This past weekend, I was lucky enough to attend ASCD for free, thanks to CSTA! It was great to just hop on the light rail and end up at a really great education conference.

Saturday started on a really high note with the keynote speaker, Brandon P. Fleming. He told a powerful story about how one educator can change the trajectory of a student’s entire life. He wrote it all down in his book MISEDUCATED, which I will definitely add to my TBR pile. He is now doing amazing things, teaching black students from Atlanta the background knowledge and skills to be highly competitive in the debate world. He is changing lives, and it’s super impressive.

I chose to attend presentations about collaboration and active learning, which will force me to stretch and improve building community among my students. It’s definitely an area of growth for me. I’m a big fan of self-paced and mastery learning, but the classroom community does suffer, and I see it as something I can work on from the beginning of the year.

I also attended a good literacy presentation that taught me how to help my students tackle difficult text. While CS doesn’t seem like it should be about literacy, it’s all literacy all the time — new vocabulary, new syntax rules, and a lot of thinking. I’ve never taken a literacy class or even had training, so now I feel better about tackling FRQs tomorrow in my classroom.

Some really cool resources that I learned about or found:

• Total Participation Techniques by Dr. William Himmele and Dr. Pérsida Himmele

• The Boundless Classroom – by Nathan Lang-Raad & James V Witty