Storm into Summer 2025

Discover an innovative approach to engaging students in their learning by fostering collaboration, cultural exploration, and student-led learning experiences. This session will provide strategies to help students not only acquire learning skills but also deepen their understanding and take an active role in their own learning journey.
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Have you wondered how you might inspire younger learners by tapping into their natural curiosity and genius? Consider infusing wonder into your classroom!

Cultivating wonder can be part of a plan for creating a "wisdom classroom" where anxiety can be reduced and meaning is imbued through sharing, relating, and creating.

Inspired by Georgia Heard's WELCOME TO THE WONDER HOUSE, we will define wonder, consider its power for student engagement, and construct a mini "Wonder Kit" to support launching wonder stations through "rooms" (or space) for: curiosity, praise, ordinary things, creatures, nature, science, time, place, quiet, imagination, mystery, and wishes.

In this session, I will share several creative writing activities that have helped my students to write descriptive and imaginative stories, poems, and reflections. These activities can be used in any classroom setting and are a great way to begin class and to get students to begin thinking about words. These creative writing exercises are fun, easy to plug into any class and require minimal prep. They can be used to help students to brainstorm about topics related to your lessons.

Online videos can inspire – how did that person walk on “water”. Beyond videos being entertaining, students can apply principles from their courses to demonstrate mastery of course material. The goal of this session is for teachers to leave with a worksheet filled with ideas on using videos in new ways in their courses. Examples will leverage my experience with engineering courses where my students author problems that reverse engineer actions in the videos. These real-world problems – affectionately called YouTube problems – bring new, creative, and unique content into all of my courses. While we won’t dive into the research in this session, students solving YouTube problems exhibited improved problem-solving skills and learning attitudes. More recently, YouTube Problems Met Generative Artificial Intelligence, which may or may not be helpful.