CRAFTING INQUIRY 2023
SPEAKER AND SESSION INFORMATION
DETAILED SESSION DESCRIPTIONS
Friday, October 13
On Friday, participants will experience all three keynote addresses. All sessions are applicable for educators and administrators working with early childhood, elementary, and middle school.
Keynote: Cultivating Curiosity, Wonder & Play through Pedagogical Documentation
Lynn Cuccaro
What does your classroom say about children’s ideas, inquiries, play, and learning? How do we nurture children’s curiosity while also keeping it alive for ourselves as educators?
Insert pedagogical documentation, an invitation to walk alongside children as researchers and learners. Slowing down to look more closely at the everyday and extraordinary interactions and explorations of children engaging with materials cultivates wonder and curiosity. Allowing ourselves to wonder and wander as we observe and document children can lead to transformational possibilities for both children and educators. Through the lens of teacher-researcher, Lynn will explore how curiosity, wonder, play, and learning are interwoven throughout the process of pedagogical documentation.
This keynote is geared toward early childhood, elementary, and middle school educators and educational leadership.
Keynote: A Pedagogy of Play
Yvonne Liu-Constant
Play is a powerful strategy for learning. Playful learning can help students learn fundamental concepts and skills, as well as develop their abilities to collaborate, solve problems, and navigate uncertainty. However, apart from early childhood and recess, learning through play does not have a central role in most schools. A false dichotomy is partially to blame, positioning play, enjoyment, and emotions to be at odds with learning and rigor. Creating powerful learning experiences for students means breaking down this distinction. It means bringing children’s natural way of learning through play together with the teaching of important skills and mindsets that children need to be contributing members of their communities.
In this keynote presentation, Harvard Project Zero researcher Yvonne Liu-Constant will introduce the findings of the Pedagogy of Play project. What is playful learning? Why do educators need a pedagogy of play? How do we support playful pedagogy in schools? These questions will be explored with classroom examples of playful teaching and learning in action from Denmark, South Africa, the US, Colombia, and Taiwan.
This keynote is geared toward early childhood, elementary, and middle school educators and educational leadership.
Keynote: The Curious Classroom
John Spencer
Our world is changing. For years, students were taught a formula: go to school, graduate from university, and climb the corporate ladder. But the ladder is gone, and our students will need to navigate the maze of a complex world. Experts have called on educators to prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet. Instead, we can design classrooms to be bastions of curiosity and wonder. As educators, we can empower students to ask questions, seek out information, and design solutions built on empathy. In this keynote, we explore what it means to spark ongoing curiosity through inquiry-based learning in a way that develops deeper learning to help students thrive in the maze of a complex world.
This keynote is geared toward early childhood, elementary, and middle school educators and educational leadership.
Saturday, October 14
On Saturday, sessions will occur simultaneously. Participants will choose two sessions to attend, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. All sessions are applicable for educators and administrators working with early childhood, elementary, and middle school.
Session: Educator Curiosity & Wonder: The Language of Wire Play Lab
Lynn Cuccaro
When viewed as languages, materials and the arts open windows of imagination and possibility while giving voice and visibility to children’s learning and thinking. Different materials create different opportunities for thinking and learning to arise.
For curiosity and wonder to thrive in educators, we also need an opportunity to tinker, toy with, make and create with unusual and provocative materials. We need to build a relationship with materials, to see materials in new ways, to see the possibilities that open the window of what children might create. Playing with the languages of materials ourselves can better support the exploration of these materials with children.
In this workshop, we will play with the wondrous material of wire while creating space to let our minds wander, be creative, take risks, and experience joy so we can nurture a curious disposition within ourselves while prioritizing for children.
This workshop is geared toward early childhood, elementary, and middle school educators and educational leadership.
Session: Supporting Playful Learning in Classrooms and Schools
Yvonne Liu-Constant
In this workshop, participants will explore playful learning practices, strategies, and tools developed by the Pedagogy of Play project. Through hands-on experiences of playful learning, discussion of classroom examples and documentation from different cultures, and reflection on one’s own classroom, school, and community, participants will gain practical ideas for bringing more play into their teaching and learning contexts.
This workshop is geared toward early childhood, elementary, and middle school educators and educational leadership.
Session: Making Inquiry-Based Learning a Reality
John Spencer
Inquiry-based learning sounds great, but how do we actually make it work when we have content to teach and limited time to do it? In this session, we explore tools and strategies to seamlessly integrate inquiry-based learning into your curriculum, while maintaining alignment with standards and incorporating best practices in assessment. Participants will explore the principles of inquiry-based learning, discover innovative ways to foster students’ curiosity and critical thinking, and learn effective assessment methods that both support student growth and meet educational objectives. Through interactive discussion, hands-on activities, and real-life examples, attendees will leave this workshop with an outline of an inquiry-based learning experience that encourages deeper learning.
This workshop is geared toward early childhood, elementary, and middle school educators and educational leadership.
SPEAKER BIOS
Lynn Cuccaro
Founder and Principal Advisor of The Global Collaborative
Lynn Cuccaro is a global educator with extensive experience in educational leadership, strategic design, and professional learning. Invested in lifelong learning, she holds master’s degrees in curriculum and instruction as well as gifted education. As the founder of The Global Collaborative, Lynn’s passion is partnering with schools and organizations to build sustainable systems that push the possibilities of teaching and learning in the early years. For the last two decades, she has served as a play-based, inquiry advocate working in and with schools across the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
Yvonne Liu-Constant
Practitioner Specialist at Pedagogy of Play through Harvard’s Project Zero
Yvonne Liu-Constant is the Practitioner Specialist at the Pedagogy of Play. She is an early childhood educator who loves teaching children as much as she loves working with teachers. Yvonne has taught children ages 3 to 8 at independent and public schools, as well as adults in undergraduate and graduate programs. Currently, she teaches at Boston Teacher Residency and Lesley University, where she was Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education.
Yvonne is trained as a cultural researcher, and she is fluent in Mandarin Chinese, Taiwanese, and English. She has published research comparing childrearing practices of Chinese immigrant and European American parents, and translated into English the Taiwanese children’s book Run, Little Hei Hei, Run. Yvonne is passionate about the integration of math, science, and the arts, and she is the founder of Mathful Play, a teacher collaborative that seeks to make math more playful and more mathful. She is co-author of The Footbook: Steps to Developing Numbersense in Young Children.
John Spencer
Author and Professor of Education at George Fox University
Hi, I’m John Spencer. I’m a former middle school teacher and current college professor on a quest to transform schools into bastions of creativity and wonder. I want to see teachers unleash the creative potential in all of their students so that kids can be makers, designers, artists, and engineers. I explore research, interview educators, deconstruct systems, and study real-world examples of design thinking in action. I share what I’m learning in books, blog posts, journal articles, free resources, animated videos, and podcasts.
