Summer Workshop Series for Educators on Difficult Issues in the Classroom

WORKSHOP TOPICS

• June 24 – Leaning In, Leaning Away with Current Events Navigating difficult topics in today’s news from a non-partisan lens. Explore considerations and tools for taking up difficult conversations in your classroom, including de-escalation strategies, seek out varied resources and responding to student comments and questions.
• July 1 – Asset-Based Approaches This session guides educators in identifying and building upon the unique assets of their students, schools and communities. Participants will reflect upon deficit-based versus asset-based language and approaches with strategies for how to implement an asset-based lens in their teaching and classroom environments.
• July 8 – Alternate Framing – A Tool in Perspectivity Participants will practice Alternate Framing: a process used to identify and analyze different perspectives on a given issue or question. Through engaging in this workshop, participants will gain efficacy in planning for and leading discussions on difficult issues in a responsible and nonpartisan way.
• July 15 – Case Study on Difficult Issues This workshop uses real-life scenarios to frame reflection and analysis into difficult issues moments in K-12 spaces. Initiative staff will support participants in understanding their positionality in these moments; while discussing the contextual considerations one would make in the moments.
• July 23 –Using a Trauma-Informed Lens to Teach the Holocaust This workshop will introduce participants to trauma-informed principles and practices that can support the teaching of the Holocaust. Participants will apply a trauma-informed lens to refine a Holocaust unit or lesson that invites student inquiry and