Conferences
Featured Presentations
Luncheon / Keynote Presentations
Workshops
This information is available in a downloadable pdf. Click here to download.
Featured Presentations
Brod’s presentation style…
Brod’s presentations have been described as a kind of theatrical “one man show” than erases the line between entertainment and instruction. Audiences sigh, cry, and laugh out loud as Brod performs poetry to reveal simple techniques that empower both children and adults to produce both written and oral language at ever higher levels of proficiency. Brod’s presentations consistently live up the promise that his audiences will hear “poetry like they’ve never heard it before,” and leave with a rich new relationship with humankind’s oldest art form.
Luncheon / Keynote Presentations
1. The Poetry Revolution and the Classroom Teacher
Brod takes his audience on an unorthodox and irreverent tour of the world of traditional poetry as prologue to suggesting a kind of relationship between the speakers of the English language and our poetry, while addressing these questions:
- Does the golden age of poetry in English lie in our past or in our future?
- Might it be that a student in your classroom is destined to be one of the poets of that future golden age?
- If so, what are the odds of her fulfilling that destiny?
- And what do the answers to these questions have to do with “powerful teaching” and “engaged learning?”
2. A Chorus of Voices
Audiences delight as Brod recites selections of his poems in variety of voices that include a mischievous five-year-old who loves snack-time, a nine-year-old expressing angry frustration to a forgetful tooth fairy, an in-your-face sixth grade girl laying down the law to her male classmates, a classroom teacher annoyed with her “worst-kid-in-the-class” who has never missed a day at school, a middle aged man who loves his wife with the strength of “the steel cables they build bridges with that twist and swing through storms.”
All rich entertainment in pursuit of a series of serious ideas:
- 1. that poets need not limit themselves to writing in their own inner, personal, “confessional” voice;
- 2. that poets, like novelists and playwrights, can create a chorus of dramatic characters and write in each of their voices; and
- 3. that the practice of writing in multiple voices is likely to create a new class of highly entertaining, artistically powerful poetry to usher in “The Golden Age of Poetry in English.”
3. Rambo Teacher
Are you starting to wonder if you should have been a doctor? Could your teacher muscles use a small dose of steroids? In the highly politicized world of “high stakes” education, where parents, press and political pundits claim to have all the answers as they ignore the insights of classroom professionals, are you starting to feel a little frustrated? Enter RAMBO TEACHER! A passionate, patient, irrepressible spirit who “always puts the children first.”
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Workshops
1) Free Choice Poetry
In Free Choice Poetry participants will discover how to create a new kind of poetry experience in their classrooms. Based on oral performance, the result is high-energy fun that will alter the relationship between their students and the written word, empowering them to read aloud fluently and write with voice. Participants will discover:
- How to select poems for your students in the context of daily poems, poetry notebooks, and poetry across the curriculum;
- How classroom teachers can model the performance of poetry and maybe even outdo the professional actors;
- How to set up your very own, weekly Free Choice Poetry “happening;”
- And, finally, how to parley all of these insights into a veritable tsunami of voluntary, creative writing.
2) Writing Demonstrations
In each of these unique demonstrations participants observe as Brod writes an original poem. With laptop and projector, Brod writes and rewrites, over and over (typos, misspellings, weak writing and all) as participants draw the self-empowering conclusion that writers, even professional writers, really don’t start by writing well.
The intention of this workshop is for participants to achieve a series of insights to enrich what they already know about writing and writing instruction, a dash of Cajun-seasoning to good- ole meat and potatoes. Throughout the process Brod does a running commentary revealing every thought that goes through his head, issues such as:
- Poetic devices: how, when, and why he’s uses them.
- The personalities of various verse forms and how he chooses one for a particular poem.
- The learnable techniques he uses to write successfully within the constraints of a fixed rhyme and rhythm pattern, and how, when, and why to deviate from it.
- How to watch for and catch the metaphorical opportunities that turn ordinary, even funny verse, into full-power poetry.
This is how Brod describes it: “Writing in front of people can give them a concentrated dose of the courage-to-create, a direct injection into the muscle of their communicative inner-self. It’s the best thing I get to do.”
This information is available in a downloadable pdf. Click here to download.
