Traverse Boulder: June 3-5, 2019
Imagine a workshop where you head off campus in a bus. Imagine a conference where you're one of the experts speaking from the stage. Imagine learning new ways to teach by doing them, hands-on, like a student would. Imagine brainstorming with Post-Its and a local microbrew as you sit on a patio with a view of the Rockies. Imagine an experience where you not only leave with new ideas, but leave with new collaborators.
Traverse is a different kind of professional experience for educators. It's hands-on, real-world, and built on the expertise of the people in the room. It's a small group of innovative educators learning together and caring about each other beyond the event itself. At Traverse, you'll be challenged to try things, take risks, make connections with other educators, and leave inspired to lead your school toward the future of learning.
Traverse is focused on real-world learning as the future of education. "Real-world learning" isn't about one method: it refers to any learning experience that challenges students with real problems, situations, and opportunities. Real-world learning can happen in any and all disciplines. Different educators might call pieces of it project-based learning (PBL), inquiry-based learning, expeditionary learning, service learning, experiential learning, and/or design thinking.
But we're not about jargon at Traverse. We're about trying things, making school more inspiring, getting kids ready to do what's real, and supporting each other along the way.
If you are interested in presenting at Traverse Boulder, please fill out the following proposal form or contact Hannah Nelson
Traverse is a different kind of professional experience for educators. It's hands-on, real-world, and built on the expertise of the people in the room. It's a small group of innovative educators learning together and caring about each other beyond the event itself. At Traverse, you'll be challenged to try things, take risks, make connections with other educators, and leave inspired to lead your school toward the future of learning.
Traverse is focused on real-world learning as the future of education. "Real-world learning" isn't about one method: it refers to any learning experience that challenges students with real problems, situations, and opportunities. Real-world learning can happen in any and all disciplines. Different educators might call pieces of it project-based learning (PBL), inquiry-based learning, expeditionary learning, service learning, experiential learning, and/or design thinking.
But we're not about jargon at Traverse. We're about trying things, making school more inspiring, getting kids ready to do what's real, and supporting each other along the way.
If you are interested in presenting at Traverse Boulder, please fill out the following proposal form or contact Hannah Nelson
Sample Schedule for Traverse Boulder (from 2018)
Monday
2:00pm Registration Opens
3:00pm Traverse '19 Kicks Off! led by Tim Breen, Watershed's Head of School
3:45pm Opening session on your past, present, and future as an educator: led by Watershed educators Jeff Osgood and Emily Graf
6:00pm Salon dinner on the Future of Education facilitated by author Grant Lichtman at Rayback Collective
3:00pm Traverse '19 Kicks Off! led by Tim Breen, Watershed's Head of School
3:45pm Opening session on your past, present, and future as an educator: led by Watershed educators Jeff Osgood and Emily Graf
6:00pm Salon dinner on the Future of Education facilitated by author Grant Lichtman at Rayback Collective
Tuesday
7:30am Morning yoga with the Traverse community, led by Watershed science educator and yoga instructor Hannah Nelson (optional)
8:30am Breakfast and mixing with the Traverse community
9:00am Gathering in Home Groups
9:30am Expedition 1: Choose from 7 three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus (many will repeat)
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 7 three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus (many will repeat)
4:45pm Reflection in Home 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!
8:30am Breakfast and mixing with the Traverse community
9:00am Gathering in Home Groups
9:30am Expedition 1: Choose from 7 three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus (many will repeat)
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 7 three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus (many will repeat)
4:45pm Reflection in Home 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 Short hike at Chautauqua Park, led by Watershed humanities educator Emily Graf (optional)
8:30am Breakfast burritos from Blackbelly and mixing with the Traverse community
9:00am Gathering in Home Groups
9:30am Expedition 3: Choose from the three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus (many will repeat)
12:30pm Lunch and reflection in Home Groups
1:30pm Reflections on learning
2:45pm Closing circle
3:00pm Traverse concludes
8:30am Breakfast burritos from Blackbelly and mixing with the Traverse community
9:00am Gathering in Home Groups
9:30am Expedition 3: Choose from the three-hour, hands-on workshops both on and off campus (many will repeat)
12:30pm Lunch and reflection in Home Groups
1:30pm Reflections on learning
2:45pm Closing circle
3:00pm Traverse concludes
Sample Expeditions at Traverse Boulder (from 2018)
The Art and Craft of Phenomenal Field Science for K-12 Communities
with Anne Burnett of Watershed School (CO)
This workshop will illuminate effective ways to create, plan, and implement authentic, age-differentiated field science experiences that expose students to the messiness of scientific thinking, the dirty work of scientific investigation, and the understanding of scientific phenomena. Together, we will design a model investigation driven by a guiding question and a dynamic hypothesis. We will co-plan our fieldwork with risk management, appropriate field technologies, science learning standards, and expert field resources in mind. Next, we'll head out into the nearby foothills to DO THE REAL WORK OF FIELD SCIENTISTS! You will leave with a new or renewed confidence in building authentic, safe, and standards-satisfying field science experiences for students of all ages that may be easily integrated with other content areas or larger fieldwork travel opportunities. You will need hiking attire, a smart phone, and a hankering to get dirty.
Building a Better Learning Experience
with Hannah Nelson of Watershed School (CO)
During this workshop we will explore how to design curriculum using place based experiences, and interdisciplinary expeditions and how to tie those to real-world problems, as well as, national standards. This workshop will introduce the concept of backwards design, using design thinking in the classroom, and how to incorporate the values of your school into assessments. Weather permitting, we will be doing observations and journaling outside, brainstorming with colleagues, and creating a plan for how to implement an "expedition" in your own classroom. Hopefully you will leave this workshop energized and excited to think about how you can bring your students out into the world around your school and how you can bring real-world challenges into your classroom.
A Crash Course in Expedition Design
with Pablo Stayton of Watershed School (CO)
What makes the content we teach relevant and meaningful? How do we provide learning opportunities that support students to connect emotionally to course content, dive deeper into learning, and make complex connections to the world around them? While applying ideas to your own curriculum, explore the power of essential and guiding questions and how to design learning experiences, projects, and assessments that connect to a clear direction of purpose and meaning. This expedition will model several Watershed expeditions and coach participants through creating a draft design for a unit, project, or course integrating principles from Traverse.
Building a Community Curriculum That Could Save The World
with Chris Carithers of Watershed School (CO)
Our students and staff are often a reflection of our school communities, which raises questions about how schools either do or don't consciously create the kind of community they are striving for. This workshop will focus on how to build smaller communities within classrooms, homerooms and faculty and staff teams in order to thoughtfully layer community into all aspects of a school's ecosystem. We will look at different rituals, practices and strategies that help to build relationships, deepen intimacy and empathy, as well as develop a sense of purpose and meaning for students and staff alike.
Creating Competency Based Artifacts of Learning
with Marty Moran of Bennett Day School (IL) and Colin Reynolds
With hands-on, experiential learning taking front seat, there is a need to establish a core set of competencies that teachers and students can use to demonstrate understanding and document applied knowledge and skills as evidence of the learning process. In recent years, there has been a new framework of assessment emerging in schools that value, and create, real-world learning experiences for their students.
In this session, workshoppers will do the following: (1) Brainstorm and agree upon a set of core competencies for learning → that will be used to (2) rapid prototype a competency map so that we can (3) develop models of authentic learning experiences that allow students to demonstrate levels of proficiency/mastery in competency areas.
Cross-Cultural Facilitation Toolkit
with Simon Hart and Jenny Wagner of Where There Be Dragons
Where There Be Dragons programming removes students from familiar cultural environments and intentionally introduces encounters with "otherness" to break down stereotypes, challenge norms, and build meaningful relationships.
In today’s social contexts, students are surrounded by informal debates fueled by anger and injustice, and too often they see adults modeling ineffective communication, be it too aggressive or too passive to come to a place of meaningful exchange. In our current world, how can we engage in debate across gender, race, privilege, and other differences? Rather than avoid controversial topics such as privilege, development, comparative religion, and political conflict, this expeditionary session engages participants to lean into critical global issues through a variety of activities, discussion prompts, and hands-on lessons.
This workshop will provide participants with an expanded toolkit of cross-cultural facilitation techniques adaptable to a wide range of ages and environments. The expedition takes participants through Dragons’ in-field programming, which can in turn be used with students to teach cultural competency. Specific activities will cover student container-building, examining privilege, practicing conflict transformation, and cultural competence models.
Designing and Making A Better World: Boulder Edition
with Bo Adams and Jim Tiffin of Mount Vernon Presbyterian School (GA)
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Abraham Lincoln
The world is a malleable place. How will you shape it? - MakerEd and Design Thinking are a potent combination that can catalyze the development of learner agency. At Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation, we’ve been working for years to set conditions for our learners to be real-world problem solvers. More recently, we’ve layered in more Maker, Design and Engineering (MDE) efforts to increase the sophistication of our prototyping and problem solving. And we’ve introduced “Design Briefs” and “Provocations!” We want to share our methods and stories and learn from yours.
For this expedition, we will give participants a chance to witness the impact they can make for members of the Boulder community. We’ll seek out authentic users to have at the center of our design thinking work, and then explore the pedagogy of tinkering through hands-on/minds-on fabrication. We are hoping to engage with a hospital community for our user group, and we plan to co-opt some more advanced Maker equipment, such as a Carvey, to create higher resolution prototypes that address the identified needs of people at the hospital. HMW create playful gear to brighten the days and experiences of those in the Boulder medical community?
Displaced and Disconnected: Tools and Strategies to Connect Students to Place
with Chris Barlow and Rebecca Schild of High Mountain Institute (HMI)
Today, students are increasingly displaced and disconnected from their environments and communities. The impacts of this disconnect span cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences. This workshop will introduce participants to theories and strategies to connect students to nature and develop a sense of place, from classroom to expeditionary contexts. Participants will be introduced to HMI’s unique approach and participate more in depth with several hands-on activities to explore what sense of place and connection to nature mean. Finally, participants will brainstorm specific ways in which they plan to foster sense of place and/or nature connection in their own teaching.
Experiential and Instructional: Promoting Productive Mathematical Struggle
with Jill Gough of Trinity School (GA)
How might we implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving to deepen conceptual understanding? Let’s identify and implement high quality tasks grounded in real experiences. Advancing the teaching and learning of mathematics cannot be accomplished with decontextualized worksheets. Discuss, sketch, and solve tasks that promote flexibility, creative and critical reasoning, and problem solving. Learning math should be anchored in depth of understanding through context - not pseudo context - and built on conceptual understanding as well as procedural fluency.
Introduction to Purpose Learning
with Ross Wehner of World Leadership School
In the world of K-12 education, no one argues anymore that mastery of 21st century skills is a higher bar than memorization of content. But the highest bar of all is when students have the opportunity to use these skills to take action in the real, messy world. In so doing, students are able to develop their own dreams and goals, which are key steps towards exploring purpose. Having a sense of purpose is a game changer that helps young people manage stress, sleep better, build relationships, engage with learning, and be happier and healthier. As Stanford purpose expert Bill Damon puts it: “The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress, it’s meaninglessness.” This expedition will be divided into three parts: First, we will explore the theory and science behind purpose learning which, has the potential to both drive and enhance the global learning that is happening in many K-12 schools today. Second, we will work in pairs and engage in an hour-long activity to better understand our own sense of purpose, the “golden thread” or stable intention, which runs through the various stages of our lives. This activity is based on the principle that if teachers want to help students explore purpose, they first have to do the hard work themselves. Most teachers have a latent purpose, which can be clarified through a relatively small amount of focused, intentional work. Third, we will examine a K-12 toolkit of purpose learning activities which can be embedded in advisory periods, global and other off-campus programs, co-curricular programs and core learning areas such as math and humanities. This K-12 toolkit is part of a book, and a curriculum guide, I am currently writing to explore the question: “How can K-12 schools helps students explore, discover and articulate a sense of purpose at an earlier age?” This expedition requires 1-2 hours of previous preparation in reading and storyboarding.
Making Experiences Matter: A Deep Learning Design Sprint
with Eric Hudson of Global Online Academy
How do you design experiences for deep learning? The Deep Learning Design Sprint is an intensive experience designed to playfully instruct, design, and model deep learning in an interactive workshop. By writing competencies and conducting a short sprint where they construct experiences and assessments aligned to those competencies, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the link between experiential education, deep learning, and the important current conversation around competency/mastery-based learning. In addition, participants will have opportunities to connect with colleagues, discussing why and how performance-based assessment enhances experiential learning, what role technology might play in this work, and what this work means for the future of school.
Shifting Perspectives
with Tara Jahn of CreatEDU
In this session we will look at case studies where a narrow perspective led to missing an important opportunity or need. For example, in this day and age many students are struggling socially and emotionally, but we do not catch it because superficial markers such as vibrant social media and school success are masking deeper challenges. After exploring case studies we will practice a variety of tools for shifting perspectives, challenging assumptions and uncovering hidden need and opportunities. Tools we will explore may include empathy interviews, photo journals, shadowing, etc.
The Power of Change, One Teacher At A Time
with Karla Long of The Wonder Project
As educators creating authentic, real-world experiences for our students, we passionately ask our students “be the change they wish to see” in the world around them. But how often do we ask the same of ourselves, both as educators and as citizens?
In this hands-on workshop, we will look within ourselves -- as adults and as professional communities -- to explore how to use the power of “one” to affect positive change within and around us.
Together, we will ask and answer the following questions:
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Engaging Young Children and Teachers in Activism
with Alison Maher and Alex Morgan of Boulder Journey School (CO)
Education is a vehicle for social change. This session will provide numerous examples of how children and teachers at Boulder Journey School actively participate in classroom, school and local communities. Habits of action are formed early, through small steps that grow as humans grow. By offering young children strategies for utilizing their communities and tools for impacting change within those same communities, we plant the seeds of action. Boulder Journey School is a school for innovative education for young children (birth - 5) and for graduate teachers enrolled in our Teacher Education Program, a partnership with the University of Colorado Denver and the Colorado Department of Education. Join us to explore a model of education in which teachers and children are learning together to be advocates for change. In this session, we will explore Boulder Journey School’s physical environment, considering how the design of the physical space can support a high level of participation. We will also view videos and photographic examples of how schools can support activism. Last, we will engage in a process of curriculum planning in order to develop ideas that can be developed in your context.
True North Hack: (Re)designing Your Work Life
with Dalton McCurdy of Bozeman Field School (MT) and Kirsten Blake of ChapterBe
“Designing something changes the future that is possible” -Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, authors of "Designing Your Life" Using a designers mindset, participants will map out, reflect, and then commit to a hack or a disruption to better align passion and purpose. Through a series of value-sorting, self-reflection and journey mapping exercises, this experience will provide expeditioners with the opportunity in both time and framework for a “compass check” to redefine, recalibrate and hone in on driving (work) values. The experience will push participants to reflect on personal practices, systems and “norms” in their work-life, particularly the ones that have become mindless or automatic, to re-evaluate and align actions with purpose. Through this work, participants will use a compass framework to shape thinking and develop a guiding “True North” statement. These navigational tools will then be used to brainstorm and design a work hack to better align practices with purpose and an action plan to put process into practice. This experience is particularly designed for educators needing a work-life reset or those searching for a catalyst to spark passion and purpose, get “unstuck”, or renew and reflect on current practices, systems and routines in the workplace.
with Anne Burnett of Watershed School (CO)
This workshop will illuminate effective ways to create, plan, and implement authentic, age-differentiated field science experiences that expose students to the messiness of scientific thinking, the dirty work of scientific investigation, and the understanding of scientific phenomena. Together, we will design a model investigation driven by a guiding question and a dynamic hypothesis. We will co-plan our fieldwork with risk management, appropriate field technologies, science learning standards, and expert field resources in mind. Next, we'll head out into the nearby foothills to DO THE REAL WORK OF FIELD SCIENTISTS! You will leave with a new or renewed confidence in building authentic, safe, and standards-satisfying field science experiences for students of all ages that may be easily integrated with other content areas or larger fieldwork travel opportunities. You will need hiking attire, a smart phone, and a hankering to get dirty.
Building a Better Learning Experience
with Hannah Nelson of Watershed School (CO)
During this workshop we will explore how to design curriculum using place based experiences, and interdisciplinary expeditions and how to tie those to real-world problems, as well as, national standards. This workshop will introduce the concept of backwards design, using design thinking in the classroom, and how to incorporate the values of your school into assessments. Weather permitting, we will be doing observations and journaling outside, brainstorming with colleagues, and creating a plan for how to implement an "expedition" in your own classroom. Hopefully you will leave this workshop energized and excited to think about how you can bring your students out into the world around your school and how you can bring real-world challenges into your classroom.
A Crash Course in Expedition Design
with Pablo Stayton of Watershed School (CO)
What makes the content we teach relevant and meaningful? How do we provide learning opportunities that support students to connect emotionally to course content, dive deeper into learning, and make complex connections to the world around them? While applying ideas to your own curriculum, explore the power of essential and guiding questions and how to design learning experiences, projects, and assessments that connect to a clear direction of purpose and meaning. This expedition will model several Watershed expeditions and coach participants through creating a draft design for a unit, project, or course integrating principles from Traverse.
Building a Community Curriculum That Could Save The World
with Chris Carithers of Watershed School (CO)
Our students and staff are often a reflection of our school communities, which raises questions about how schools either do or don't consciously create the kind of community they are striving for. This workshop will focus on how to build smaller communities within classrooms, homerooms and faculty and staff teams in order to thoughtfully layer community into all aspects of a school's ecosystem. We will look at different rituals, practices and strategies that help to build relationships, deepen intimacy and empathy, as well as develop a sense of purpose and meaning for students and staff alike.
Creating Competency Based Artifacts of Learning
with Marty Moran of Bennett Day School (IL) and Colin Reynolds
With hands-on, experiential learning taking front seat, there is a need to establish a core set of competencies that teachers and students can use to demonstrate understanding and document applied knowledge and skills as evidence of the learning process. In recent years, there has been a new framework of assessment emerging in schools that value, and create, real-world learning experiences for their students.
In this session, workshoppers will do the following: (1) Brainstorm and agree upon a set of core competencies for learning → that will be used to (2) rapid prototype a competency map so that we can (3) develop models of authentic learning experiences that allow students to demonstrate levels of proficiency/mastery in competency areas.
Cross-Cultural Facilitation Toolkit
with Simon Hart and Jenny Wagner of Where There Be Dragons
Where There Be Dragons programming removes students from familiar cultural environments and intentionally introduces encounters with "otherness" to break down stereotypes, challenge norms, and build meaningful relationships.
In today’s social contexts, students are surrounded by informal debates fueled by anger and injustice, and too often they see adults modeling ineffective communication, be it too aggressive or too passive to come to a place of meaningful exchange. In our current world, how can we engage in debate across gender, race, privilege, and other differences? Rather than avoid controversial topics such as privilege, development, comparative religion, and political conflict, this expeditionary session engages participants to lean into critical global issues through a variety of activities, discussion prompts, and hands-on lessons.
This workshop will provide participants with an expanded toolkit of cross-cultural facilitation techniques adaptable to a wide range of ages and environments. The expedition takes participants through Dragons’ in-field programming, which can in turn be used with students to teach cultural competency. Specific activities will cover student container-building, examining privilege, practicing conflict transformation, and cultural competence models.
Designing and Making A Better World: Boulder Edition
with Bo Adams and Jim Tiffin of Mount Vernon Presbyterian School (GA)
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.” - Abraham Lincoln
The world is a malleable place. How will you shape it? - MakerEd and Design Thinking are a potent combination that can catalyze the development of learner agency. At Mount Vernon Presbyterian School and the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation, we’ve been working for years to set conditions for our learners to be real-world problem solvers. More recently, we’ve layered in more Maker, Design and Engineering (MDE) efforts to increase the sophistication of our prototyping and problem solving. And we’ve introduced “Design Briefs” and “Provocations!” We want to share our methods and stories and learn from yours.
For this expedition, we will give participants a chance to witness the impact they can make for members of the Boulder community. We’ll seek out authentic users to have at the center of our design thinking work, and then explore the pedagogy of tinkering through hands-on/minds-on fabrication. We are hoping to engage with a hospital community for our user group, and we plan to co-opt some more advanced Maker equipment, such as a Carvey, to create higher resolution prototypes that address the identified needs of people at the hospital. HMW create playful gear to brighten the days and experiences of those in the Boulder medical community?
Displaced and Disconnected: Tools and Strategies to Connect Students to Place
with Chris Barlow and Rebecca Schild of High Mountain Institute (HMI)
Today, students are increasingly displaced and disconnected from their environments and communities. The impacts of this disconnect span cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences. This workshop will introduce participants to theories and strategies to connect students to nature and develop a sense of place, from classroom to expeditionary contexts. Participants will be introduced to HMI’s unique approach and participate more in depth with several hands-on activities to explore what sense of place and connection to nature mean. Finally, participants will brainstorm specific ways in which they plan to foster sense of place and/or nature connection in their own teaching.
Experiential and Instructional: Promoting Productive Mathematical Struggle
with Jill Gough of Trinity School (GA)
How might we implement tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving to deepen conceptual understanding? Let’s identify and implement high quality tasks grounded in real experiences. Advancing the teaching and learning of mathematics cannot be accomplished with decontextualized worksheets. Discuss, sketch, and solve tasks that promote flexibility, creative and critical reasoning, and problem solving. Learning math should be anchored in depth of understanding through context - not pseudo context - and built on conceptual understanding as well as procedural fluency.
Introduction to Purpose Learning
with Ross Wehner of World Leadership School
In the world of K-12 education, no one argues anymore that mastery of 21st century skills is a higher bar than memorization of content. But the highest bar of all is when students have the opportunity to use these skills to take action in the real, messy world. In so doing, students are able to develop their own dreams and goals, which are key steps towards exploring purpose. Having a sense of purpose is a game changer that helps young people manage stress, sleep better, build relationships, engage with learning, and be happier and healthier. As Stanford purpose expert Bill Damon puts it: “The biggest problem growing up today is not actually stress, it’s meaninglessness.” This expedition will be divided into three parts: First, we will explore the theory and science behind purpose learning which, has the potential to both drive and enhance the global learning that is happening in many K-12 schools today. Second, we will work in pairs and engage in an hour-long activity to better understand our own sense of purpose, the “golden thread” or stable intention, which runs through the various stages of our lives. This activity is based on the principle that if teachers want to help students explore purpose, they first have to do the hard work themselves. Most teachers have a latent purpose, which can be clarified through a relatively small amount of focused, intentional work. Third, we will examine a K-12 toolkit of purpose learning activities which can be embedded in advisory periods, global and other off-campus programs, co-curricular programs and core learning areas such as math and humanities. This K-12 toolkit is part of a book, and a curriculum guide, I am currently writing to explore the question: “How can K-12 schools helps students explore, discover and articulate a sense of purpose at an earlier age?” This expedition requires 1-2 hours of previous preparation in reading and storyboarding.
Making Experiences Matter: A Deep Learning Design Sprint
with Eric Hudson of Global Online Academy
How do you design experiences for deep learning? The Deep Learning Design Sprint is an intensive experience designed to playfully instruct, design, and model deep learning in an interactive workshop. By writing competencies and conducting a short sprint where they construct experiences and assessments aligned to those competencies, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the link between experiential education, deep learning, and the important current conversation around competency/mastery-based learning. In addition, participants will have opportunities to connect with colleagues, discussing why and how performance-based assessment enhances experiential learning, what role technology might play in this work, and what this work means for the future of school.
Shifting Perspectives
with Tara Jahn of CreatEDU
In this session we will look at case studies where a narrow perspective led to missing an important opportunity or need. For example, in this day and age many students are struggling socially and emotionally, but we do not catch it because superficial markers such as vibrant social media and school success are masking deeper challenges. After exploring case studies we will practice a variety of tools for shifting perspectives, challenging assumptions and uncovering hidden need and opportunities. Tools we will explore may include empathy interviews, photo journals, shadowing, etc.
The Power of Change, One Teacher At A Time
with Karla Long of The Wonder Project
As educators creating authentic, real-world experiences for our students, we passionately ask our students “be the change they wish to see” in the world around them. But how often do we ask the same of ourselves, both as educators and as citizens?
In this hands-on workshop, we will look within ourselves -- as adults and as professional communities -- to explore how to use the power of “one” to affect positive change within and around us.
Together, we will ask and answer the following questions:
- What makes each of us unique or different beyond being educators?
- What motivates each of us to act on behalf of another person, group, or something much bigger?
- Do we have the potential to be a “Power of Change”?
- What are we willing to pursue so that we can create authentic change?
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Engaging Young Children and Teachers in Activism
with Alison Maher and Alex Morgan of Boulder Journey School (CO)
Education is a vehicle for social change. This session will provide numerous examples of how children and teachers at Boulder Journey School actively participate in classroom, school and local communities. Habits of action are formed early, through small steps that grow as humans grow. By offering young children strategies for utilizing their communities and tools for impacting change within those same communities, we plant the seeds of action. Boulder Journey School is a school for innovative education for young children (birth - 5) and for graduate teachers enrolled in our Teacher Education Program, a partnership with the University of Colorado Denver and the Colorado Department of Education. Join us to explore a model of education in which teachers and children are learning together to be advocates for change. In this session, we will explore Boulder Journey School’s physical environment, considering how the design of the physical space can support a high level of participation. We will also view videos and photographic examples of how schools can support activism. Last, we will engage in a process of curriculum planning in order to develop ideas that can be developed in your context.
True North Hack: (Re)designing Your Work Life
with Dalton McCurdy of Bozeman Field School (MT) and Kirsten Blake of ChapterBe
“Designing something changes the future that is possible” -Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, authors of "Designing Your Life" Using a designers mindset, participants will map out, reflect, and then commit to a hack or a disruption to better align passion and purpose. Through a series of value-sorting, self-reflection and journey mapping exercises, this experience will provide expeditioners with the opportunity in both time and framework for a “compass check” to redefine, recalibrate and hone in on driving (work) values. The experience will push participants to reflect on personal practices, systems and “norms” in their work-life, particularly the ones that have become mindless or automatic, to re-evaluate and align actions with purpose. Through this work, participants will use a compass framework to shape thinking and develop a guiding “True North” statement. These navigational tools will then be used to brainstorm and design a work hack to better align practices with purpose and an action plan to put process into practice. This experience is particularly designed for educators needing a work-life reset or those searching for a catalyst to spark passion and purpose, get “unstuck”, or renew and reflect on current practices, systems and routines in the workplace.
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What Participants Say
"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."
- 2016 Participant
