Submitted by: Heather Brubaker

Doing a professional development “deep dive” around some aspect of subject related progressive practice. This could draw on within department expertise and/or work with an outside consultant.

This year, the English department will focus on our practice as writer/teachers and teachers of writing. We will engage in an immersive day – a writing workshop – with periods of time to write and structured sessions for feedback and reflective work. Faculty can opt to work within one of the three strands below or to move between more than one over the course of the day: creative or personal writing, writing about teaching, or “doing student work” aka actually writing one’s own assignments or others’ assignments (either for the purpose of producing samples, or just to go through the exercise of doing what we ask our students to do). The orientation that we’d will bring to the work is that we are better teachers when we are closer to the practices we are asking our students to engage in, and we’d be seeking the learning from our own process of moving through ideation, generation, feedback, revision etc. After the retreat, we’ll gather later in the year to reflect on how this work has shifted or informed our classroom work. Department members are also seeking, variously: artistic or intellectual sustenance, a reconnection to the work of teacher as public intellectual, the chance to produce high-quality sample writing for use in the classroom.

We will do a full-day retreat (likely in January) and then follow up with a meeting in the spring.

Type of Work Focus: 

• • • Documenting the “story” of the preK-12 curriculum  
    • Doing a professional development “deep dive” around some aspect of subject related to progressive practice. This could draw on within department expertise and/or work with an outside consultant

Description of Work Focus: To map the social justice/activism strand in our program as it exists with an eye toward the following: Where are we studying social justice or reading/writing with a social justice lens? Where are we asking or encouraging students to take action or engage in activism? Where are the spots in our curriculum where we aren’t connecting to social justice or activism or could be more deeply invested in that work?

To share specific examples of best practices around reading/writing with a social justice focus and moving from learning to action. The goal in this second step is to apply those practices to places in our curriculum where we need to invent or reinvest in a more social justice/activism-oriented component. Ideally, we’d all emerge from this work with new approaches to a specific unit, project, or assignment that we could implement. 

Schedule for Work: We think a full-day or two half-day retreats would probably work best.