The Asilomar Conference is based on sustained group discussions following the teachers-teaching-teachers, collaborative learning philosophy. Resource and chair persons in each group do not function as lecturers. Rather, participants share information and insights as the discussions evolve. The emphasis is on good conversation and the pursuit of intellectual interests. For the group to maintain integrity, it is necessary that the same people stay together for the weekend. It is also essential that people prepare by reading the suggested books for the section they choose.
Asilomar 59 Group Sessions
1. Works of Nobel Note VI: Paul Scott, The Raj Quartet
GENERAL ENRICHMENT
Through their reading, the participants will experience the fine writing in the Raj Quartet, then evaluate and discuss Scott’s carefully crafted characters, his mastery of a variety of narrative styles (letters, memoirs, and dialogue), and his detailing the effects of the Raj upon both British, Hindu, and Muslim characters.
Our discussions will be within the total group as well as in small break-out groups where specific female and male characters may be looked at and where specific sections of the text may be read aloud in order to assess and enjoy the quality of Scott’s writing. Comparisons with the television series “The Jewel in the Crown” and the Rushdie novel of a previous year’s group (Midnight’s Children) may become important; but the emphasis of the group will be on Scott’s narrative mastery.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: The Raj Quartet (4 volumes: The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of the Spoils) any edition
2. Dorothy Allison: Two or Three Things I Know for Sure
GENERAL ENRICHMENT
Dorothy Allison presents an unflinching vision of the ugliness and injustices of poverty in her works. Yet, she holds faith in the redemption and power of love, one of the major themes in her works. Join us as we read aloud from Bastard Out of Carolina and Two or Three Things I Know for Sure as we further explore the theme of the human search for love and acceptance.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: Bastard Out of Carolina, and Two or Three Things I Know For Sure by Dorothy Allison
3. Teaching Fight Club
GRADES 9-12 TEACHING MATERIALS PROVIDED
Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel is intense, engaging, and highly literate. Participants will discuss what makes Fight Club teachable, and will examine the struggles, responsibilities, and rewards involved when teachers include this or other challenging works in our curriculum. We will model, practice, and create classroom lessons.
I am Jack’s discussion group. Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel is intense, engaging, and highly literate. Saying you’ll teach Fight Club raises blood pressure in some colleagues, pulses with some students, and smiles from anyone who’s read it. Participants will discuss what makes Fight Club teachable, and will examine the struggles, responsibilities, and incredible educational rewards involved when teachers include Fight Club or other challenging and challenged works of literature in our curriculum. We will model, practice, and create classroom lessons full of great ideas for teaching Fight Club, with possible topics of focus to include: Getting Fight Club approved; , Use of Second Person Narration; The Place of History; The Individual vs. Society; Real vs. Artificial; Gender; Existentialism; Fight Club and the High School Literary Canon; & any and all other ideas the group members have.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk; visit www.chuckpalahniuk.net
4. A Culture of Discontent: Steinbeck and the 21st Century
GRADES 9-COLLEGE GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
Through the eyes of Steinbeck, explore the cultural forces of his writing and the parallels between today’s times and that of the turbulent decade of The Grapes of Wrath. Discussion will be guided by Steinbeck scholars living in Salinas Valley, a Steinbeck biographer, and a Cannery Row worker from the 30’s.
Discussion will center on how the American dream and the politics of place and circumstance create a contemporary economic and social unrest for readers today.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: The Grapes of Wrath or Cannery Row or In Dubious Battle and bring best practices to share.
5. Carver & Chekhov: The Art of the Short Story
GRADES 9-COLLEGE USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
We will savor the fascinating parallels between two masters of the short story. Raymond Carver’s stories are luminous and profound—and what’s more, students love them. He frequently acknowledged the example and inspiration of Anton Chekhov. Examining their stories side-by-side, we will discover unexpected depths and surprises in both writers, and ways to bring them to life for our students.
Two pairings of stories (Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” and Chekhov’s “Misery;” Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and Chekhov’s “About Love”) will provide the foundation for our conversation. Two sessions will be devoted to a thorough comparison/contrast of these stories; we will use classroom discussion techniques as well as a “book club” format to guide our conversation. A third session will be a “short story practicum” in which we share ways to engage our students in these (and other) short stories. The fourth session will focus on Carver’s story “Errand” (a self-conscious homage to Chekhov) and a selection of the writers’ letters, which will allow us to consider their artistic credos.
This workshop will be in the classic Asilomar tradition, i.e., a heavy emphasis on group process and on the contribution of group members. The resource person is a passionate and appreciative reader of both Carver and Chekhov, but is no scholar and will prepare no lectures or “presentations.”
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: A list of pre-conference readings (4 or 5 short stories) will be mailed to group participants in August.
6. Puccini – With and Without Tears
GRADES 9-COLLEGE GENERAL ENRICHMENT
The San Francisco Opera is presenting 4 Puccini operas during the 2009 – 2010 season: La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the Golden West), a Wild West Melodrama; El Tabarro, a horror story set in Paris; Sur Angelica (Sister Angelica), a religious fantasy; and Gianni Schicchi, a farce set in Florence, Italy. We will view, listen to, and discuss these operas.
7. Children’s Books, All Grown Up
GRADES 9-COLLEGE USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS
In a handful of pages, good picture books artfully develop plot and characters in service of a greater point. Ostensibly simple and familiar, they unfold to allow students' analysis, encouraging critical writing. Through reading and discussion, we'll savor the texts and consider their value for teaching. Please bring favorites from your own collections.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: As many children’s book titles as possible—a smattering of Dr. Seuss, William Steig, and Russell Hoban would be a good start.
8. Young Adult Literature: Fostering Hope and Compassion
GRADES 9-COLLEGE USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS
Young Adult literature's relevance makes it an appealing and motivating genre, one which can also serve to develop a sense of global citizenship. We will explore text-based activities that link the award-winning YA texts to broader social and political issues. A reading list will be provided in advance but please bring copies of your favorites.
Young Adult literature's relevance and immediacy make it an appealing and motivating genre, one which can also serve to develop a sense of global citizenship. The question I would like to explore with you is the following: How can we use these texts to create an awareness that is both compassionate and hopeful, one that creates a sense of positive engagement with the world. We will explore text-based activities that link the award-winning YA texts to broader social and political issues, share favorites, and consider strategies to create compassionate citizens of the world.
Related resources:
The Bellwether Prize for Fiction: http://www.bellwetherprize.org
Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA)
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa/yalsa.cfm
Richie’s Picks
http://www.richiespicks.com
PRE-CONFERENCE READING:Reading list and relevant articles provided in advance.
9. River of Words
GRADES K-COLLEGE USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
In this poetry writing session we will write a lot, focusing on the importance of place. Learn fun and engaging ways to spark your students’ (and your own) imaginations by writing that informs and inspires. River of Words® is a place-based K-12 program created to promote watershed awareness, literacy and the arts
PRE-CONFERENCE READING:Reading list and relevant articles provided in advance.
10. Ekphrastika: Artistic Dialogue for Our Classroom and Ourselves
GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION
Ekphrastic poetry is conversation between pieces of art. In this cross-curricular session, we’ll interpret a work of visual art, then create poetry that reflects or “dialogues” with that painting, photograph, etc. Please bring your pen, pencil, camera, and/or paintbrush to share our writing and visual experiences with each other and our students!
This session can also work “in reverse;” that is, writers can start from printed poems and create pieces of visual art. We’ll share paintings, photographs, sculpture, and poems that create an atmosphere conducive to dialogue and exchange with the art and each other. We will contact you with additional information once you’ve signed up to join us.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING:Your own favorite art and/or poetry books; we’ll supply more!
11. Writing on the Road
GRADES K-COLLEGE GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS
Teachers of writing rarely have time to practice the craft of writing themselves. Participants select a local destination and are given the time to write. Group members respond to one another’s drafts. Spend a weekend writing and brushing up on how to get students to respond to one another’s writing.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: None
12. Thinking through Nature
GRADES K-COLLEGE GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
This session focuses on using interdisciplinary outdoor education to foster identification with the environment. Activities will include eco-critical readings of Steinbeck and Ricketts, as well as practice with eco-composition and field journaling. Presenters have led groups to bioregions including Baja, the Monterey Area, Humboldt County, and regions of Oregon.
This three-part workshop will take place mostly outdoors. Presenters will introduce existing research on and arguments in favor of outdoor experiential education. Second, the group will spend the day in the field practicing both reading and writing in a context that highlights the natural world, and discuss how these practices enhance interdisciplinary education. Participants will be encouraged to keep a journal. Finally, the group will workshop the writing they did over the weekend, and discuss how these activities can be used in a variety of classroom settings.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: None
13. Using Teacher Inquiry to Inform Practice and Influence Policy
GRADES 4-12 USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
Teacher Inquiry groups are a powerful way of investigating and improving one’s practice. In this session veteran and new teachers will choose a burning question about their classroom practice, create an inquiry project, and learn how to form site-based inquiry groups. Teachers are encouraged to come with others from their site (administrators welcome, too) or as individuals.
This session will help veteran and new teachers formulate workable questions about their practice that can be researched in their own classrooms or school sites.
We will each search for the burning question we would like to answer this year about how we make our classrooms tick. We will write a little and share a lot, help each other formulate a workable research question, and then explore the steps that will allow us to do research based on our own teaching.
Teachers are encouraged to come with others from their site (administrators welcome, too) or as individuals. Our weekend Asilomar group will serve as a model for how a successful school site inquiry support group works, but teachers can also use these techniques to do inquiry on their own.
Who can use teacher inquiry?
Teachers who are working on site evaluation projects. Methods are those used by Project Impact (UC Berkeley) to help teachers become reflective about their practice and generate data using professionally legitimate methods. (WASC self-study materials ask about this)
New teachers who are now required to carry out inquiry as part of their clear credential work, and want to learn to frame productive questions and to select the research techniques to answer them.
Teachers who don’t like working in isolation.
Teachers who are interested in working on cross-disciplinary projects.
Teachers who want to help find changes that will make their schools (or their individual classrooms) more humane and more effective.
Teachers of older students who want to help them formulate higher order questions to carry out original research projects on their own.
14. The Personal Juice of Learning and Teaching: Engagement Through Fun and Meaning
GRADES 9-COLLEGE GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
Before achievement, God created engagement. Learning should bring our students alive! How can your unique teaching personality best enliven your students’ learning, growing souls? How indeed? Make some fun. Make some meaning. Then think about standards. Pondering principles and practices, sharing tools and techniques, we’ll leave this session ready to guide our students to the juicy springs of engaged learning. Bring classroom examples.
An early-career English department chair joins forces with a veteran teacher/author to explore the roles personalities play in engaged learning. How can we assess our own teaching personality types and find methods to interact with our students’ personalities to optimize learning engagement in our classrooms? Interactive, risky, random quizzes and games build interest –and fun. Sustained purposeful reflection, ubiquitous questioning, and award-winning projects build meaning. In this interactive session, we’ll have fun building meaning as we learn new ways to engage our students in learning.
15. Film as Discourse
GRADES 6-COLLEGE USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
From satellite television to websites to mobile phones to movies, film/video continues to integrate with and change both society and how people “receive” information. Participants will explore the filmmaking-literacy connection through a fun, intensive filmmaking seminar, taking ‘projects’ through concept, shooting, editing, and finishing phases. If possible, bring video cameras.
16. Beyond the Bells and Whistles: Connecting Students with Literature Using 21st Century Skills
GRADES 9-COLLEGE GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
Participants will learn effective strategies to help their students gain the following: a better understanding of literary criticism and effective strategies for comparing major literary works, exploring literary allusions and improving their research skills. They will create “Google sites” incorporating all of these components and share their sites with the class. Laptops with wireless capabilities would be very helpful for participants.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING:A website will be created prior to Asilomar 59 for pre-conference information and materials. Check back for a link to that site.
17. Civil Rights History and ELA & SS State Standards
USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
This interactive workshop will explore how Civil Rights history can be taught throughout the school year as part of one’s scheduled curriculum. We will provide handouts of film, book and curriculum resources accumulated by the SF Freedom School in collaboration with middle and high school teachers.
We will ask the participants the share what they believe are the underlying principles of U.S. history or literature—e.g., democratic themes or threads that recur from the colonial conquest to today. We would also like everyone to share an example of how they teach such basic principles. Handouts will include suggestions as to how to tie Civil Rights History to the revised California state standards, emphasizing the organizing tradition in U.S. history. By exploring how ordinary, everyday people make change (and not just the leaders or “heroes”), we hope to provide teachers with some ideas of how to further “dismantle the master’s narrative” as well as help teachers present a multi-faceted approach to empowerment. We believe the detailed story of the Civil Rights Movement can inspire students to feel empowered today.
Links to Related Sources:
San Francisco Freedom School / Education and Democracy
Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement
Rethinking Schools Civil Rights Teaching Resource list
Liberation Curriculum at the King Institute, Stanford
Teaching Tolerance: Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching
Without Sanctuary
Sojourn to the Past
Civil Rights 2.0
18. Oh, the Drama of Middle School
GRADES 6-12 USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
This interactive session will provide participants with inexpensive, easy to implement student activities which fit either English or drama classes. Come gather new ideas to motivate your students. We will focus on: creativity, character development, plot, theme, setting, and poetry interpretation using masks, pantomime, puppetry, tall tales, reader’s theatre, scene extensions, and role playing.
19. Cross-Cultural Fluency among High Schools, Here and There
GRADES 9-COLLEGE USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION
Explore how to adapt online technologies to promote writing and Cross-Cultural Fluency (CCF). Focus is on the evolving uses of (Internet) genres, e.g. blogs, email, etc. to create and refine written exchanges with outside cultures. Participate in designing prompts and assessing the effects of interacting with remote audiences on students’ writing improvement and cultural fluency.
Visit the following URL for more information: http://www.humboldt.edu/~teg1/syllabus/424/lexia.html
20. Cross-Cultural Fluency among Middle Schools, Here and There
GRADES 6-8 USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
DIFFERENTIATED INSTRUCTION
Our teens are Masters of the Internet. Join this session to learn how to channel Middle School students’ mastery into international dialogues to improve writing and foster good will and mutual understanding. Participate in collaboratively designing prompts and assessing effects on students’ fluency of communicating with remote audiences.
Visit the following URL for more information: http://www.humboldt.edu/~teg1/syllabus/424/lexia.html
21. Having Hard Conversations
GENERAL ENRICHMENT USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS TEACHING MATERIAL PROVIDED
As administrators, coaches or teacher leaders, we often encounter situations where difficult topics must be addressed. What are the best strategies for those moments? What questions should we be asking ourselves before we speak? Based on research around conflict and interpersonal communications, this session will provide action plans and scripting tools for having those necessary hard conversations.
22. Making the Case for Reforming NCLB: Combining Our Experiences with Academic Research
GRADES K-COLLEGE
No Child Left Behind and state accountability systems will be revised during the coming year. In this session we will share our own experiences, review studies of these systems, and discuss how we can make sure our voices are heard in the coming debate. Readings recommended, but not required.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING: 1) Daniel Koretz, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, 2)Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools 3) Deborah Meier, Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools
23. Raising API Scores through Teacher/Principal Collaboration
GRADES K-12 USEFUL FOR NEW TEACHERS
This session will offer ideas and strategies from a Central Coast secondary principal whose high school has been recognized as a California Distinguished School and a National Blue Ribbon School. Learn signature practices that empower teachers and administrators to focus on student achievement. Please bring your own ideas of what has worked, and what problems need solutions.
You will also learn strategies that help foster cooperation between administrators and teachers, and builds teams within each core and elective department while allowing students to remain the central focus of the entire staff. All participants will be encouraged to share (in the Asilomar Spirit) their knowledge and dilemmas.
24. The Brain Challenge
GRADES K-COLLEGE
In Liars, Lovers, and Heroes by MIT’s S. Quartz and the Salk Institute’s T. Sejnowski, the group explores the “fit” between teaching and the brain. AERA President Carol Lee(2008) calls this book a major challenge to many of our teaching assumptions.
PRE-CONFERENCE READING:Liars, Lovers, and Heroes by Steven Quartz and Terrence Sejnowski