Professional Development

Professional Development Menu

This menu represents professional development opportunities I have offered to my school community in the past. These presentations can be repeated for new audiences based on your community's needs.

Pandemic-Impacted Teaching:

Engaging Students in Virtual Learning

This professional development opportunity focuses on trauma-sensitive remote instruction and student engagement in digital learning environments.

Engaging Flipped Instruction with EdPuzzle

This professional development opportunity was presented for my building's staff but was also later offered at our district's "curriculum day" professional development for district-ELA teachers. This professional development focused on using the district's purchased EdPuzzle technology tool with other technology (Microsoft Teams and Office products).

Additional Professional Development Offerings:

Communication Strategies for Parent/Guardian Partnership
Preparing Students for the ACT: A Metacognitive Approach to Improvement
Reconstructing Curriculum: Decentralizing Eurocentric Curriculum
Universal Learning By Design: How to Adapt the Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum to your Classroom
Nonlinguistic Representations for Differentiated Learning

Professional Development Experience

Reimagining Giftedness*
Rewriting the Narrative of Black and Brown Boys*
Gender Intersectionality*
Secrets to Motivating Students*
National Council of Teachers of English Conference Attendee
Innocent Classroom*
Oxbow Writing Participant
UNMC CITI for Research with Human Subjects Certification
Increasing Student Engagement through Absent Narratives*

* Minnesota Humanities Offering

Comments

Technology: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Impacted my Technology Pedagogy

Technology has been a priority in pre-service education for quite some time. I'm approaching a decade since my pre-service education, and I know how much emphasis was placed on navigating the changing technological landscape in my own program. I can only image the increased emphasis now. One tenet of technology I have tried to stay true to is that technology should never become a paper and pencil replacement. If it can be done with paper, using technology merely becomes a substitute and not an enhancement. But as we try to reintegrate ourselves into "conventional" education post-pandemic, we are faced with the issue that technology was primarily a substitute for paper and pencil for the last 18 months. So now what? How do we find a way forward and backward - a way that progresses the skills we have developed but also reflects on how we can reintegrate the technology focuses pre-pandemic? Jennifer Gonzales, of Cult of Pedagogy , suggests six strategies...

Reimagining Tupac's Rose in Concrete as an ELA Unit

Room for Antiracist Inquiry: An Example Unit This summer, I had the privilege to work for the Upward Bound programs at both Nebraska Methodist College and Creighton University. These programs are designed to enrich the academic experience of students that will be the first in their families to attend a college/university and live below the federal poverty line. These programs both nurture and challenge students. For the literature course I taught for each program this summer, I attempted to reimagine Tupac Shakur's famous "The Rose That Grew from Concrete" poem and position it as an antiracist lens of study. Students started by reading the poem from Shakur, discussing metaphors and interpreting the poem's significance. Next, I wanted to challenge students to see the metaphor's application to today's society and further understand the struggles facing communities of color today. To help students interpret the "concrete" mentioned in Tupac's poem ...

Multiple Literacies: Examples of The Rose that Grew from Concrete Student Work

I completely understand the value of writing and speaking in today's global society. I will not abandon the structured essay or the public speaking event in favor of other summative projects. However, I think that in order to best support students for today's world, we can't shy away from the value of the multiple literacy standards. According to the International Bureau of Education, (click here) multiple literacies is defined as: A concept calling for a broader view of literacy, also referred to as ‘new literacies’ or ‘multiliteracies’. The concept is based on the assumption that individuals ‘read’ the world and make sense of information by means other than traditional reading and writing. These multiliteracies include linguistic, visual, audio, spatial, and gestural ways of meaning-making. Central to the concept of multiple literacies is the belief that individuals in a modern society need to learn how to construct knowledge from multiple sources and modes of ...

Mrs. Holly Murphy

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