It's taken a few weeks, but I finally got around to editing video footage from our Western Massachusetts Writing Project's fall conference keynote address by Sydney Chaffee, a Massachusetts educator who is the 2017 National Teacher of the Year. Sydney's keynote speech centered on how to encourage student voice, and how to spark a love of words and language.
I hope you can watch her talk. Be sure to listen to the spoken poem of one of her students — Omar — whose performance of his poem caught the attention of our former state commissioner of education (he passed away earlier this year), who shared Omar's poem with educators around the state and beyond, and apparently even performed Omar's poem a few times himself.