Thursday | October 6, 2022
Our classrooms reflect our communities and always need to be safe spaces for learning. How do you maintain that safe space for learning while respecting all of the opinions, backgrounds and perspectives students bring to the classroom?
Join the Albert Shanker Institute and Share My Lesson for an informative webinar with diverse educator voices offering ideas for creating and maintaining an identity-affirming learning environment. We'll discuss the importance of creating an intentional community and how to do it, including setting rules and responsibilities. We'll also address how having community can help address tough topics with students and their families. Finally, we'll cover how and why we must remember to humanize our students and ourselves--both what is practical and aspirational--and how we can be together despite disagreements.
This session is part of the series: A More United America: Teaching Democratic Principles and Protected Freedoms.
Watch on Demand. Available for 1.5-hour of PD credit. A certificate of completion will be available for download at the end of your session that you can submit for your school's or district's approval.
Speakers
Public school teacher and proud member of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers (Local 1520). He has been an early childhood educator for the past 12 years and currently supports over 130 preschool classrooms as District Lead Teacher for Cincinnati Public Schools. He is a national trainer for the American Federation of Teachers and adjunct professor in the Graduate School of Education at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Mr. Calhoun recently served as a member of the Professional Governance Body Transition Committee to help create a governing board to support the implementation priorities developed through the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) Power to the Profession process.
Amber Chandler is a National Board Certified middle school ELA teacher in Hamburg, New York with a Master’s Degree in Literature, as well as a School Building Leader certification. She is the 2018 Association for Middle Level Educators’ “Educator of the Year.”
Amber has enjoyed a wide variety of teaching opportunities--from 6th grade remediation, to college courses, to education workshops on Differentiation, Danielson’s Domains, and Project Based Learning. No matter which level Amber is teaching, the goal is always the same: engage students to take charge of their own learning.
Amber’s blogs and articles have appeared in Middleweb, ShareMyLesson, Getting Smart, ASCD’s “Ideas From the Field,” Mom’s Rising, The EdVocate, AMLE magazine, as well as New York Teacher. She has served as a co-moderator for #WhatIsSchool education chat, as well as initiating the first #NYEdVoice Twitter chat as a New York Educator’s Voice Fellow. Amber has appeared as a guest on BAM! Radio Network to discuss the benefits of Project Based Learning, as well as webcasts for AMLE on the importance of teaching speaking and listening skills, and how to use artifacts to improve teacher evaluation in APPRs.
Amber was chosen from a nationwide search as one of a handful of panelist for Fordham’s “Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments” to evaluate how state assessments compare in their ability to assess Common Core Standards. She’s also served as a School Review Team member, offering her observations and expertise, particularly in the area of Project Based Learning.
Amber is an active AFT member as a ShareMyLesson Ambassador and participant in the Resource and Materials Development at the Summer Educators Academy. Amber also is a featured contributor for the AFT blog, “Classroom Voices.” She serves as the President for her local, Frontier Central Teachers Association. To learn more about her work, check out Amber Chandler's website here.
Mary Cathryn Ricker is a National Board Certified middle school English/language arts teacher who has served as Minnesota’s Commissioner of Education, as Executive vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers, and as president of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers, Local 28. Prior to her leadership outside of the classroom, Ricker was a classroom teacher for 13 years in Minnesota, Washington State, and South Korea.
As Minnesota’s Commissioner of Education, Mary Cathryn Ricker lead a school finance working group examining Minnesota’s school finance systems and recommending reforms. She advocated for a more student and family facing department of education, resulting in increased, direct outreach including translated materials and translation services. Additionally, Ricker worked alongside advocates in the effort for legislation for Indigenous Education for All, ethnic studies, credit attainment for students experiencing housing instability or homelessness, expanding social/emotional learning, strengthening teacher diversity efforts, including cultural competency in teacher and principal evaluations and non-exclusionary discipline policies—winning a prohibition on public preschool suspensions and dismissals in a special legislative session. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Ricker lead an effort to act on the science, create safe and healthy learning conditions, and prioritize in-person learning by establishing localized learning models, listening and responding to the community—including building MDE’s most ambitious and diverse family-facing communication work—providing statewide professional development in meeting the needs of students with special needs, students experiencing housing instability, students learning English as a new language, and Black, Indigenous, and students of color, and investing in necessary health and safety items like technology, protective equipment, and COVID testing.
When Mary Cathryn was executive vice-president of the AFT, under the leadership of AFT President Randi Weingarten, she created and lead the AFT Professionalism Task Force and organized the AFT Gun Violence Prevention Advisory Committee. Ricker also lead the AFT Innovation Fund, focusing on expanding and supporting career and technical education and full-service community schools. Additionally, she coordinated local, state and national unions support for refugee children at the border, lead involvement in ethnic studies movement, advocated and organized for comprehensive immigration reform and for strengthening education for English language learners. She organized a member/staff working group for Native American advocacy and represented AFT in professional membership work, including as Program and Policy Council division liaison.
As president of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers, Ricker pioneered the concept of bargaining for the common good, an approach to negotiating where union members share the power they have at the negotiating table with students, families, and community members to negotiate around a set of demands that benefit members, students, and the broader community. She lead the effort to win contract language such as citizenship leave and a school nurse for every child, and she championed innovative, teacher-built solutions that improve teaching and learning as well as strengthen public education. These include the union's alternative teacher recruitment and licensure program, CareerTeacher; a full-spectrum peer assistance and review program; site-based school redesign and governance; a parent-teacher home visit project; comprehensive professional development; paraprofessional pathways to teaching, dedicated paraprofessional professional development; and meaningful community engagement as the union's work.
Ricker also serves on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards board of directors. Her teaching and leadership have been recognized with a number of other honors, including receiving the Education Minnesota Peterson-Schaubach Outstanding Leadership Award, qualifying as a semifinalist for the NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence, and serving as a featured contributor in the Annenberg Foundation's national professional development series "Write in the Middle." She has spoken and written extensively about teaching and learning, professionalism, and human rights issues and her work has appeared in local and national publications. She has traveled to speak, teach, or study public education, the labor movement, and democracy, including in Europe, North and South America, and Western Asia/the Arabian peninsula.
A native of Hibbing, Minnesota, she earned her undergraduate degree in English with a mathematics minor at the University of Saint Thomas, and completed graduate work in Teacher Leadership at the University of Minnesota.