Promising Practices 2014 with Keynote Speaker Dr. Christopher Emdin

Promising Practices has been a conference I’ve attended annually, ever since I first entered Rhode Island College in 2010.  What I have learned as varied immensely, but what I always end up taking away is “Choose your workshop carefully.”

Christopher Emdin was our keynote speaker.  Heck, I’ve even added him on Twitter and Instagram.  He is as much of an influential educator as he is a groundbreaking.  His address to the audience gathered rally and criticism alike, as his point being made was “Education is a disease where we are the weaker creatures who have brainwashed the stronger ones to suppress themselves.”  What I came to learn from his address was that if I want to teach in a manner I see appropriate and awspiring, I would first need to learn the basics, discover my potential, and make myself both the saint and the martyr to my pedagogical cause.

But I digress.  For my own workshops, before the keynote address, I had decided on “Making it Personal” with Buddy Comet from Central Falls High School, and “Comedy in the Classroom” with Elizabeth Anne Keiser and students.  At a glance, and in reading their description, these two workshops worked to the extent of Emdin echoed in his address—be diverse and be you.

I could not have been more wrong.  Firstly, I should reconsider my previous statement “Choose your workshop carefully.”  What was more appropriate in my circumstance was “Not all workshops are equal.”  Prior to this year’s upset I’ve had a rather successful time with Promising Practices.  The educators I got to meet and work with all gave me very inspiring lens in which to move my professional identity through.  The best workshops left me with an open-ended answer and a pathway to evolve that identity through incorporating myself with my fellow educators.  And the worst workshops (until this years) presented me with a problem I had never encountered and allowed me the opportunity to meet and team up with other professionals in my field to learn what they already knew.  Nonetheless, I was able to become a better student, scholar, and teacher through these years with Promising Practice.

What about Promising Practice 2014 upset me the most? It would seem that the presenters, Buddy Comet and Elizabeth Anne Keiser, were underprepared in their aesthetics.  Comet began his lesson with a rather intriguing question “What does it take to make sure every and/or all students are accommodated?”  I, as many did, thought that he would take a poll on what our responses would have been.  Instead, he lectured us on what he thought the method should be.  And after that, he broken us up into groups and expected us to understand and interpret where we were supposed to end up in the lesson.  After a grueling 20 minutes of confusing and in-between side conversations between Comet and one of his former students-turn-colleague, we were presented with a guest speaker.  This speaker, whose name escapes my mind, was a fellow Rhode Island College professor.  She intended to teach us about how investigate the student psyche in order to appreciate the complexity of their livelihoods with our teaching methods, as well as how to begin to approach their needs, but instead ended up name dropping and yapping at length about how she was proud of her new course on campus.  (I’m sure both of these professionals are highly regarded in their fields of study, but from my own observation, I only saw two much underprepared presenters trying to save themselves with a very obscure lesson plan.)

In the case of Keiser, many of my fellow SED 406 colleagues can agree, “Please post grade level appropriation on Workshop.”  There isn’t much to say about this class, save for that we within the Secondary Education program did not learn much that could have been incorporated into our own livelihoods as professional educators.  The entire workshop in itself demonstrated a high level of intrigue and student-to-teacher involvement, but it just wasn’t appropriate for our studies.

But I would like to end this reflection-turned-rant on Promising Practices 2014 with a thank you to Dr. Christopher Emdin.  For it was with him that I was able to take a step back and look at myself as I always have these past four years with Rhode Island College and within Promising Practices—I am an individual who aims to become an educator of several individuals, and I wish to set a checkpoint in their destination towards “Life.”  In order to do that, I have learned that I will most certainly need to be alert and attentive, but most of all I must have the ability to think outside the box.  My classroom will always incorporate this sense of freedom to express, but to express to and with reason.