When I requested funding for the NCTE registration fee from my admin team in the early fall, I said I wanted to focus on activism and middle school literacy instruction. Learning more about both as a relatively new sixth grade teacher at a progressive lab school seemed valuable. However, now that I have returned from my amazing experience at NCTE, I am realizing that most of my take-aways are about poetry and teacher education. But I am also realizing I can certainly use poetry to achieve some of my original activism and secondary literacy goals.

Whenever I return from a conference, I like to budget some time to review my flurry of notes from all of the sessions I attended. My current favorite way to synthesize my learning is by creating a slideshow of all of the sessions I attended.

Each session has its own slide with my condensed notes, memorable quotes from presenters, related images, hyperlinks, and contact info for presenters. A former PLC I was a part of when I was an elementary literacy coach introduced me to the idea of collecting info from different sessions in a slideshow. It is impossible to attend every session, but this strategy gives you the highlights of many. My reflections below synthesize overall takeaways and next steps, but the slideshow has more specifics.

Professional Reflections

As a lab school teacher, I found myself drawn to the ELATE track: English Language Arts Teacher Educators. There were some EXCELLENT sessions. I was particularly inspired by “Unearthing Joy in Teacher Education”. Not only because Dr. Gholdy Muhammad was one of the presenters (!!!!), but also because I am always drawn to joy since it is one of my core values.

When I co-teach the writing methods class in a few weeks, I will certainly use some of the joy-mapping activities like creating a class playlist of walk-up songs and a collective “Where We’re From” poem. I also *loved* the artistic representation of the synthesis of learning as an end-of-term assignment. These practices are joyful and full of teacher candidates’ identity! Shamari Reid’s Humans Who Teach: A Guide for Centering Love, Justice, and Liberation in Schools insists that our profession needs to recognize the humanity of the adults if we want the adults to do the same for kids.

Another human-affirming format is poetry. It isn’t nothing that the first session I chose leaned on the inspirational text, 90 Ways to Community: Nurturing Safe and Inclusive Classrooms Writing One Poem at a Time, and focused on one of my other former core values: community. Doesn’t poetry do community so perfectly? I loved rotating through two poetry writing stations at “Words That Mend” to create two poems that didn’t exist in the world prior to that session. The last session I went to was also about poetry. Pop-up Poetry, in fact. A high school teacher in Brookline, Massachusetts partnered with Dr. Alison Adair, a professor and poet from Boston University, to teach students how to write on-demand poems. I scribbled down so many of the poet’s glorious phrases, and the teacher’s reflection questions will permanently affect reflections I ask students for all sorts of writing assignments moving forward. My teaching partner, Holly, has already told me she has a typewriter our students can use. I can’t wait to put it to use! Leave it to poetry to provide a beautiful circular ending to my conference experience.

A third takeaway was the maintaining my personal writing practice. One of my personal writing heroes, my sixth grade language arts teacher, Ms. Vinson, inspired my love of writing, and it’s been a big part of my identity ever since. Several of the workshops I went to had attendees actively do some writing. I believe that if we teach writing, *we* need to write. We need to experience the process, the hurdles, the joy that our students will if we are to guide them as writers.

“Anyone who doesn’t understand…that writing is a complex, recursive, ever-shifting kind of thing you have to decide about, hasn’t written very much…”

Katie Wood Ray

Remember my two goals for the conference? Secondary literacy instruction and activism? Well, I was able to tackle ONE of them well: activism. My second to last session was “Climate Literacy”, and I left with SO many ideas for our climate change unit in the spring! Last year, the unit focused on research-based informational writing. My students dabbled in this form of writing a bit with our voting rights unit in our in-depth studies earlier this year. However, there wasn’t a lot of explicit instruction on informational writing. I intentionally left the instruction a bit vague so that when we returned to informational writing in the climate change unit, I could do some actual teaching and showcase students’ tremendous growth in their writing. But now I’m wishing I *had* focused on informational writing now so that we could do something more creative with climate change in the spring. Right now I’m thinking a stations-of-the-cross-type play where we travel around campus performing different acts of a play on climate change. I’m not totally sure. One thing I *do* know for sure is that I want to apply for the Summer Institute: Teaching Climate Justice with Young People’s Literatures and Media that I learned about in that session. It could be incredible! I’m also interested in submitting to their Climate Lit pocket journals.

Professional development begets more professional development. It’s exponential.

Logistical Reflections

In addition to all the ways I filled my brain, I also learned things to fill my bags. Things to bring and things to wear.

Things to bring: sticky note page markers in a variety of colors to color-code your chosen sessions for the day, washi tape to create pockets to store handouts next to the session’s notes, a notebook with *plenty* of blank pages (I had to ration mine towards the end lest I run out of room), a refillable water bottle (there were water dispensers in every session!), sandwiches, and crunchy, crisp SNACKS. I can never have too many snacks.

Things to wear: SNEAKERS to traverse the immense convention centers, literacy-themed fits. I didn’t buy any 2024 convention gear because I am saving that for the first time I present at NCTE! But I did have some of my favorite Book Wrangler merch, and I was inspired to buy this cardigan after seeing it on two attendees.

Do you agree? What essentials make your conference experience a delight?

I love, LOVE, L.O.V.E. attending professional conferences.

I learn so much.

I see my teaching heroes.

I feel inspired.

Can’t wait to repeat the experience next year! See y’all in Denver. Is it too early to buy tickets?!