Redbird Educator Series
The Redbird Educator Series, hosted by the Borg Center at Illinois State University, features College of Education faculty in one-hour virtual professional development sessions designed for PK-12 teachers. In this series, faculty share their research and evidence-based practices on relevant topics in education. Join us for each session or choose the ones that are most relevant to you. Each session is free and you could earn one PD credit.
Fall 2020 Schedule
Wednesday, September 23 at 4 p.m.
Building anti-racist educators through embodied contemplative practices
Becky Beucher, Assistant Professor, School of Teaching and Learning
The purpose of this webinar is to support teachers of diverse identities in understanding how the nervous system responds to uncomfortable situations and to learn methods and tools for building resilience in the nervous system. Participants will gain an introductory understanding for how bearing witness to each others’ stories about race and racism while attending to embodied reactions can function as an important mechanism for building community and developing empathic stances towards each others’ stories. Understanding how to sit in discomfort, interrogate that discomfort, and learn from our bodies why we feel what we are feeling when we talk about race, racism, and anti-racist work is imperative to engaging anti-racist practices and behaviors. This webinar is designed for those who desire to do the hard work of sitting with discomfort around conversations about race and who are interested in learning how to bear witness to others’ stories from a compassionate place, while attending to oneself. We will maintain an active awareness around how who we are (our identities) shapes how we will react to and have the capacity to hold space for others to speak about race and racial injustice.
Thursday, October 8 at 4 p.m.
Inclusive mathematics: e-learning methods and routines that promote mathematical thinking
Tara Kaczorowski, Assistant Professor, Department of Special Education
This webinar will focus on inclusive, research-supported methods to teach mathematics to elementary students with and without disabilities and how to facilitate this in e-learning environments. Historically, special education methods for teaching mathematics have explicitly taught basic skills like fact memorization and calculation procedures. Still prominent in schools today is an emphasis on instructional methods that teach students “tricks” that actually circumvent instead of promote mathematical thinking. ALL students can think mathematically. During this session, we will discuss powerful math practices like number talks, open ended questions, and three act tasks that facilitate rich discourse and real world problem solving. We will emphasize how you can scaffold those practices by utilizing principles of universal design for learning and supplementing with targeted explicit instruction for students with varying learning needs. Additionally, we will address how these practices can be facilitated in both synchronous and asynchronous e-learning environments.
Tuesday, October 27 at 4 p.m.
Rethinking the role of knowledge in the literacy classroom
Courtney Hattan, Assistant Professor, School of Teaching and Learning
Knowledge plays an inarguably critical role in reading comprehension. When considering the science of reading, it is important to engage with varying theoretical frameworks and empirical research that inform our collective understanding regarding the intersection of knowledge and literacy in K-12 classrooms. Therefore, the purpose of this webinar is to address three tensions related to the role of knowledge in K-12 literacy instruction and offer research-based perspectives on how educators can rethink knowledge to support children in learning from text.
First, I will reframe the “knowledge gap” and encourage educators to operate from a more asset-based perspective. Second, I will define the terms activating, integrating, and revising knowledge and will highlight instructional techniques that have been empirically examined in the literature to support these processes. Third, I will suggest that, although content knowledge is important, other types of knowledge are also critical to the literacy process, such as cultural and linguistic knowledge, principled knowledge, strategic knowledge, knowledge of multimodal texts, knowledge of multiple text use, and conditional knowledge. I will define each of these types of knowledge and provide examples of how they can be leveraged and taught in literacy classrooms.
Spring 2021 Schedule
Sessions coming soon.