2026 Elevated Teaching Summit

This interactive session explores how teachers can guide students through a structured reading process that promotes inquiry, collaboration, and deeper understanding of texts. Participants will learn practical strategies to prepare students to engage with a text, facilitate collaborative reading and annotation, and extend learning beyond the text through meaningful discussion and reflection.

Using an Activate – Engage – Extend framework, the session will model strategies that help students build curiosity before reading, collaboratively analyze and annotate during reading, and synthesize their thinking after reading. Educators will experience classroom-ready routines that support student inquiry, structured collaboration, and deeper comprehension across content areas.

Participants will leave with concrete tools to help students:
• Prepare for reading through inquiry-based activation strategies
• Collaboratively read and annotate complex texts
• Extend understanding through discussion, synthesis, and reflection activities

The session emphasizes practical, student-centered strategies that foster meaningful engagement with texts while building critical thinking and collaborative learning skills.

Join us as we explore the five interconnected pillars of reading—phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Together, we will discover how these essential components work to build skilled readers, all while keeping oral language as the critical foundation that fuels every step of reading development.

Dr. Throndsen will be sharing scaffolding strategies to support teachers as they help all student access challenging text.

In this break-out, two different student-talk / vocabulary strategies will be demonstrated with attendees acting in the student roles. Krista Edwards and Emily Gonzalez will model strategies for Tier 1 Vocabulary Instruction, using lessons that they have used in the past and taught with improved student outcomes and student engagement. Krista will start with demonstrating a lesson pairing visual scaffolds to vocabulary acquisition, and Emily will demonstrate a strategy using physical movement in a World Language classroom to support vocabulary acquisition. Following these two demonstrations, there will be time for a debrief and conversation on how these strategies apply to your classroom and content. Teachers will leave with the confidence that they have actionable strategies they can implement immediately.

We will be presenting on a QTEL lesson structure we have implemented in the classroom. This strategy includes reading in 4 voices, collaboration, creating a mind mirror of the character you are reading about, and presentation skills.

What if your students didn't just summarize their learning, but curated an exhibit? Move beyond an essay or run-of-the-mill Slide Deck and turn your classroom into an interactive gallery.

By stepping into the role of a Museum Curator, students do more than just report facts - they evaluate, prioritize, and defend their choices. Canva’s Mini Museums take the heavy lifting out of design, allowing students to focus on the 'why' behind the 'what'. Join this session for a 3D glow-up that puts learning on a pedestal.

This session explores how AI can be used to strengthen feedback cycles and support high-quality teaching and learning. Participants will examine how timely, actionable feedback helps students refine their thinking, deepen understanding, and take ownership of their learning, while also reducing the burden on teachers.

It will introduce teachers to Snorkl, which is a tool for students to record and explain their thinking, and then get immediate and personalized feedback from AI. Students insights are also shared educators so they can better understand how their students think, including their strengths and where they need more support.

During this reflective session, teachers will work to align their values with their teaching practice as one step towards protecting against burnout and demoralization.

Empower students to thrive by intentionally teaching executive function skills. This interactive session shifts the focus from managing behavior to building capacity. Learn actionable "adult moves"—modeling metacognition, creating predictable routines, and using visual tools—that help students plan, prioritize, and sustain attention, bridging the gap between external support and self-regulation.

This session will break down the basics of UDL and how you can incorporate it into your class in small chunks or in whole units

In this fun and fast-paced presentation, teachers of all content areas will be given ideas and actionable steps to support their students in practice and review work while motivating them through competition and creative presentation.

RetroReport is free to use and is a Nonprofit, non-partisan, independent journalism organization - focused on short-form documentaries. You can explore by subject it has Chemistry, Psychology, Physics, Environmental Science, Civics, Geography, World History, US History, and more. It has everything you need to use it in class tomorrow (or right away). It is free for teachers to use and it combines videos with resources so it has questions already set up for you with quizzes, discussion questions, and connection assignments.