Well, welcome everyone to episode one of season three of the Poggle Podcast. This season is all about the practice of Poggle. I am your host, Wayne Pearson, and with me today is Siobhan Julian. Hello, Siobhan. Hello, Wayne. So what do you have in store for our listeners today? Well, today is actually, I think, a very special episode. We're going to be talking about NCAP, which is the National Conference to Advance Poggle Practice. And this was a very meaningful event for me.
So I am very excited to have with us here today Joyce Easter. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Joyce Easter. She teaches at Virginia Wesleyan University. Biochemist by training, she teaches in the chemistry department. She's been using Poggle since before it was called Poggle. So she is an OG Poggler. And she's been a leader in the Poggle Project for many years.
Currently, Joyce is the chair of the planning committee for the National Conference to Advance Poggle Practice, and she is here to talk to us about this awesome event. Welcome, Joyce. Thank you. It's great to be here. So Joyce, tell us, you're planning this conference, you're the head of the planning committee. What is NCAP? Well, NCAP is the National Conference to Advance Poggle Practice, which is a conference designed specifically for Poggle practitioners.
It has been held by annually in June since 2017. And the main goal of the conference is to transform education and educators by connecting educators from across the country and the world, from a variety of disciplines and with diverse experiences. To this end, the conference offers an engaging environment for sharing ideas, challenges, successes that participants have had using Poggle in their classrooms and their laboratories.
The format of the conference includes a variety of session types, all of which are participant-centered, ranging from discussions and conversations to workshops and poster sessions. That sounds fantastic. So why should our listeners apply to NCAP? Why do we want to go? That's a great question. This conference promotes a very engaging environment in which all of the practitioners are going to gain insights into effective teaching and facilitation.
They will share and find new activities and approaches for the classroom and laboratory. They will develop support networks. And what I find most intriguing is established collaborations with other practitioners. So participants will leave with new ideas for Poggle activities. They'll have new strategies for implementation, and they'll have new colleagues for collaborative projects.
So those of you who want to develop skills as a practitioner, you want to broaden your participation and contribution, the Poggle community should definitely apply. Thank you, Joyce. That's wonderful. And when I went to my first NCAP, I came back with so much that I was able to share with colleagues who didn't go. And it was really just an incredible experience.
Speaking of my first NCAP, people who are new to the Poggle project, as I was when I applied, might be surprised that there isn't actually an application process to attend NCAP. You can't just register like at other conferences. Can you tell us a little bit about this application process? So the application process is not meant to be onerous, and it's not really meant to be a hardship for the participants.
It really is a way for us as the planning committee to try to match the participants with the right type of presentation, as well as sometimes we pair people up and they end up being like co-presenters or co-facilitators for sessions. So the process itself is basically telling us a little bit about yourself, including in that your experience. How experienced are you? Are you relatively new to being a practitioner with the pedagogy, or have you been doing it for many years?
And what types of workshops that you've already been involved in and how you're involved with the project already, if at all. And the application process really is necessary for this conference because we want to ensure that we can have an engaging environment where all the participants are more than just attendees. This is not one of those conferences where you register, you go to your session, you present, and then you don't attend anything else.
We really want people who want to be fully engaged. So we want everyone to really be contributors to the program, both as in their sessions that they might be leading, but also actively engaged in the other sessions that they are attending. Yeah, thank you so much for that, Joyce.
Just from a personal standpoint, I remember feeling a little intimidated by the fact that there was an application the first time, but it really is, I love how you put it, that it's really more about getting at your POGLE profile. What is your experience? Tell us a little bit about yourself. The application is really more along the we want to get to know you sort of line. With that in mind, who should apply to NCAP?
I would say if you use POGLE as a part of your teaching toolkit and you want to develop your skills as a POGLE practitioner, you should apply, right? So anyone who falls into that category, whether you are relatively new to POGLE or you are a seasoned POGLE practitioner, you will benefit from participating in the conference. Everybody gets something out of this conference if they come and attend. People in the POGLE project are always very welcoming to new people.
So if you're thinking that I'm too new to this, I shouldn't apply, trust me, you should. Joyce, what are you looking forward to about NCAP 2023? I'm always eager to get back together with other POGLE practitioners. It's always really inspiring. But what I'm most looking forward to this conference, I've been to each of the NCAPs prior to this, but we have really three incredible plenary speakers and I am very eager to hear each of them speak.
Elise Eidman-Adal is the executive director of the National Writing Project and her area of expertise is in literacy and learning in the new digital age. It is so very timely, right? Particularly with everything that's happened in the last couple of years in terms of turning to so much technology, there's a social transformation that's occurred and I really am eager to hear what she has to say about this particular time and how the digital age is affecting student learning.
Peter Kaladay is one of our other plenary speakers. He's somebody from within the POGLE project. Anyone who has been to workshops before probably has heard of him. He's a high school teacher in the Chicago area.
He's been very involved in the POGLE project for a number of years, but in particular, been involved in the development of the classroom observation protocol working group for a number of years and they produced the optic assessment tool for teachers to evaluate their facilitation, have somebody come in and look at what's happening in their classrooms, which is particularly important I know at the secondary level when you have to have those sorts of evaluations.
I think that he has many years of experience that are very practical, probably very relevant to many of us who are practicing POGLE. The third one is Ellie Theobald, who's a professor of biology at the University of Washington. She's also a former high school teacher. She's been researching how to achieve equity in STEM education by addressing both instructor and systemic practices.
Really trying to come up with real concrete ways to implement changes in the practices to try to obliterate the inequities that are so prevalent in education today. I can't wait to see what she has to say about some of the things. I hope there's some take homes from that as well of how we can actually implement some of her ideas into our classrooms. Wow, those sound like just fantastic speakers. I'm looking forward to it too now.
Joyce, what are some of your best takeaways from previous NCAP meetings? I think one of the most inspiring aspects of the POGLE project just in general is the inspiration and support we gain from participating in this transformative community. It truly is a community. There's some people I only see every couple of years when I'm at conferences like the NCAP or even the BCCE, which chemistry people go to. You reconnect as if you haven't been apart for two years.
For me, the most exciting and rewarding feature of this particular conference is the interactions with the members of the POGLE community, the sharing of our experiences, the expertise and the insights between the participants is the real value that I gain from the experience. I always leave this conference with at least one action item that I'm inspired to tackle in the coming year to improve my facilitation or my activity writing.
And ultimately, that impacts the education experience of my students. For me, that's the most exciting or inspiring aspect of this conference is that there's always something that I can take back and inspire my students to improve their education. Yeah, 100%. Same with me. And I'm so, so looking forward to having another in-person NCAP. Where is it being held, Joyce? So it is being held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And the dates are June 26 to June 28 in 2023. Awesome.
And when are the applications going to go out? Approximately when? So the application, the call for proposals or call for applications should be going out in middle October at the latest. That's typically our target date is to get that out in October. And then we'll start putting the program together early 2023. And like I said, that sometimes we actually match pair people up based on their interests. They're presenting on very similar things. We sometimes pair people up.
And so you'll need time to interact with those other people that you're going to be paired with. And so we really do try to get the program together fairly early so people can prepare. One of the other aspects of this with the application process is that you can tell us what type of sessions you're most interested in. And you can propose ideas for different sessions. You may or may not get selected for all the sessions. But again, you need to know which one you got selected for.
So we do try to get through that applications and make those decisions pretty early in 2023. Yeah. And there are some very low key types of sessions as well. So if you're interested in presenting but you don't necessarily want to do a full blown formal thing, there are other ways that you can participate. What are the types of sessions, speaking of that, what are the types of sessions that NCAP has?
So again, we have some of those low key things like birds of a feather discussions or conversations. So that's kind of more informal. So if you have a topic that you want to get together with other people and chat about, it's more of a conversational get together. And then along those lines, we also have more extended discussions, a little bit more formalized with more formal focus questions with small groups. And those are called roundtables.
And so you could facilitate one of those sessions as well. We also have an opportunity for you to engage in professional development workshops. And so those are workshops similar to what you might have already participated in and a POCAL workshop in the past. And we're very excited that this year we're going to roll out the facilitators toolbox, which is a new session that is now in the three day facilitators training.
But for those of us who might have had our training prior to the session being created, we'll have that opportunity to do that one as well. And then we have an opportunity if you want to improve your facilitation skills, we do have a few facilitation fish bowls. This is where you can facilitate an activity, shorten activity, and focus on a particular aspect of facilitation that you want to improve on.
And then the people who are participating in this session will be able to give you feedback, some insights into your facilitation, whatever the areas you want to improve. It's a very typical traditional poster session. And we also have an opportunity if you want to improve on your activity writing, we do have some like author coaching sessions where you do some collaborative peer evaluation of each other's activities.
Yeah. I will put a big put up for the facilitator toolbox that I think that's easily one of the most valuable things out there for any POGAL practitioner to have a look at. Well, thank you so much, Joyce. That sounds absolutely terrific. I know I'm going to be applying to NCAP 100%. As soon as that comes in, I'm going to fill that form out and put that in. And I hope that all of our listeners apply as well. It is truly, truly a worthwhile conference.
It's a fantastic event, a wonderful opportunity for community building and learning. Thank you everyone for listening and I'm going to hand it back to Wayne. Thank you, Siobhan. And thank you, Joyce, for sharing that important information about NCAP 2023. As Joyce said, the plan is to open the application window for NCAP in October. I have good news for you though. The release of this episode and the opening of the application window are simultaneous.
So if you are listening, that means that you can apply now. Don't miss your opportunity to attend this great and might I add really fun conference. Why not apply today? There are three ways that you can get to an application. Number one, go directly to the POGAL website, www.pogal.org. You will find an online application form there. Number two, if you are in the POGAL database and a lot of you are, you should be receiving an email with a link to the application.
And number three, look for the announcement in the POGAL practitioners Facebook page. You will find the link to the application there also. And you will find a discussion thread for NCAP at hashtag the POGAL podcast. If you have any questions or comments about NCAP, you can join the discussion on the Facebook page. So there you have it. Three ways to get to an application and no reason that I can think of not to apply. Thanks for listening to this NCAP 2023 episode of the POGAL podcast.
We will be back soon with another episode about the practice of POGAL. So long everybody.