Demonstration Lessons
Demonstration Lesson from our year-long Teacher Institute: Cultivating Engaged Citizens through Civic Reasoning, Critical Thinking, and Empathy in the Anti-racist Classroom
On April 25, 2022, six area teachers were invited to apply to an invitational Teacher Leadership Institute through our Top of the Mitt Writing Project. This institute invitation was unique because it is funded by a Pandemic Recovery Grant with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Writing Project under the theme of “To Build a More Perfect Union.”
We wanted to give each teacher the time and opportunity to envision how best to support young people to grapple with the complex problems in our civic life while helping them generate what Detra Price-Dennis names as “the capacity to build critical thinking about power, equity, and justice as civic-minded citizens in our country.” (NCTE, Dec. 2021)
Each teacher participant has engaged in reading and analyzing numerous scholarly works from diverse national authors. Additionally, our partner organization, Little Traverse History Museum has a diverse collection of scrapbooks, journals, newspapers, and government records that teachers were able to use to build their lessons and background knowledge.
These rich, local, primary and secondary resources have been invaluable as “artifacts” for students and teachers to engage with when researching the diverse history of our local community as they designed their lesson models. https://www.petoskeymuseum.org/woman-suffrage-in-petoskey.html
We will be publishing a final collection of Demonstration Lessons this June 22, 2023 when our year-long institute comes to an end. Several lessons will also be included in the Traveling Classroom Scrapbooks we are creating in collaboration with our partner Little Traverse History Museum. On August 9, 2023, we will be hosting a Community Colloquium for our larger local community where we will present each facet of our work under the “Build a More Perfect Union” Grant from the NEH and the NWP.
We wanted to give each teacher the time and opportunity to envision how best to support young people to grapple with the complex problems in our civic life while helping them generate what Detra Price-Dennis names as “the capacity to build critical thinking about power, equity, and justice as civic-minded citizens in our country.” (NCTE, Dec. 2021)
Each teacher participant has engaged in reading and analyzing numerous scholarly works from diverse national authors. Additionally, our partner organization, Little Traverse History Museum has a diverse collection of scrapbooks, journals, newspapers, and government records that teachers were able to use to build their lessons and background knowledge.
These rich, local, primary and secondary resources have been invaluable as “artifacts” for students and teachers to engage with when researching the diverse history of our local community as they designed their lesson models. https://www.petoskeymuseum.org/woman-suffrage-in-petoskey.html
We will be publishing a final collection of Demonstration Lessons this June 22, 2023 when our year-long institute comes to an end. Several lessons will also be included in the Traveling Classroom Scrapbooks we are creating in collaboration with our partner Little Traverse History Museum. On August 9, 2023, we will be hosting a Community Colloquium for our larger local community where we will present each facet of our work under the “Build a More Perfect Union” Grant from the NEH and the NWP.
Shared Demonstration Lessons of Best-Practice
A Collection by Top of the Mitt Writing Project
North Central Michigan College
This collection of excellent teaching demonstrations represents a main pillar of our rigorous Invitational Teacher Leadership Institutes. Whether in our classic, five-week Summer Institute Model, or in our new Year-Long Institute Model, exceptional educators come together to share and refine their practices in the teaching of writing and the results shared here are striking.
Teacher participants are always treated to multiple demonstration models of exemplary instructional practices all of which were inspired by the selection of stellar mentor texts. This collection includes invitations for engaging students in writing from early elementary through high school senior year.
In a time when the complexity of teaching is being undervalued by many voices outside education, we are inspired to share the stellar work of many of our Teacher Consultants as they completed our many National Writing Project institutes with distinction. Each lesson is shared here in detail to honor the complexity and intentionality of that work. We took time in these lessons to pay careful attention to the intricacies of thoughtful, purposeful planning and the many challenges we all face when we strive to engage each learner and inspire every young writer.
Here we offer multiple demonstrations that brought us to laughter and sometimes tears—all with brilliantly effective ways to pass along to our students a love of writing, reading, and a deep appreciation for the power of language. We offer these lessons to our teaching colleagues to revise or adapt for use in their own classroom communities. We hope our contemporaries will be encouraged to share their own joy of writing and language with their students. We have made our practice public to honor the difficulties, challenges, and remarkable rewards of a life in public school teaching.
A Collection by Top of the Mitt Writing Project
North Central Michigan College
This collection of excellent teaching demonstrations represents a main pillar of our rigorous Invitational Teacher Leadership Institutes. Whether in our classic, five-week Summer Institute Model, or in our new Year-Long Institute Model, exceptional educators come together to share and refine their practices in the teaching of writing and the results shared here are striking.
Teacher participants are always treated to multiple demonstration models of exemplary instructional practices all of which were inspired by the selection of stellar mentor texts. This collection includes invitations for engaging students in writing from early elementary through high school senior year.
In a time when the complexity of teaching is being undervalued by many voices outside education, we are inspired to share the stellar work of many of our Teacher Consultants as they completed our many National Writing Project institutes with distinction. Each lesson is shared here in detail to honor the complexity and intentionality of that work. We took time in these lessons to pay careful attention to the intricacies of thoughtful, purposeful planning and the many challenges we all face when we strive to engage each learner and inspire every young writer.
Here we offer multiple demonstrations that brought us to laughter and sometimes tears—all with brilliantly effective ways to pass along to our students a love of writing, reading, and a deep appreciation for the power of language. We offer these lessons to our teaching colleagues to revise or adapt for use in their own classroom communities. We hope our contemporaries will be encouraged to share their own joy of writing and language with their students. We have made our practice public to honor the difficulties, challenges, and remarkable rewards of a life in public school teaching.