Promising Practices

Like many people expressed today in class, I too was skeptical of the Promising Practices Conference on the third. Much to my excitement, the conference was fantastic. I was glad to get as much out of it as I did. 

I found myself taking a lot of notes while Dr. Fusco was speaking. The focal point of her presentation, as you will remember, focussed on the correlation between agency and equity in youth development. For me, the most compelling piece of the lecture was when she gave the "ying-yang" visual. One side represents "things that matter to children personally" and the other side represents "things that matter to children in the world". The two sides are divided by, but brought together by agency. The agency part speaks to the way we "act upon" teaching children through intrinsic motivation. Regardless of the age level or the teaching environment, children are most highly engaged when an educator "invokes dialog to get a solution". Dr. Fusco asked us to "support young people to be active curators in their own lives".  

By the way, there are some rad pictures of ying-yang signs on Google

The workshops were a cool way of breaking up the day. My first workshop was with Neil Anderson (check out this guys resume!) and the Southern Youth Commission about "youth lead initiatives". Although this workshop was focused on youth groups, I found almost all of his information useful and could see myself applying it in my classroom. He wrote out a series of standards to hold and also a few ideas to think about. Some things that resonated with me were when he said, "Make it REAL and make it FUN" and "to always invest in your [students] -- it's reciprocal" and lastly, to "not put youself in the way of the learning process".  Not only did I learn a ton from this workshop, it was a great networking opportunity. 

My second workshop was a little less successful. It was the lecture on service learning. Rather than learning anything knew, everything that we learned in class was reiterated. Dr. Ozcan, the speaker, did mention a term that sparked my interest. Rather than saying "community service" he said, "social responsibility". I think these terms can be applied pretty well to what we were saying in class. When I hear community service, I think of services I have to do in order to complete a requirement. For instance, National Honor Society required community service. When one performs a social responsibility there seems to be more prestige and meaning. 

After lunch, we had the "unconference" where we got to see a presentation from the A.L.L.I.E.D. student group. I thought that this portion of the Practicing Promises conference was very well done and very well placed. The presentation given by the A.L.L.I.E.D. group gave great closure to the day. Personally, I liked the tidbits of information from some of the various articles we've read in class -- especially the poem!

This is all I have time to write for now...on a later date I will post my connections to the readings!

Hope ya'll enjoyed the conference as much as I did.