Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™

 Workshops, Coaching, Collaborative Research & Instructional Support

For more information on how to apply for grants, or to register, please sign up below. We will let you know what dates are materializing for groups of teachers. If you have a group of teachers from your school who are interested, please let us know how many. We will provide you a budget breakdown and workshop descriptions and point you to available grants. We will support you through the grant writing process and ensure your specific goals are coordinated with our customized services.

Whom We Serve

Teacher Testimonials 

K-12 Administrators
Curriculum Specialists all Disciplines
Department Chairs All Disciplines
K-12 Teachers from Every Discipline
​Counselors
In-School Suspension Teachers
Youth-Leader Groups

Where We Serve

Leadership Training
Professional Development Sessions
Classroom Observations
Classroom Co-Teaching
Classroom Planning/Reflecting

Math Teacher: “Working with you has helped me realize you’ve got to get to know the kids, and if they’re not working, there’s a reason. All kids want to do well . . . Deep down I always have believed that but you, there’s sometimes that I just get tired, but then you coming helped me know—no don’t give up. If that didn’t work, try something else. The ones that misbehave, looking at it from a different way. That’s a person. Why are they doing that?”

Science Teacher: “Before, they were treating it more like a chore, and when they were able to connect with it and find some sort of use for it as is classically what you want, they were more able to cope with the challenges and work together instead of in competition to get things done."

Services

Workshops: See below.
Hourly Coaching: Classroom observations, and/or planning and assessment reflection meetings with individual teachers and/or administrators and/or teacher teams.

• Supporting administrators in implementing practitioner inquiry processes that catalyze change management approaches
• Supporting principals, curricular specialists and literacy coaches in coordinating and streamlining their approaches to working with teachers
• Supporting departments and teachers in coordinating their approaches to working together and with students
  
• Providing feedback to teachers on their instruction and helping them forge teaching partnerships within and across subjects
• Support in developing or enhancing school leadership teams
• Support in working within and across leadership teams of administrators, literacy specialists, teachers, parents, and students
• Support in mapping within and cross-curricular units
• Support in designing and implementing teacher research protocols
• Curricular material and assessment support  

Professional Development Informational Speaking

• Introducing cutting-edge literacy educational topics
• Providing insights into regional, national, and international cultural histories and their connections to youth 
• Bridge-building practices that create connected classroom learning environments 

Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™

The ethnodramatic approach Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™  is an analytical approach to community stories that illuminates and transforms the brokenness of current thinking about persistent social problems. The ethnodramatic approach Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™ is designed to demonstrate a high-impact, highly interactive approach to teaching that engages a wide variety of learners in strategic close-text, cross-text, digital reading, research, and inquiry. In our project-based workshops, teachers are invited to participate as if they are students in a power packed array of dramatic and socratic interactions that help them interpret rich textsets. They work together to access a set of complex texts, to deepen their knowledge of the impact of local histories on social issues, and to compare and contrast past and present cultural circumstances. They experience student-centered collaborative inquiries that strengthen student identities as readers, speakers,writers, researchers, and language learners.

Workshops are followed up with written and shared reflections on the many layers of instructional design that yielded high-impact and differentiated learning. Teachers have the option of receiving year-long support through observation, coaching, co-teaching and mentoring in within and cross-discipline collaborative planning, teaching, and reflection. They expand their abilities to integrate contemporary place-based history, real-world collaborative arts, drama, and film-based reading and writing opportunities into their classes. 

Through written and shared reflections and follow-up practitioner inquiry sessions, teachers engage in professional inquiry communities that help them integrate contemporary place-based issues, interdisciplinary arts-integrated approaches and real-world reading and writing opportunities into their classes.
 
Teachers work together to map their curriculum, drawing on the ethnodramatic social scientist techniques they have experienced in the workshops. They also engage in practitioner inquiry and design practitioner inquiry questions, goals, and methods for the year that will support their implementation of Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™.

16 teachers who recently completed a workshop noted the combination of rigor and engagement they had experienced, the strong organization of the lesson, the relevant topic, the pertinent and high level vocabulary instruction, the many different forms of differentiation, the chance to learn for themselves across a progression of activities, and the supportive discussions.

Here are some of many comments from middle school teachers:

• "If we felt engaged as the teachers . . . You know the kids are gonna feel engaged."  (Arnez and Ken)
• "It’s very inclusive, versus me standing up and explaining to them all the information . . . you can make that [ethnodrama] work with any content . . . tie it into whatever time period or class that you’re teaching." (Emily)
• "It’s something I can immediately implement in my classroom . . . It was new for me. . . the level of engagement and level of rigor—both were high."  (Ken)
• ​"I found it fascinating to actually interact with the racial history of St. Louis and the implications that are still standing now." (Arnez)​

​If interested in integrating one or more ethnodrama workshops at your school, please contact Sarah Hobson, sarah.hobson@communityalliesconsulting.com

Sample Set of Workshops 

3-Hour Workshops Spread Over Summer or Year: Teacher-Led Goals and Instructional Coaching in Between
Workshop training manual included with sample unit designs and practitioner inquiry protocols, assessments, reading resources. With each workshop, teachers engage in reflective practice together and expand abilities to document and study intersections between instruction and student learning. With ongoing support, teachers also design and implement practitioner inquiry agendas, goals, and methods.
Day 1

• Teacher collaborative inquiry place-based, local history, drama-integrated experience as student collaborative researchers, readers, and writers.

​Day 2

• Maximizing community-centered language learning and decoding processes when reading, researching, and writing texts.​

Day 3

• Expediting and improving youth informational literacies through creative interactive community research.

Support Offered Throughout Year

• 2 meetings with departments or teacher research communities per semester.
• In-person instructional coaching
• Practitioner inquiry support through phone/zoom/email conversations throughout year.
• Training manual with instructional, assessment, and practitioner inquiry models and templates, reading lists, historical texts, and other customized resources. 
• Points from workshops and from ongoing professional development towards certification as Honoring Stories and Integrating Curriculum™ teacher expert.

Overview of Workshops, Coaching, Instructional Support 

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