TEACHERS: The teachers’ seminar, aka EDUC 790: Graduate Topics in Education Studies (The Chesapeake Writers’ Conference), is an MSDE-approved Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course that provides two graduate-level credits from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, which can be used toward fulfilling CPD requirements in Maryland and elsewhere.

Teachers interested in attending the Conference are encouraged to contact their Division of Educator Certification and Program Approval or equivalent for more information.

The Overview
Participants in the teachers’ seminar will attend a genre-specific workshop like other conference-goers (fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction) but will also meet each morning for the seminar. This approach allows you a robust and uninterrupted writing workshop experience in the genre you gravitate toward and connects you to those who work in your genre and the other teachers at the conference.

We see one’s creative practice and interest as the most important means of exciting students about writing. We’ll focus on pedagogically harnessing that skill and enthusiasm in the teachers’ seminar.

Whether you’ve been hard at work on a book of poems or your novel has been in the deep freeze, this seminar will be a chance to renew and revitalize your project–and allow you the opportunity to work closely with other teachers also trying to balance teaching and writing. Those folks will offer you fresh eyes on your writing, and you will do the same for them. We’ll discuss infusing the syllabus with creative writing exercises and assignments while covering the writing process, editing, and revision.

The Course
Each day during the conference, those participating in the teachers’ seminar meet to discuss the ways they can better intersect their writing practice and pedagogy. In our meetings, the discussion will range from talking about readings we’ve done, to experiences in your conference workshops, to your classrooms back home, all with the purpose of getting concrete about what you can bring to your students.

The course work for EDUC 790 will include two main items:

1. Conference Journal. A detailed conference journal in which you offer responses/interpretations/analyses of the various conference events and experiences (including panel discussions, readings, craft talks, lectures, your workshop, and even the teachers’ class). An important guiding question could be: What did you find useful—for teaching and/or writing?
2. Instructional Methods/Plans. You’ll write five short summary overviews of new instructional approaches or methods you could incorporate into lesson plans next fall. These should include an explanation of the ways these activities will engage students through a focus on creative writing, formal composition, language analysis, or literary analysis. These instructional summaries can be paired with full lesson plans, essential ancillary materials, or more informal, but complete, descriptions of how the activity or instruction would occur within the classroom setting (ex. an explanation for how regular, creative warm-up writing could be compiled into a writing portfolio and used for various revision and re-writing tasks in subsequent lessons).

Admissions are rolling and enrollments are limited to 13 participants.
Students taking the teachers’ seminar will be registered for the graduate course EDUC 790 and, upon completion, awarded two graduate-level credits from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.