Session Titles, Descriptions & Materials

When many of us think of “speaking and listening” skills in our classroom, we imagine formal speeches, presentations, and discussions: the large culminating assignments. Rethinking this allows us to change the way we expect students to ‘speak up’ and how we assess their skill levels. Reevaluating ERWC module activities through the lens of diversifying speaking and listening opportunities in your classroom prevents the silence that stops the spread of diverse ideas, increases sharing of experiences, and allows students to participate in vital subject standards in meaningful ways. We will discuss strategies and differentiated ERWC lesson options where students find a variety of opportunities that allow them to unmute and reach their full potential.

My session explores the challenges English Learners (ELs) face in mastering both language and content, demonstrating how threshold concepts can bridge language acquisition and deeper learning. Participants will learn to identify key threshold concepts within specific subjects and develop instructional strategies that simultaneously support ELs' language development and conceptual understanding. My session would include visual aids, examples of collaborative activities, and transparent language instruction, to make complex concepts comprehensible and empower ELs. I'd discuss concepts such as creating a supportive, inclusive classroom environment where ELs feel comfortable taking risks and participating actively. Strategies for assessing ELs understanding of threshold concepts, sensitive to their language needs and cultural backgrounds, will also be discussed.

In modern pop culture, the word brat refers to someone who is confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant. This new definition celebrates individuality and a winning attitude.. In other words, a person with a high degree of agency. Secondary school is a challenging time for students and teachers (and parents). The ERWC curriculum has tremendous potential for students’ academic and social-emotional development. Adolescents can be advantaged through the social connections and social bonding attained through their instruction that is more student centered. This session will provide a model for establishing a classroom configuration that promotes agency, literacy development and critical thinking known as “Cooperative Literacy.” This session will also feature an innovative “Quickwrite” protocol built on this interactive format We will demonstrate how to form mutually interdependent learning teams to provide instructional options for small group, whole group, and independent learning. Also, we will share classroom and the management tools that accompany this approach. Materials will be provided for attendees.

This session, an Introduction to the ERWC, is meant for new people who have not attended a 24 hour ERWC training. This 2-session workshop (You must stay for the two sessions) will give the basics about ERWC. We will do some hands-on activities, learn the history and goals for the ERWC, and share information about what makes it so special!

This session takes a practical look at how AI tools can support—not replace—student learning in writing. As students move from tentative to more confident writers, AI can offer useful scaffolds without doing the thinking for them. We’ll dig into strategies for using AI throughout the writing process, with an emphasis on promoting critical thinking, reflection, and voice. We’ll also work with a simple framework to help both teachers and students tell the difference between learning and cheating when it comes to AI. You’ll leave with adaptable activities for a range of grade levels and some new ideas for using AI as a writing partner that supports, rather than shortcuts, authentic writing.

Technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, has thrown teachers into a quandary. How can we develop students’ critical literacy skills when they are being lured away from anything complex and tempted to let a machine do all their reading and writing -- all their thinking! -- for them? Carol Jago will demonstrate instructional moves that can help students increase their stamina as readers and develop greater confidence in themselves as writers. Based upon current research in adolescent literacy and evidence from the latest NAEP assessment, the session will offer texts and tasks designed to engage students in their own learning.

This session shares my experience building a unit using Jeff Zentner’s The Serpent King, an accessible young adult text with themes appropriate to older students.  I will share my process for designing, writing, and teaching the unit, which incorporated a literary text, reader response, ERWC strategies, and other resources relevant to my students' lived experiences.  Though I did not set out to write a full ERWC 11th-grade module, I found that I could incorporate many of the ERWC strategies (a shared basket of best practices) that pushed my students to engage in rhetorical thinking about literature with a book they couldn’t put down. What felt daunting at first, became a wonderful examination of my practice and pushed me to create something new proving the versatility and adaptability of the ERWC model.

This session discusses Artsteps as a tool for fostering student engagement and cultivating multiple literacies in the ERWC classroom. Artsteps, a free-to-use, digital platform that allows users to create immersive virtual museum environments, invites students to embark on multimodal explorations of texts and issues using a collaborative interface. We will examine best practices for instructors interested in using virtual spaces to supplement language and literacy learning, as well as strategies for enhancing students’ progression along the arc. We will conclude the workshop by brainstorming potential ideas for integrating Artsteps into the ERWC classroom, and attendees will participate in a short workshop in which they build their own virtual museums. Bring your laptops and creativity!

In this session, we explore how Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding invites students to navigate the liminal spaces between trauma and healing, past and present, language and identity. Designed for the forthcoming 10th grade ERWC curriculum, the unit supports English, Spanish, and ELD classes alike. Participants will examine how rhetorical grammar and affordances bring the play’s emotional intensity to life, while comparisons between 1936 Spain and 2024 California wildfires offer relevant, localized connections. The concept of duende—as explored in Lorca’s poetry and Tracy K. Smith’s “Duende”—grounds discussions of art, sorrow, and resilience. Through argument-based writing and civil discourse, students will engage deeply with the text and the world around them. Join us to discover how literature can be a space of critical reflection, emotional growth, and interdisciplinary learning.

Based on the webinar by the same name from the fall 2024 semester, this presentation focuses on strategies for finding rhetorical affordances in literary texts written by authors of color. Affordances are elements of a text that can be used as models for teaching and as starting places for lessons on language strategies and effectiveness. Rhetorical affordances highlight the ways that authors construct their text in relation to an audience. Drawing on Jennifer Fletcher’s approach to audience in literary texts in Teaching Arguments, this presentation highlights the role of primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences at the rhetorical level, the genre level, and at the language level and will engage the conference audience in naming and practicing strategies for seeking out rhetorical affordances to recast module texts as needed for new learning.

As the world's digital reality has exploded, so too have the demands placed on students and teachers to participate and become literate in these online communities. Drawing from the experiences of NCTE’s Digital Democratic Dialogue project, participants will discuss how to work with students to produce multimedia texts that expose them to 21st century rhetorical experiences. This will include a deep dive into specific partnerships between digital tools and human voice in software, digital media and Gen AI and how to teach students to be fully prepared to interact in the continually changing rhetorical situations of today. Additionally, we will discuss how to use our newfound digital literacy to engage in civic discourse, and how online platforms can foster working through difficult conversations and amplify traditionally marginalized voices.

In this session, led by the writer of a new Grade 8 module for ERWC-ELD, participants will explore from the perspective of a writer how ERWC-ELD middle school modules support culturally sustaining, high-quality integrated and designated ELD. Participants will engage with a new Grade 8 module grounded in the core text Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America, edited by Margarita Longoria (2021). Participants will do a deep dive into some of the module's innovative activities and view classroom videos taken during a workshop of the module at a Fresno Unified middle school. Engaging from the perspective of a module writer, participants will explore how the ERWC-ELD module design achieves its objective: to equip teachers with the tools for high-quality integrated and aligned designated ELD instruction, and in classrooms where middle school EL students thrive.

To live in a diverse society is to live in an ever-transforming matrix of conflicting identifications and divisions. We celebrate our our identities and negotiate our divisions in order to form and maintain a vibrant whole. However, an aspiring demagogue can exacerbate and exploit division to gain power through a scapegoating process, projecting all the ills of society on a targeted group. In this session, informed by concepts from Kenneth Burke, we will explore the animus, the projection, the rhetoric, and the magical thinking behind the scapegoating process, while we brainstorm and workshop strategies and countermeasures for our classrooms.

Through curated passages from Baldwin's 1963 speech, this session aims to examine how we are the very accomplices to reinforcing that which we claim to be countering in our classroom. Coupled with excerpts from "A Talk to Teachers," visual frameworks of power, privilege, and supremacies will be a gateway to critical conversations between small and whole group analysis discussions. The aim is for participants to leave this session with more questions that will cause for closer, critical examination of our own professional and pedagogical decisions affecting the impacts on literacy, our work sites, and ourselves. Participants will also leave with added perspective to our social and global conversations surrounding power dynamics in our society.

Participants will learn how to level up how they teach writing by leveraging existing ERWC curriculum and resources. Using ERWC 3.0 modules, mini-modules, and supplementary resources, we explore teaching strategies and frameworks that promote teaching writing well. Special attention is given to offering feedback and encouraging revision, approaches that help writers develop their skills, identities, and agency. This session is intended to benefit ERWC teachers who want to maximize their ability to teach writing well, which will ultimately benefit our student writers.

In this presentation, participants will use the article “Want to Get Into College?  Learn to Fail” from the What’s Next module to offer students a framework with which to challenge assumptions about themselves and their suitability for college. First, participants will read the article using the protocols outlined in the ERWC curriculum.  Then, participants will walk through a multi-step process as a way to help students test the durability of the assumptions they have formed about themselves to help make a more conscious choice.  The presentation will include a culminating assignment where students will consult their future selves to help appraise their present circumstances.

A student’s understanding of a text is a journey in itself: How they are understanding (or not understanding) can determine their success in the classroom. Multilingual learners need rich environments to engage in quality reading, writing, and academic talk throughout their literacy development journey. Students can develop their cognitive skills through synthesizing multiple sources to build strong and persuasive arguments. Join us as we share research-based cognitive strategies to support students in reading and synthesizing multiple texts to produce arguments, opening doorways for further wonder and inspiration.

As educational policies and oversight evolve, counter-narratives are increasingly under scrutiny, especially in some communities. One way to foster critical thinking and inclusivity while navigating these challenges is by pairing controversial topics with canon texts. This session explores the ERWC unit pairing of Othello with Gender, Language, and Culture and strives to demonstrate how traditional, classic literature can serve as a bridge to new perspectives. By framing complex social issues within widely accepted texts, students engage with counter-narratives in a way that feels accessible and relevant. This approach empowers students with the language and tools to analyze challenging themes thoughtfully, encouraging open-minded discussion and deeper understanding.

AI tools are changing writing instruction fast, bringing both new possibilities and new challenges to our classrooms. Come learn practical ways to use AI tools that support real student writing while keeping academic honesty at the forefront. We'll look at tools like Brisk Boost and Magic School AI that can help with reading, understanding, and writing feedback, helping bridge the gap between where students are and where they need to be. Using examples from my own classroom, you'll see how thoughtful use of AI can support all students while maintaining the integrity of their writing. This session is perfect for teachers trying to figure out how to balance traditional writing instruction with these powerful new AI tools.

Participants will explore ERWC-ELD modules including new middle school modules based on texts chosen to reflect the diversity of California students. Participants will engage as learners and think metacognitively as teachers about how to support students in reading high level, complex texts as a way to grow student language. By scaffolding challenging text and supporting students as they discover “How English Works,” modules provide equity and access to college and career readiness and a pipeline to advanced high school coursework.

This interactive session focuses on strategies from ERWC modules and resources that foster linguistic dexterity and innovation. We examine activities for language exploration and awareness, including sentence unpacking, blackout templates, and collaborative text reconstruction. We also consider the extent to which AI chatbots and other predictive or corrective language apps (e.g., autocorrect or spellcheck) support or impede authentic human communication and student autonomy. Finally, we contextualize this discussion with frameworks for assets-based, linguistically sustaining English language development that cultivates rhetorical thinking as a humanizing counter-method to prescriptive approaches to language instruction.

Building on last year’s ERWC webinar “Rhetorical Affordances: Recasting Texts for New Learning,” this session features the powerful rhetorical affordances (pedagogical potential or opportunities) of rhetorical strategies, including the strategies of antithesis and argument by elimination, as well as complementary rhetorical strategies of collection such as paradox.  We will focus on presentations by Audre Lorde (“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”), Martin Luther King Jr (“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”), and Malcolm X (“The Ballot or the Bullet”).  My goals are to help participants: 1) approach the rhetorical strategies of the texts they teach as powerful rhetorical affordances; and 2) reimagine the power of such rhetorical strategies within the ERWC reading-to-writing arc, including reading with and against the grain and composing preliminary and culminating assignments.