AGIS Conference 2024 Potsdam

Secondary School Humanities educators from across the AGIS community will meet, get to know each other and collaborate on the issues and challenges facing us. How can we collaborate on curriculum, exams and assessment, linking our subjects to current affairs, field trips and excursions etc.? The session will also be used to explain how AGIS working groups function and what opportunities and support members receive.

Using the 'Love and Logic' approach to promote positive, respectful relationships between children and adults in your school. "The Love and Logic Approach teaches adults a range of skills that support the development of positive, supportive, and respectful relationships with children. Joyce and Chris have used these resources to support teachers, parents, and children over many years, with families of different cultures and religions and in several countries.

The 5 key principles of Love and Logic are:

Mutual Dignity - Love and Logic believes that mutual respect and dignity are critical for teaching children how to treat others.

Shared Control - Power struggles between parents and children are fundamentally about control. When we try to exert control over others, we lose it, but when we share control, we can gain it.

Shared Thinking - Enabling children to think about the consequences of their choices is a lifelong gift. By sharing the thinking process with them, they learn how to think on their own and solve their own problems at an early age.

Sincere Empathy -When we respond to children with anger and frustration, they will respond with defensiveness and defiance. When we respond with empathy, there is a much better chance that we will encourage them to think about their behaviors and consequences. Nothing works without empathy!

Loving Relationships - By following these principles parents will naturally develop a loving and mutually respectful relationship with their children. Kids learn to see their parents as both powerful and loving, and they are much more likely to grow up and become respectful, responsible adults.

Digital Society is a new course in the IB and the first students in this program will graduate in 2024. This session is intended to highlight what this new course is all about and the exciting learning that the first class and I experienced over the last two years. I will share details of the curriculum, the highlights we experienced, and the challenges we faced. I will have a social robot to show you, how I use a virtual reality world to enhance the experience, and I will explain the Bitcoin activity that we engaged in.

With all these new EdTechapps and AI tools looming around, it can often feel overwhelming to integrate them in a meaningful manner or know what’s out there. In this workshop, we will talk about some great EdTech platforms and how to utilize AI for your classroom -for lower to upper primary. Feel free to share examples of your best practices in or just be an curious mind during this session.

My passion for education and a desire for professional growth has led me to pursue a Master's in education. For the last four years, I juggled teaching full-time, balancing personal interests and family demands.

My session is set to explore efficient time management techniques, the choice of adaptable study programs, utilizing support from employers, and preserving personal well-being despite challenging timetables.

In my presentation, I aim to address the unique challenges I faced as I worked to enhance my teaching qualifications and provide an inclusive learning environment for my students. It will explore effective time management techniques, how to utilize employer support, and the importance of self-care throughout the process.

By equipping teachers with the knowledge and tools to better fulfill their learning and teaching responsibilities, I hope my presentation can help guide and motivate fellow educators to propel their professional and personal growth in completing a Master's in education program.

Are you looking for new ways to boost student engagement? Have you been searching for tools to reinvigorate your curriculum? Then this session is for YOU. We explore practical ways to add drama to a unit and how to use it as an assessment tool.

As a drama teacher with over 24 years of experience I am passionate about helping others discover the joys of adding theatre to areas where they could never imagine it.

At the end of the session, you will leave with several tools and maybe a few ideas that will inspire you to add a little drama to your classroom.

Your life is an epic journey, and you are the hero of the story. Joseph Campbell developed his concept of the “Hero’s Journey” through studies in comparative mythology, finding that cultures around the world have hero stories sharing an underlying story structure. The protagonist receives a call to adventure, faces a series of trials and challenges, learns and perseveres to get a treasure, and finally brings the treasure back home to share. The Hero’s Journey is therefore symbolic of personal development and acquiring special gifts to contribute to society. This workshop uses The Hero’s Journey as a lens to look at our own life journeys, asking how we became ourselves, what trials and challenges we faced, what we learned along the way, why we decided to become educators, and what special “treasures” we can bring to support our students and colleagues. When a hero complete’s their own journey, their role is supporting young people’s agency as they become the heroes on their own life journeys.

In an academic world where one size rarely fits all, how do we craft lessons that resonate with every learner? "Teaching All Minds" is more than a goal—it's a commitment to the diverse tapestry of intellects in our IB classrooms. This presentation will introduce you to the synergy of Rosenshine’s Principles and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a combination poised to revolutionize inclusive education for grades 6-12.

Unfamiliar with Rosenshine or UDL? No problem. We’ll explore these powerful frameworks together, revealing how they can seamlessly blend to enhance learning experiences. Explore universal strategies to present challenging curricula in a way that is accessible and engaging for all students, including those with diverse learning needs. Learn to transform assessment preparation into a supportive process that builds understanding and fosters success for each individual learner.

Join me for an engaging session filled with insights, strategies, and real-world applications that will empower you to meet and exceed the unique challenges of IB education. If you're ready to embrace a teaching philosophy that celebrates and elevates diversity in thought and learning, "Teaching All Minds" is your must-attend session!

In this session we will explore ways to make the MYP more accessible and inclusive for learners of
varying backgrounds and abilities. We will look at ways to allow non-native speakers to access the key concepts and develop their analytical skills, representation and voice, and making content manageable for struggling readers. From ATLs to Global Contexts, we will look at where barriers might exist and how we can break them down. This session is geared primarily toward teachers of English but also will include a few examples for German and should be transferable to any Language and Literature course.