT 427 class, I will be writing a multigenre paper later on in the semester.

To start off her session, she handed out different genres to each audience member. After we each received our genre, we had to write for approximately five minutes about a specific scene from Cinderella that she put on the board.

The genre I received was “lab notes,” which was a really interesting angle to look at Cinderella with. After the five minutes was up, several audience members read what they had written aloud, and it was really neat to hear the different takes on the same scene. This is what makes a multigenre project so cool, the fact that each component is looking at the same overarching idea, but they each approach it from a different lens.

The last breakout session I attended was given by Mary Gibson, and was called “Harry Wong Got It Wrong!” I was particularly interested in this session since in my EDT 421 class, we are reading Harry Wong’s book, The First Days of School. While the title of her session confused me slightly, as I was not fully able to see the relation with her discussion, she was an extraordinarily enthusiastic speaker which captivated my interest.

As her audience, she had us practice a few of the techniques she was talking about. One of the activities she talked about was a writing activity. During the session, we watched a YouTube video, and then wrote about what it means to have “pure joy,” which is something that was prominent in the video.

I had a very educational and informative experience at this conference, and it was definitely worth the drive. The ideas and perspectives I gained from this conference will be invaluable to me as a future teacher.