WYTeacherCon25

This collaborative idea-building session focuses on a perennial problem: the lack of time to teach science in elementary classrooms. There are so many demands on teachers to support their young learners including character development, and engagement of all learners. This session will provide participants with new ideas for using age-appropriate science crosscutting concepts (CCCs) to pose morning meeting and bell ringer prompts that will engage students while building their science understanding.

Children learn what they attend to--but how do we ensure they are attending to what we want them to learn? In this session, participants will engage in cognitive-science-informed classroom routines that will maximize student engagement and learning. Applicable to K-12 and for all content areas, these simple routines have a huge impact by checking students are listening, allowing for 100% participation, and maximizing student attention and retention of the lesson. Participants will have the opportunity to rehearse and engage with the routines and easily adopt them into their teaching practice.

The purpose of the Wyoming Resilience Youth Project is to create a community of practice for Wyoming educators to empower youth voices through curriculum and applied practice. As a response to Governor Gordon’s Reimagining and Innovating the Delivery of Education (RIDE) Initiative focused on youth life skills and community involvement, the project proposes to work with teachers to help their students to be engaged citizens. The goal is to partner with 25 teachers to collect youth perspectives about barriers and opportunities in educational attainment, employment, and community resilience that will be showcased locally and on a public interactive map. The project employs PhotoVoice – a research methodology designed to capture people’s perspectives of their lives through photography and narrative. By capturing Wyomingites’ experiences, in their voices, the project adds a rich context and texture to economic and behavioral data, which can be used in Wyoming college & K-12 classrooms, to inform community and state economic development priorities, and to develop a deeper understanding of what resilience means in different Wyoming communities. This session will provide information about the overall project, provide participants with an understanding of the PhotoVoice method, share curricular resources to support teacher participation, and discuss specifics about how teachers can partner with the UW Wallop Civic Engagement Program across 2025-26 in this project.

This session will engage educators by demonstrating effective student strategies that create relevance and boost engagement in high school. Participants will learn how to connect today's curriculum with students' future goals and dreams, fostering a smoother transition to adulthood.