By Chris Wells, Staff Writer
English teachers set off to UCI once a month to further improve their skills in the classroom during what is known as the UCI Writing Project.
The UCI conference collects speakers to give presentations on various topics relating to a theme that year. Teachers go to lectures and listen to topics that they are interested in learning more about and can incorporate into the classroom.
“The UCI Writing conference [is] where teachers go to learn how to continually integrate writing into teaching, whether its teaching English or other things,” said English teacher Elizabeth Taireh. Teachers can go to a speaker and learn new skills to pull out of the conference and into the classroom.
“I attended a speaker whom I have listened to on the same topic maybe five years ago and he was discussing ways to incorporate authentic writing activities,” said English teacher Lauren Bielefeld. “So getting students to write commentaries and his session basically involved him having us participate and write the commentary for a poem he had us read as a class.”
With new strategies, teachers can find different ways to build communication with their students. It pulls teachers out of their comfort zone and keeps students out of a repetitive state to help them focus in the classroom and understand in new different ways.
“I think this benefits the student because we all come away with something new and innovative practice to either bring back. As a reminder like ‘hey, you should be doing this,’” said English teacher Amy Futagaki.
Guest speaker Sheridan Blau and key speaker Carol Jago both taught innovative new techniques at the UCI conference. Blau spoke of authentic writing activities and how to apply them to high school and elementary school levels. Jago is a well-respected presenter who talked about the importance of reading literary text. She had a lot of suggestions on how to incorporate different types of text into the classrooms. Jago also demonstrated how teachers could bring all these ideas that don’t seem to be connected in any way and connect them. She brought in paintings, poems and stories and related things that don’t seem to have any similarities.
“We were looking of a picture of ebola and the places to treat ebola and it was amazing because she broke down the psychology of it and that’s what we do in literature too,” said Taireh. “So she translates what we do in reading to other activities and gives us ideas on how to bring that into other activities we do,” said Taireh.
The UCI conference is a part of a bigger project where teachers can participate in an intense four-week summer program after the writing project once a month during the course of the school year. Teachers can go meet and focus on one area of interest to study and give presentations on it. The conferences help teachers become more skilled inside the classroom and improve how students learn.
“I have been doing it for a long time and it’s my fifth or sixth year going to the conference, and every time I go, there is always something new,” said Taireh. “It’s fun to get together and see people there with other teachers and it gets you excited just like, how students love to work with each other, we love that. It’s a nice time to just get out of your comfort zone and meet with new people and hear new ideas.”
