Upcoming Professional Development Opportunities

IEFA Opportunities

Register now for OPI's fourteenth annual Indian Education for All Best Practices Conference, the theme of which is Honoring Indigenous Resilience and Persistence. The free conference will be held online from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, May 15 and Sunday, May 16. There are fewer sessions than usual (a concession to the online format, no doubt), but they've got some rock-star presenters, including keynotes by Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, and Patrick Armstrong Jr. of the Blackfeet Nation.

 

Broadwater Elementary School teacher Jodi Delaney and I will be presenting MHS's new hands-on history footlocker, Montana's First Peoples: Essential Understandings (unfortunately at the same time as the panel of the 2020 and 2021 Advocacy Award for Excellence in Indian Education Recipients and a presentation by Billings librarians Ruth Ferris and Kathi Hoyt on IEFA and primary sources, both of which I'd really like to attend!) Here's a link to the program and here's the link to register. 

 

The Best Practices conference is free, but if you are looking for a chance to go more in-depth (and earn graduate credits), you might want to check out the IEFA special topics courses offered by the Western Montana Professional Learning Collaborative (WMPLC). Summer semester courses are now open.

 

National Opportunities

Possibly the only good thing to come out of the pandemic is that we now can easily Zoom into courses offered outside Montana.

 

I encourage anyone interested in helping students cope with the barrage of fake, exaggerated, or biased information we experience every day to consider taking "Sorting Truth From Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning." This 9-week facilitated class offered by MITx is FREE (and for $50 and they'll give you a certificate of completion.) The instructors are legendary social studies Stanford University education professor Sam Wineburg, of Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) fame, and Justin Reich, comparative media professor at MIT. My colleague Deb Mitchell took the course, and found it tremendously useful. Learn more and find a link to register here. 

 

SHEG is offering a number of three-day workshops, including 

• Introduction to Reading Like a Historian Curriculum and Beyond the Bubble Assessments
• Reading Like a Historian: Local History, Opening Up the Textbook, and Discussion
• Reading Like a Historian with Younger Students, and more. 

They all seem to cost $375, but teachers at Title I schools can apply for scholarships. The deadline to apply for a scholarship is May 10.