Session 1: 9:00 am - 10:30 am

1-on-1 Conferencing as a Daily Ritual

Flexible Feedback Practices: Combining AI Feedback, Peer Review, and Self-Reflection for Targeted Revision

Building Students' Writing Capacities: The Stakes Are High

This workshop is about developing a practice of daily 1-on-1 writing conferences to support students’ growth as writers. Some advantages of this approach: 1. students receive personalized feedback at a more consistent rate; 2. time spent grading papers at home is shifted into the rhythms of daily instruction; and 3. many opportunities are created for positive relationship building between student and teacher. Workshop participants will experience the structure of a mini-conference, analyze its impact on student learning, and consider how conferencing might find a home inside of their limited instructional minutes. This workshop is most applicable for secondary English teachers, but all are welcome!

Engaging your students in a multi-step writing process can be daunting, especially if you have a large workload and students with different skill levels. But not every student needs the same amount or type of feedback in order to improve their writing. In this workshop, you will learn how to lead students through a process of soliciting peer feedback and AI feedback paired with self-reflection that will help them revise their work before turning it in to the teacher. Meanwhile, you will identify ways to give students quick formative feedback so that students who need more teacher support can still receive it in a timely manner. This workshop is most applicable to middle school and high school ELA teachers.

Reading and assessing student writing takes time, time most teachers don’t have. However, writing instruction is more important than ever and, with the right systems in place, is doable. This workshop makes the case for assigning a variety of writing tasks in secondary classrooms, using Peter Elbow’s low, medium, and high stakes categories as ways to manage the paper load. Teachers will learn about and practice low and medium stakes writing exercises and also see how they can prepare students for high stakes, full-length compositions. Participants will see how frequent writing opportunities build students’ creativity, critical thinking skills, and writer identities. As time allows, teachers will also consider how a single point, interactive rubric can substantially shorten the time it takes to assess multiple-page papers.

Daniel Harbarger has taught in Oakland public schools for his entire career, as a Humanities content teacher and also an internship supervisor and dual enrollment coordinator . His work centers on project-based and real-world learning, helping students connect their classroom experiences to the world beyond school.

Molly Montgomery is an English and ELD teacher at Albany High School. She was a Stanford CRAFT AI Literacy fellow and has facilitated several workshops on integrating AI and ed tech tools into the teaching of writing. She is passionate about creating meaningful learning experiences for all students.

M. Clare LePell has been a teacher consultant for BAWP since 1993.  She taught BAWP's 2025 Summer Secondary Writing Course and has 37 years of public school classroom experience, instructing struggling to advanced writers.

Session 2: 10:45 am – 12:15 pm

First Thought; Best Thought: Becoming Psychic Writers

Holistic Self-Assessment

Ahead of the Game: Teaching Students to Revise BEFORE They "Turn It In”

This workshop focuses on the surrealist idea of automatic creation and how this can inspire low stakes writing activities in the classroom. Included is a philosophy of writing instruction that allows the instructor to let go and for the students' genius to flourish. Through frequent surrealist "automatic writing" students build confidence, speed, stamina, and style. In this workshop, participants will begin by exploring surrealist art and theory and ultimately engage in automatic creation. Suitable for all, but most applicable to elementary and middle school teachers.

This workshop focuses on the power of using holistic student self-assessment to deepen their personal and social agency.  This approach to self-assessment supports students in connecting their passions, identities and culture to their academic writing, particularly in relation to social and civic action. Workshop participants will consider how this approach dissolves the distinction between academic “standards” and socially relevant learning, and supports a more linguistically, socially and linguistically just curriculum.

In the sea of strategies to manage the paper load -- trade and grade, peer feedback, rubric apps, digital comment banks, employing AI, and ever on -- this workshop focuses on two approaches that can help students make initial changes to their writing BEFORE they turn in their first drafts: revision choice boards, and the "parallel revision" strategy based on Judith Hochman's book, The Writing Revolution.  Using these strategies, students not only learn to make changes they are capable of on their own so that teachers can encourage higher leverage revisions, but they also begin to take ownership of writing expectations and develop a common language of revision with their teacher.  Participants will consider how this approach can streamline the feedback process and even encourage a stronger peer-to-peer writing culture in their classrooms.  Workshop materials and work samples will be high school level, but the approaches can be easily adapted and all are welcome!

My name is Paul Vasquez. I am a proud Oakland educator originally from California's High Desert. I am totally obsessed with the puzzle of education and am always seeking like minded people to collaborate with.

Kevin Anderson is a former social studies, ELA and AVID teacher in middle and high schools in the SF East Bay. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Stanford Graduate School of Education whose research investigates enactments of culturally sustaining pedagogies in racially and ethnically diverse classrooms and how they may foster liberatory literacies.

Maurisa Thompson has taught middle school and high school in the Bay Area for 14 years, and has also worked as an afterschool program literacy coordinator and as a graduate teaching assistant in UC Riverside's MFA program.  She currently teaches 11th/12th Grade Humanities in the Acting for Critical Transformations Project at Downtown High School in SFUSD, where her cohort produces a show each semester devised from student-written 10-minute plays. When she has spare time, she also loves writing poetry and working on her YA novel.