"Traverse is a conference with 100 people who care the most about education and how to transform their instruction to meet the needs of all kids. I would most definitely recommend this conference to any other educators who want to grow themselves and push themselves to be the best they can be. This conference is full of forward thinkers, and any and all educators could benefit from this experience."   - Traverse Participant

Sample Traverse Boulder 2019 Expeditions

Power and Purpose: Developing a STEAM-Based, Outdoor Classroom Experience
By: Shannon Lukz; Emily Felderman; Heather Havre (Laurel School)
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This session will emphasize leadership, community, and connection with students, places, and colleagues within the parameters of designated curriculum standards.  Participants will discover an outdoor learning experience where students record and collect data in an authentic field notebook to test water quality, measure features of the land, and engage in a stewardship project to build a bridge! Expedition participants will engage in 3 field rotations emphasizing scientific research, topography, and engineering, design and construction.  Regardless of student age or campus location, colleagues will leave with an experience that inspires and energizes them to collaborate and create an authentic field experience!

Expanding the Pie: What we have to gain from examining White Dominant Culture in the workplace
By: Lindsay Babbitt (Catlin Gable)
White Dominant Culture negatively impacts us all, regardless of race. Let’s expand the pie by learning to identify this culture in our schools and programs, then create an action plan to shift this culture. Together, we’ll venture into Boulder to notice and reflect on white culture, a culture that can be unnoticed when it’s the norm. People of all races will benefit from a more inclusive school culture. We have nothing to lose from “expanding the pie.”


Designing Experiences as Targeted Learning Tools.  
By: Michael Giamellaro (Oregon State University)
As experiential educators most of us would prefer to deeply immerse students into authentic contexts where content knowledge comes alive. Constraints of time and resources mean we need to choose when to lead our classes by learning IN context, others where students learn WITH context and still others where the context is simply the skills of doing school. In this expedition we will explore how to make targeted choices about how much to contextualize the learning to meet the sets of learning goals your class is working toward. We will participate in and evaluate some learning sequences around the power of water at varying degrees of contextualization, visiting Boulder Creek as part of that. We will also take a dip into current research on contextualized learning and spend some time workshopping on laying out a unit that aligns goals to contextualization levels. Participants are encouraged to bring their own curriculum ideas for the workshop time. ​

iGen
By: Chris Carithers (Watershed School)
Who are today's learners? What defines this new generation, the one coming on the heels of the millennials. What are their strengths and challenges, and how can we work best with them as educators. The session will end with a design challenge - Given the challenges that this generation is facing what is the most important change for educators to make to support their success?

A Contextual Approach to Planning: Developing a curriculum that engages both students and educatorsBy: Alex Cruickshank Morgan and Vicki Oleson (Boulder Journey School)
How do we develop curriculum that that is contextually relevant while engaging both children and adults? At Boulder Journey School, we recognize that a contextual curriculum integrates academic standards while embracing 21st century thinking skills. A contextual curriculum also values teacher research as a tool to promote teacher engagement and teacher retention. Through documented classroom projects, shared through video, photography, and storytelling, and covering a range of topics and content areas, including technology, science, engineering, mathematics, anthropology and robotics, educators from Boulder Journey School will lead participants in exploring the following questions: How can we teach children to learn while also learning from students how to teach? How can we engage teachers as researchers in order to elevate the field of education? What makes a strong research question? What ideas are worth pursuing in the classroom? How, with the resources available, can we create a system of support needed to engage in contextual curriculum planning? Join us to explore a model of education in which teachers and children are learning together through the development of a curriculum.

From The Back Of The Napkin To The First Day Of School:
We Started Our Own School And Probably You Should Too.
By: Mike Simpson; Abby Kirchner (Stone Independent School)
In this expedition we’ll give a warts-and-all account of the complexities inherent to opening a school of your own: we’ll share our biggest successes and our hundreds of failures, and give you an inside-look at the process we went through in order to ideate and open a private high school. Then, we’ll get hands-on and invite all participants to design their dream school -- we’ll grapple with what your “why” is, we’ll cover the five things all schools need in order to open, we’ll talk about marketing a school that doesn’t exist, we’ll use a little design-thinking and a whole lot of practicality to propel everyone on this expedition toward “opening day” of their own Dream School.

Supportive Strategies in Hard Times: How to rally as a community when tragedy strikes
Sarah Hay (Naropa University)
Community crises can take many forms, from poverty and unemployment to school violence. Even exposure to traumatic events on the news can result in acute trauma that needs to be addressed carefully within our learning communities. Trauma can manifest in unexpected ways in youth, from inability to focus on schoolwork and insomnia to more severe responses like depression, anxiety and self harm. Often times as educators we can feel helpless and unsure of how and when to support students. This workshop is built for school professionals, from the math teacher to the counselor to anything in between. With guided activities, discussion, and specific tools, participants will gain insight and strategies for facing traumas and community crises as they arise.


Purpose Learning -- Deep Dive
By: Ross Wehner (World Leadership School)
"No vulnerability, no learning" -- Brené Brown. This 3-hour intellectual spa will help you get back in touch with the real you, that teacher who first showed up years ago to teach. The grind of our profession can cover our stories with dust. We teachers have a deep sense of purpose, but few of us can describe it in a way that makes our classrooms come alive with vulnerability and innovation. In this expedition, we will overview the theory and science behind youth purpose and examine cutting edge models of "head, heart, hands" learning; we will engage in a storytelling activity to clarify our own sense of purpose; and we will build a purpose map to help us set goals for bringing purpose learning alive in our schools.


A Contextual Approach to Planning: Developing a curriculum that engages both students and educators
By: Alex Cruickshank Morgan and Vicki Oleson (Boulder Journey School)
How do we develop curriculum that that is contextually relevant while engaging both children and adults? At Boulder Journey School, we recognize that a contextual curriculum integrates academic standards while embracing 21st century thinking skills. A contextual curriculum also values teacher research as a tool to promote teacher engagement and teacher retention. Through documented classroom projects, shared through video, photography, and storytelling, and covering a range of topics and content areas, including technology, science, engineering, mathematics, anthropology and robotics, educators from Boulder Journey School will lead participants in exploring the following questions: How can we teach children to learn while also learning from students how to teach? How can we engage teachers as researchers in order to elevate the field of education? What makes a strong research question? What ideas are worth pursuing in the classroom? How, with the resources available, can we create a system of support needed to engage in contextual curriculum planning? Join us to explore a model of education in which teachers and children are learning together through the development of a curriculum.

A Way of Council:  Circle practices as a way for creating meaning, connection and community in classrooms and schools.  
By: John McCluskey (Centennial Middle School)
Council is an ancient way and modern practice whose roots are within the natural world, spanning diverse cultures and religions. This practice elicits an experience of true community, recognizing that each voice needs to be heard, that every person has a gift, a story to share, a piece of the whole. How do we remember all our relations, embrace differences, and find our own voices, while opening to others? It seems more than ever an essential time in our nation and around the world, to awaken this deep relational heart-mind. Council offers a way of communicating that encourages attentive listening, as well as honest and compassionate expression. It makes room for new insights and understandings, wisdom in decision making, and healing. As a personal practice, a group process and a life-pathway, council is an intrinsic ingredient of our education at any age and especially important for families, guides, teachers, therapists, caregivers or any anyone whose work involves groups.

Cross-Cultural Facilitation Toolkit
By: Jenny Wagner (Where There Be Dragons)
What does responsible community engagement look like and how do we guide our students through the process? How do we facilitate meaningful learning in a context fraught with complex histories and unequal power dynamics? How do we engage with difficult issues in a productive way? Join our workshop to explore best practices in cross-cultural education drawn from over 25 years of experience with international programs.


Designing Transformative Experiences In and Out of the Classroom
Brad McLain, Ph.D. (Co-Director XSci) and Pablo Stayton (Watershed School)
Transformative experiences happen to people every day all over the world, sometimes during adventures explicitly for the purpose of seeking out the extraordinary, and sometimes when just stopping by the local coffee shop.  What if we could understand how transformative experiences work across a range of human experiences? What if we could use that understanding to intentionally design the transformative into our curricula as experiential educators?  In this activity-based workshop, we will explore the science of transformative experiences through a framework that views courses as journeys, educators as experience designers, and students as narrators of their own learning and identity development. Come prepared to re-think a course or unit you plan to teach and discover practical ways to design opportunities for transformation.

Chemistry, Color and Curriculum Design
By: Robbin Dilley; Cinder Trout (Watershed School)
This workshop focuses on how expeditionary learning can be applied in any school context. We will begin with a group investigation of the art, chemistry and real world impacts of textile dyes. We will debrief the impact of various elements of this experience before working in small groups to problem-solve ways of bringing these components into any class you teach. Our goal is to leave with at least one actionable plan for a class, unit or lesson that you are genuinely excited about!

​Arts Integration in the Classroom: Using Theatre to Spark Creativity.
By:  Emily Norman (Watershed School)
In this workshop you’ll learn how use theatre as a tool to create memorable, kinesthetic experiences for your students. You’ll experience an arts integration workshop as a participant and then as an educator, allowing you to leave with tools to bring subjects to life in your own classroom.

Schedule for Traverse Boulder 2019

Monday

2:00pm Registration Opens
3:00pm Traverse '19 Kicks Off! led by Tim Breen, Watershed's Head of School
3:45pm Opening session  led by Watershed educators Chris Carithers and Taylor Replane
6:00pm Salon dinner facilitated by Erica Nelson at Rayback Collective

Tuesday

 7:00am ​Morning Hike/Walk at Chautauqua Park, with the Traverse community (optional)
​​8:30am Breakfast and mixing with the Traverse community
9:00am Gathering in Trail Groups
9:30am Expedition 1: Choose from many three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus 
                                       OR Choose a six-hour workshop that will take you off campus for an in-depth experience
12:30pm Lunch from Tacos del Norte food truck and mixing with the Traverse community on the patio and lawn
1:30pm Expedition 2: Choose from many three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus 
4:45pm Reflection in Trail Groups
5:15pm Happy Hour with local microbrews, wine, and nonalcoholic drinks in the Watershed School art studio and patio. Live music with Watershed alumna Cara Keyser '15!

Wednesday

7:00am Morning Yoga with Deaf Yoga Rocks with the Watershed Community
8:30am Breakfast burritos from Blackbelly and mixing with the Traverse community
9:00am Gathering in Trail Groups
9:30am Expedition 3: Choose from the three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus 
12:30pm Lunch and reflection in Trail Groups
1:30pm Reflections on learning - Transferring your learning from Traverse to your own school environment
2:45pm Closing circle
3:00pm Traverse concludes
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