Empowering & Engaging Educators: Our 14th Elementary Conference in Review

Our 14th Elementary Conference theme was Engaging & Empowering Educators and we believe we did just that! Hundreds of elementary educators traveled to Concord, North Carolina to participate in three days of high quality professional development and collaboration.
This was one of our best conferences yet!


We were thrilled to have Dr. Maria Pitre-Martin,  Chief Academic and Digital Learning Officer for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction join us! Dr. Pitre-Martin kicked off a full day of learning on Monday morning with educational updates from our state, and words of gratitude for our educators that motivated everyone to continue working hard to do what is best for our students!


Our luncheon featured  Dr. John Hodge as our keynote speaker. He challenged everyone to “Be the One” who makes the difference in the life of a child and use the S.A.M.E. Pathway to override the effects of poverty in that child’s life. The Social, Academic,and Moral Environment of a child impacts a child’s behavior, learning, and beliefs. He further suggested that we as teachers must be what we want our students to become. We should teach our students that they need to SLANT (Sit up front, Lean forward, Ask questions, Nod their heads, and Talk to the teacher) to be successful in school and life. Distributive Leadership states that all of the kids belong to all of us and we should respond to all students, not just the ones in our class, with this thought in mind.

Breakout sessions were facilitated by educational leaders from our state and beyond. It was exciting to hear participants share their takeaways with one another in between sessions and swap ideas. There was great energy throughout the conference; it is always powerful when you are able to  bring passionate, enthusiastic educators together in the same place!

Our featured speakers were a mix of NCAEE returning favorites, such as Kathy Bumgardner, The Bag Ladies, and Justin Ashley, and NCAEE newcomers, Rick Jetter, North Carolina Teacher of the Year Lisa Godwin, and Kyle Greene. Each of these speakers brought great energy, passion, and delivered powerful sessions that left our participants begging for more!

Justin Ashley closed out our conference by sharing his personal story through The Balanced Teacher Path: How to Teach, Live, and Be Happy. With equal parts humor and wisdom, Justin analyzed four key aspects of every teacher's life—career, social, physical/emotional, and financial—and offered practical advice to bring these areas into sync, reigniting a passion for teaching in the process! It was the perfect way to end an amazing three days of learning, connecting, and fun.

Thank you to all of our attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and featured speakers who made this conference so wonderful! Our Board is still going through the feedback forms and reflecting on the overall conference experience. Though this year's conference was excellent, we will strive to make our 15th Elementary Conference even better! Planning will begin soon. In the meantime, please save the dates of October 28th-30th, 2018 and stay tuned for more information!

Experience Our Conference Through Tweets!

Couldn't make it to our conference OR just want to relive all of the conference goodness?! Check out the Storify below to experience it through tweets!

What Are Your Thoughts?

 What were your favorite sessions? What were the best parts of the 14th Elementary Conference for you? How will you engage and empower your students as a result of participating in this unique professional development opportunity? Share your thoughts below and let the learning and collaboration continue!

Make it Memorable

The field of education is slowly becoming mechanical.  Teachers are expected to complete more paperwork and prove that their students understand the concept using a variety of data points.  School days are micromanaged to the minute of what students are expected to be doing, where they go, and how they complete certain activities.  With our endless checklists and constant hustle to get from one activity to the next, we often forget to engage students to the point where we make learning memorable.

What are your students going to remember about your class next year? What will they remember when they their 30s?  Our students deserve to have fond memories of their elementary years. It is our duty to create safe places for our students to learn in a more memorable way.  Open your mind and think outside of the box.  What Problem Based Learning (PBL) ideas can you use?  Can you base your entire unit around one concept or idea?

This year in my third grade class we based our entire Forces and Motion, Heat Transfer, and Matter units on real-life events.  Through teaching in this manner I noticed that my students more engaged than with our normal science experiments and PBLs.

During these units we used the World Series to study forces at work in baseball.  We connected with what students were learning about in reading by experimenting with the Titanic.  We then completed a school-wide PBL on the Miracle on the Hudson, with each grade level connecting this event to their standards.  Every grade level visited Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte to view the actual Miracle on the Hudson airplane. The museum staff adapted their centers to tie into each grade level’s PBL.

We brought in a passenger from the Miracle on the Hudson to speak to the students about her experience on this flight.  The next day students arrived to see our classroom transformed into an airplane.  I portrayed a flight attendant, checking tickets for every student that boarded Flight 1549.  The tickets were created with real passenger names and seats.  We watched the safety video, then followed the audio from the cockpit as the plane descended into the Hudson River.  Students had to brace for impact and escape once the plane crash landed.
 

We had a discussion about the science behind the crash, then wrote stories from the point of view of the passengers on board.  We designed and weighed down paper airplanes with paperclips, then performed water landings using these airplanes.

We then paired with fifth grade and researched aviation throughout history.  Each class built a large model airplane of their assigned era.  Classes were split into six groups.  Five of these groups built one part of the airplane.  Group six was responsible for identifying problems during the building process and for putting the entire plane together.  Each group had to perfect their communication skills to make sure their airplane was symmetrical, that the sections fit together and that each piece was proportional.

As a culminating activity, our school partnered with Carolinas Aviation Museum for a Night at the Museum with stations set up for each grade level to showcase their products.  All of our families were able to attend for free.

The whole school PBL idea involved all of our students and made learning the curriculum memorable. These types of lessons and events are what make school more engaging and unforgettable.  I want to challenge you to make your teaching memorable.  Find more ways to bring excitement into your day.


About the Author:
Megan Charlton is a third grade STEM Teacher at Patriots STEM Elementary School in Concord, NC.  She has taught Kindergarten, Fifth Grade and Third Grade.  She is in her 12th year of teaching, all of which have been in North Carolina.  She graduated from Kentucky Christian University with a B.S. In Elementary Education and Bible.  Mrs. Charlton serves on the NCAEE Board as Teacher At Large.  She blogs at www.CharltoninCharge.com.

Create to Motivate: Put the Fun Back in the Classroom!

By Dr. Shirley Disseler

Often educators find themselves perplexed by the lack of motivation and enthusiasm of students in their classrooms. As teachers it is often hard to get excited about teaching when the creativity has been eliminated from the classroom and replaced by program after program of canned curriculum mandates. Most educators learned from the beginning about the importance of the role of play and imagination in learning through the study of such theorists as Vygotsky, Piaget, and Brunner; but we fail today to find much of what these theories purport in our current classes.

With the new Common Core, coupled with the Next Generation of Science Standards, things are about to change. STEM is presently in the forefront in almost every state in the nation. As we allow students to once again explore what it means to learn through discovery and imagination we will see the motivation and engagement increase. The need for increased literacy in the classroom is evident, but should be done through other areas such as science, math, social studies and art.

Companies like Lego Education are working hard to bring creativity and imagination back into the classroom through core content. With products designed for the classroom teacher such as Story Starters, teachers can teach parts of a story, story telling, social studies reenactments, and cultural education. With the STEM program, students can create solutions to real world problems, and investigate real engineering concepts, and with robotics animals can come alive and lead to research about biomes, and adaptations. These are only a few of the many ideas that are coming out of the work of curriculum and development at Lego Education.

Other companies are beginning to create more hands-on minds-on approaches to reading, math, science, and social studies that make students want to learn about topics that are difficult. With the technology available to students today all content can come alive with the push of a button and many are using this to their advantage with robotic adventures. Engineering is Elementary units bring together, in a wonderfully integrated format, all areas of content. Students are taken through engineering challenges involving environmental issues that require research, journaling, and presentation from grade one. As elementary educators we must work to make motivation and engagement a priority if we are to see a rise in test scores. If we are looking to enjoy teaching students who enjoy school we have to put “play” back into the classroom hidden within the content. We have to seek to find the fun in school!

Recently, students attended a full day of STEM exploration at a low performing school in NC. The students in grade two were mesmerized by the experiments they were allowed to do, third graders were excited by robotic animals that they created, kindergartners created story sets and retold stories with Lego bricks.  One student said “If I could do this everyday, I would not be out so much!”

We need to create this learning environment on a daily basis. Students deserve it, we deserve it, and the world deserves it!  Allowing students to create will lead them to be motivated to learn whatever we want them to learn. Nothing will be too hard if structured correctly and leveled appropriately! Challenge them to reach the highest level of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy. Challenge them to create. If we create challenge we will motivate our students to learn. Rigor is where the motivation lies in curriculum. Rigor can be fun, exciting, yet frustrating. We cannot be afraid to challenge young minds and stretch ourselves to learn new topics. Teaching will be different in the next decade than it has ever been before, but as professionals we should embrace and welcome the changes for these changes will allow us a bit more creativity once again!

Dr. Shirley Disseler is an Assistant Professor of Elementary & Middle Grades Education and the STEM Coordinator at High Point University in High Point, NC. Dr. Disseler is a member of the Global Lego Education Advisory Panel where she shares her expertise in product development for current and future products. She is also on the Executive Board for the NC Association of Elementary Educators, currently serving as Secretary.