KATE Conference Reflection

Walking into the Marriot on Thursday was kind of intimidating as a student teacher. This conference would be full of English teachers with a lot more experience than I have. I know I will gain experience in the future, but right now I felt sort of out of place. Fortunately, checking in and sitting down for breakfast with my fellow student teachers calmed my nerves. Also, seeing many teachers I work with at North High School seemed to validate that I belonged there.

The first breakout session I attended was Mary Harrison’s, one of my fellow student teachers. She presented on how authors inspire empathy in their audience. I have seen this presentation in its infancy this summer during a class, but it was awesome to see how the other teachers in the session enjoyed recalling the themes of the book used, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. The audience of this session did not care that Mary was a student teacher; they loved her idea about having the students try to guess who the narrator of the book is. Hearing this brightened my spirit about attending this conference.

Of the two days, the session I most enjoyed attending was the Music and Language Arts session presented by two first year teachers. They presented different lessons they used with their students that incorporated music in the language arts classroom. Out of the session, I learned about defining and describing mood while listening to a song. For my unit plan, I am using Into the Woods and “The Most Dangerous Game” as reading material and I heard a teacher say that the Jaw’s Theme song these two presenters modeled would be great for “The Most Dangerous Game.” I am going to incorporate this example into my plan.

When the schedule of sessions was released, I was happy to see that among my colleagues who were presenting, many of my teachers I worked with at North were presenting and even co-presidents of the conference. From that, I knew I would not have any issues finding sessions I would like to attend. But because of that, it was hard to choose because I wanted to support all of my colleagues. It was also fun to converse with other teachers across Kansas and find out how far they traveled to attend the conference. At one time early in the day on Thursday, someone was talking to a group of us and asked what schools we worked at, and we got excited because we looked like teachers instead of student teachers.

I really enjoyed attending this conference. Attending both days was a little much, but I received a large amount of resources and ideas to take back and incorporate into my lessons.