A Focus on Teacher Engagement Helps Set BRI Apart
<p>The Bill of Rights Institute spent the school year traveling the country and offering market-leading professional development opportunities for educators.</p>
<p>As with any quality professional development, audience engagement is paramount.</p>
<p>Lori Rech, BRI’s Programs Manager, believes in making her presentations as interactive as possible, keeping the attendees moving, and participating in activities to keep them engaged with the materials.</p>
<p>“It is difficult for teachers to ‘sit and get,’” Rech said. “They want to be involved in their own learning and idea gathering. By modeling activities, teachers can see how something works and better envision how they would do it in their own classroom.”</p>
<p>When Rech holds a daylong seminar on BRI’s curricula and materials, she includes both a scholar and pedagogical session. This allows teachers to deeply engage with the content while modeling activities they may want their students to complete.</p>
<p>“In our workshops, we have multiple sessions where teachers engage with our curriculum, as well as engage in longer modeling sessions involving classroom conversations,” she said.</p>
<p>Joe Schmidt, BRI’s Programs Director, recently presented to educators in Dayton, OH, and will present at a seminar in Texas later this month. He likes to start his presentations by explaining why BRI’s materials and curriculum are relevant to both attendees and to himself. He also likes to explain his motivation to share BRI’s mission with teachers nationwide.</p>
<p>Schmidt prefers more interactive presentations, but “it is possible to force an audience to be ‘too interactive,’ especially when it is more of a talk than a presentation,” he said.</p>
<p>“When using slides, images are truly worth a thousand words,” he added. “Listeners are taking a journey with you as you tell your story. Posing a problem and having participants reflect on a solution gives them a reason to be invested in what you are saying.</p>
<p>“I think if you give your audience a reason to reflect on why the topic is important to them, it gives them a chance to think about how the message extends beyond when I’m speaking,” Schmidt said. “Having them find that value in my talk is the experience I’m trying to deliver.”</p>
<p>Schmidt counts his presentation to the Middle States Council for the Social Studies earlier this year as one of his favorites. He presented in front of a group that included colleagues and friends, “so it felt very personal,” he said.</p>
<p>“The only constraint I was given is time,” Schmidt said. “It was 15 minutes, so it was more of a TED Talk and pushed me to be concise and impactful. The topic was of my choosing, and I was told afterward by the organizer, ‘that is what they needed to hear right now.’”</p>
<p>Rech considered a conference presentation on BRI’s Being an American curriculum as one of her favorites and mentioned it included using character cards to teach about civic virtue. The cards are used to simulate various historical figures being at a “dinner party” together.</p>
<p>“At the end of the activity we discuss who was at their dinner party, the virtues they admired, and if they would invite these people back to another dinner party,” Rech said. “I never know what the outcome of that activity will be, which is why it is a favorite. It is never boring!”</p>
<p>Rech also enjoys BRI’s day-long seminar on the Constitutional Conversations on Religious Liberty. She said it allows teachers to dive into a topic and a question that doesn’t necessarily have easy answers.</p>
<p>“These activities give teachers tools that will allow their students to use primary documents to have deep conversations over a topic and question that could be contentious but grounded in documents,” Rech said. “This is such an important skill for civil discourse!”</p>