A Mini-Institute for International and IB Schools: Bringing Together Workshop Principles, Curricular Theories of Independence and Agency, and Global Ethical Stances

Monday, February 22 - Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Institute will be offered virtually through Zoom.

Apply Now Grade: K-12
Hours: 6am-12pm Eastern Standard Time
Timing specifically to accommodate those in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and Middle East.
Featuring: Mary Ehrenworth, Hareem Atif Khan, Valerie Geschwind, and Jenny Killion (American School of Barcelona)
Payment: Purchase orders for this institute can be made out to: Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, 525 W 120th Street, Box 77, New York, NY 10027

Every year, more and more international and IB schools join our institutes and workshops. The questions that arise from teachers working to mesh the big principles of workshop teaching and the big principles of IB instruction are powerful and generative. This institute aims to address those questions, while giving you time and space to study these very questions with colleagues.

We’ll bring together (virtually) teachers, coaches, and administrators working in IB schools and international schools around the world to study a few big areas. You’ll learn about the key principles and methods of workshop and Units of Study—not all the nuts and bolts but the big ideas that undergird our work—and you’ll lay that learning alongside your school’s key stances, looking for areas where they intersect and places where workshop principles might bring out what’s most important to your school community. Then, too, you’ll think with colleagues at the institute about how to design and adapt curricular units to include the content that is most relevant to your students and the important elements and stances of IB work. Together you’ll be able to adapt a unit in a way that can serve as a model for other adaptations you’ll want to make with your colleagues after the institute ends.

International and IB schools also are often engaged in fostering a global perspective on issues, rather than keeping to a national focus on their particular country, which impacts their social studies work as well as the kinds of nonfiction topics that are most compelling to read, write, and talk about. Another aspect of this institute will be to learn from units of study that are especially rooted in nonfiction content, studying what makes them effective, and learning from them how to apply those principles to the goal of developing a global mindset.

Finally, you’ll learn ways to use checklists and other tools as formative assessments, on the way to helping kids achieve success on summative IB rubrics. And you’ll study how to help kids develop lifelong reading and writing practices. You’ll hear what we’ve learned about ways to powerfully use and adapt checklists in reading and writing, and how to turn checklists and teaching charts into student-directed tools that support independence and agency.

We’ll also look at the ethical stances and global awareness that inform the best of international school and IB curricula, studying how to infuse these across the curriculum and also into classroom structures. If we want to teach kids to be concerned with social justice, and participatory democracy, and activism, how do we infuse these into their ways of being in our classes and our classroom structures?

Join us at this institute, and plan to walk away with the tools and confidence to run a classroom or school that embodies the best of workshop and the best of IB principles.

Cost

$650/$600 NYC DOE

Where

This institute will be offered online, in real-time via Zoom, and will not be recorded for later distribution. We will accept attendees until the institute has reached capacity.