John Spencer

Featured Keynote Programs

Student choice is about more than just a menu option. It’s about student ownership. This includes ownership of the processes, the assessment, the strategies, and the metacognition. But how do we make this happen? How do we fit this into our standards and our curriculum map?

For all the talk of gadgets and apps, the future of education won’t center around a new content delivery system. The future is in your classroom. It’s with your students. Your school is packed with creative potential. In this keynote, we tackle what the future of education will look like as we shift toward creativity and innovation.

Using the metaphor of a journey, this session takes educators through the phases that many teachers go through from “tech tourism” to “tech assimilation” to “tech integration” and eventually “tech citizenship” (including media criticism). The idea here is to develop reflective questions we could ask teachers in each phase so that they could progress toward a deeper understanding of the nature of technology. Participants will reflect on their own journey through technology integration while also developing reflective coaching questions they can use with their colleagues.

The best way to prepare students for the future is to empower them in the present. In this keynote or workshop, we explore what it means to use vintage ideas, tools, and strategies in new and relevant ways. Here, we focus on innovation as a focus on “what is best” rather than “what is next.”

Creativity is often viewed through an artistic lens. The creative teacher is the one who is doing things wildly different. However, creativity can manifest itself in different ways on campus. In this workshop, we explore the five creative mindsets used in the classroom. The goal is for teachers to identify and analyze their creative identity while also empowering students to embrace creativity in the process.

With the explosion of the maker movement, schools are beginning to embrace creativity. However, what does this mean for assessment? Should we assess the creative process? Should we assess the finished product? Does assessing creativity actually make kids more risk-averse? In this session, we explore what it means to assess both the creative process and the creative product without leading to risk aversion.

PBL can seem daunting when you have time constraints, standards, and a curriculum map. Often, the push for better test scores and “basic skills” means certain students (English Language Learners, Special Education students) fail to have access to these projects. However, PBL can work for all students and in this workshop or keynote, I lay out the blueprint for making this a reality.

Despite the myth of “digital natives,” most of my students have very little experience using technology as anything more than a consumer device. It doesn’t have to be this way. By using a design thinking framework, teachers can foster creative thinking in every content area and help students develop a maker mindset.

Story-telling is a deeply human way of making sense out of our experiences. Using the lens of story, we explore how teachers can set up “epic” classrooms. The best lessons are the ones with a high level of suspense and profound character development. As teachers, we can allow students to struggle through both internal and external conflict as they make sense out of themes rather than just ideas.

Limitations and challenges can be frustrating. However, they can also be the creative constraint that leads to problem-solving and divergent thinking. Over the years, I’ve learned that students love challenges that they find engaging, intriguing and meaningful. Some of these are practical and real-world. Others are fantastical and require a bold imagination. In this session, we explore what it looks like to create maker challenges to spark student creativity.

Ever been “in the zone” while working on a project? You lose track of time. You focus on what’s in front of you. There is a strange mix of calmness and excitement. Those moments are tied into something called Flow Theory. How do we create lessons, experiences, projects and spaces that maximize flow for students? This session is an interactive discussion with an end product of something tangible that would increase flow in learning (a space, a lesson, or a unit).

Pixar continues to produce some of the most epic stories in all of cinema (well, except for Cars 2, which we’ll pretend never happened). But they don’t start out that way. In fact, they start out as pretty awful concepts that develop through iterations into genius works of art. In this session, we explore some of the processes that Pixar uses to inspire and sustain creativity and discuss what it would mean to attempt these in a K-12 classroom.