2024 ICTE Fall Conference

Four years ago, our team, partnered with our special education team, confronted our brutal reality that our outcomes in reading as measured by ISASP testing did not align with our mission statement: All students will learn at high levels. About 25% of our students in grades 3-11 were not yet proficient in ELA. We were all doing really good work, but something had to change if our mission statement was going to be something more than a poster on the wall. Join us to learn about our intense, systemic changes, especially what we’ve done at the high school that have led to more than 90% of our 9-11 students being proficient readers…and we’re still not done.

Our Presentation

An overview of why teach grammar and then a few different methods. Including a chance for those in attendance to share any success that they have had with teaching grammar.

As Megan Mayhew Bergman observes in _The Kenyon Review_, “While nearly all writing observes and processes the world around us, overtly socially-conscious writing is risky.” Many of the writers from the English Renaissance were as courageous as they were cunning, but current pedagogy often ignores the crucible of political intrigue and personal peril in which their witticisms were wielded. The Elizabethans’ affections for cryptology, rhetoric and wordplay created a synergy that often allowed them to avoid not just book bans, but beheadings! Come join in a celebration of risky writing as we sleuth the puns and politics of Shakespeare, Lanier, and Marlowe and find new appreciation for contemporary social poets like Gwendolyn Brooks.