WATG 2024 Annual Conference

In this session, participants will learn how to create a multilingual leadership program that gives students access to immersive educational experiences ahead of key grade level units in order to position them as leaders. Imagine the possibilities when advanced learning specialists and multilingual teachers work together to inspire student leaders!

Your goal is to help your students become the transformational leaders and thinkers our world needs, right? Then breaking down the walls of our classrooms and inviting students into communities where they can learn more about how thinkers with similar talents have shaped our reality can be a great way to start them along their talent development pathway. Lave and Wenger talk about the common languages, products, problems and processes that professional groups develop through building a community of discourse and practice. By leveraging this theory to create affinity groups that include students in other classrooms, schools, districts, states, and even countries, students learn more about themselves and begin to envision themselves as change makers.

Educators must be thoughtful about how to support creative students, especially since the field of creativity can be broad-ranging and sometimes unwieldy. And yet, using creativity to help meet the needs of all students - especially those gifted students who are identified in the creative domain - is not only an admirable idea but a critical one. Doing so supports best practices, and more importantly, the students in your classroom or school. Sternberg (2006) talks about the need to “...improve instruction by teaching for creativity as well as teaching students to think creatively” (p. 87). If we are to Imagine, Innovate, and Inspire, let’s use Sternberg’s wise counsel as our guide.

This session will explore a variety of definitions of creativity (i.e., Torrance, May, Sternberg, and more) as well as various programming ideas (i.e., SCAMPER, QFT, CPS, and more). Please note that this session is a condensed version of DPI’s 2023-24 Transforming G/T Teaching and Learning meetings that focused on the theme of creativity.

Leadership this, and Leadership that! Schools around the globe push leadership, leadership, leadership. We won't always get the option to be the leader, but we can always be an active follower. Together we will explore what it means to be a good teammate and how that perspective can be crucial to the journey in developing leadership skills.