The Office of Standards and Learning at the Oklahoma State Department of Education is excited to announce free professional development workshops for the 2024-25 school year. These workshops will be held in different regions of the state and are designed to support educators with effective instructional strategies aligned to the Oklahoma Academic Standards. Space is limited, so register today!
Meaningful Secondary English Language Arts for All Students
Learn how to apply the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities in secondary ELA. Participants will reflect on exemplar lesson plans and brainstorm ways to incorporate UDL approaches into their lessons.
The five in-person workshops will be from 8:30-11:30 a.m. The virtual workshop on October 22 will be from 6:00-7:30 p.m.
If you would like to return after lunch, you will have an opportunity to learn about Artificial Intelligence (AI) from Dr. Karen Leonard, Program Manager of Educational Technology and Micro-credentialing.
AI in the Classroom: A Practical Workshop for Teachers
This hands-on session is designed to equip educators with practical strategies and tools for integrating artificial intelligence into their teaching practices. Participants will explore real-world applications, learn about ethical considerations, and gain confidence in using AI technologies effectively in educational settings.
The in-person workshops will be from 12:30-3:30 p.m.
The Oklahoma Council of Teachers of English will host its fall conference on Friday, October 4, at Glenpool Intermediate School. OKCTE supports English Language Arts teaching at all education levels, provides professional development opportunities, and strives to create a collaborative community to nurture the efforts of Oklahoma’s ELA teachers.
The conference theme is Native Voices, and the keynote speaker will be author Traci Sorell, winner of the 2024 Oklahoma Book Award in Young Adult for her novel in verse Mascot.
The Carolyn Watson Rural Oklahoma Community Foundation was started in 1995 to improve the quality of life in designated rural communities in southern Oklahoma. The Classroom Enhancement Grant Program was created to enhance the classroom experience in select rural school districts in Oklahoma.
Grants of up to $5,000 are available to eligible PK-12 public school classrooms for enhancement projects in English language arts. Projects should be integrated into the academic curriculum and provide students with a significant opportunity to expand their knowledge or understanding in the specific area of study. No virtual or distance learning projects will be considered forfunding.
Recent ELA Grants:
Antlers High School – $2,500 – To combine literacy with mentorship by pairing seniors with second-grade students to create custom-written, illustrated and constructed children’s books.
Antlers High School – $2,000 – To acquire class sets of contemporary and classic novels for use in student-led book circles and class-wide novel studies.
Designed to improve the quality of life in rural Oklahoma, classroom grants provide an opportunity for Pre-K through 12th-grade educators to go beyond traditional curriculum and enrich the teaching environment for their students and provide students with resources they would not otherwise have access to in their everyday classroom activities.
Teachers and school administrators in Oklahoma public schools, grades Pre-K through 12, are eligible to apply if their schools meet the following criteria:
Located within one of the 23 designated Oklahoma counties: Adair, Atoka, Bryan, Caddo, Cherokee, Choctaw, Coal, Greer, Harmon, Haskell, Hughes, Jackson, Johnston, Kiowa, Latimer, Le Flore, McCurtain, McIntosh, Okfuskee, Pushmataha, Sequoyah, Tillman, or Washita. (blue counties in map above)
Designated with a locale code of 41, 42, or 43 by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES).
Have a total average daily attendance (ADA) of fewer than 600 students.
Application Process
Step 1: Letter of Intent (LOI) Potential applicants must complete an LOI (Letter of Intent) by 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 12, 2024, to determine eligibility and alignment with grant program priorities. Follow the steps below to access the LOI form:
Step 2: Grant Application If your school meets the eligibility requirements and your project aligns with the grant program priorities, you will receive an email granting access to the official application. The deadline to submit your application is 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 19, 2024.
Please direct all login and access questions to p.biera@occf.org.
Pre-K through 12th-grade teachers have the opportunity to pursue self-designed professional learning through a Fund for Teachers fellowship. Teachers decide what they want to learn and where they want to learn it. Their odysseys take them all over the world—as researchers, musicians, artists, and agents of change—and they return to their classrooms with new ideas that transform student learning and achievement. Individual teachers may apply for up to $5,000, and teacher teams may apply for up to $10,000 in grant funds.
Oklahoma English Language Arts Fund for Teachers Destinations in the Past Decade
Grades 6-8 Literacy 2019
Attend the National Differentiated Instruction Conference in Las Vegas to learn strategies for planning and maximizing teaching time to reduce achievement gaps and promote a positive behavior management environment.
Grades 9-12 Literature/Writing 2018
Travel Route 66, tracing the steps of "Okies" before me during the Great Depression, to replicate the experience of Steinbeck's Tom Joad and connect English III and AP classroom curricula.
Grades 9-12 Literature/Writing 2018
Attend the College Board AP Institute at Worcester College in Oxford, England, to study great works of literature among global peers and return with best practices for boosting student engagement with plays, poetry and novels.
Grades 9-12 Literature/Writing 2016
Tour sites associated with some of the most significant works in the English language while attending seminars on Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon and the Brontë sisters in Haworth to inject authenticity into upper level British literature lessons.
Grades 9-12 Literature/Writing 2013
Attend a workshop in James Joyce's hometown of Dublin, followed by tours of significant Irish libraries, to research historical and literary connections to the Great Irish Famine.
Eligibility Requirements
The teacher must be a full-time pre-K through 12th-grade teacher who spends at least 50% of his/her time directly providing instruction to students.
The teacher must have at least three years experience as a pre-K through 12th-grade teacher at the end of the 2024-25 school year.
The teacher must be returning to the classroom in the following school year after receiving the grant funding.
**School administrators or support staff that do not spend a minimum of 50% of their time in direction instruction to students are not eligible to apply.
How to apply
The Fund for Teachers application portal will open October 1, 2024. The application is comprised of a coversheet signed by the applicant’s principal, the proposal, and an itemized budget of the proposed fellowship.
If you would like to introduce your students to Jane Austen, the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) invites you to apply for a FREE Jane Austen Book Box. If your application is approved, you'll be able to choose books tailored to your students' needs for use in a program of your own design. Available titles range from Austen's classic novels (including annotated editions and Spanish translations), to modern retellings, graphic novels, children's adaptations, and more.
JASNA only requires that Book Box recipients 1) allow students to keep the books for their personal libraries and 2) submit a follow-up report on the outcome of the program or project.
The Public School Classroom Support Revolving Fund has $85,000, which includes a generous $10,000 donation from the Oklahoma Department of Commerce. The State Board of Education is authorized to award one or more grants annually to classroom teachers from funds available in the Public School Classroom Support Revolving Fund. Each grant awarded shall be used by the grantee teacher/teachers to purchase supplies, materials, or equipment for their class or classes.
610 applications were submitted for the CLASS grant, each ranging from $1,000 to $5,000. A committee reviewed all applications and selected 26 to recommend to the State Board of Education. Thank you to every educator who took the time to apply for this grant!
Two of grants are related to secondary ELA teachers:
Jay High School Requesting $4,402.67 for decodable readers that are geared towards high school students. This enables ninth and tenth-grade students to practice phonics skills while engaging student interest and preserving the dignity of teenagers who are growing their reading ability. Additionally, the text sets come with the following items to support comprehension: a lesson plan, vocabulary-building activities, guided reading questions, and a quiz.
Elk City High School Requesting $2,159.98 to create an elective course for juniors and seniors to promote critical thinking skills, reading comprehension, and text analysis. In the Mystery and True Crime Literature course, students will analyze literary texts related to true and fictional crime stories. Students will explore society’s true crime obsession while allaying issues, limitations, or problems with that obsession. Items requested include supplies like poster board, crime board red string, and crime scene markers, as well as a podcast equipment bundle and various mystery/true crime texts.
Seven additional writing contests have recently been added to the Writing Contests page. Four poetry contests, a fiction contest, an essay contest, and a competition with multiple genres are now available. Read on to learn more about each contest, all of which are national, and some of which have restrictions on grades and ages.
One Teen Story Contest
One Teen Story publishes 3 stories a year and accepts submissions from teen writers ages 13-19. For the One Teen Story contest, they ask writers ages 13-19 to enter their original, unpublished fiction. We are interested in great short stories of any genre about the teen experience—literary, fantasy, sci-fi, love stories, horror, etc. What’s in a great short story? Interesting teen characters, strong writing, and a beginning, middle, and end.
The winning stories will be published in forthcoming issues of One Teen Story, which will reach over ten thousand readers. The contest winners will receive $500 upon publication and 25 copies of the magazine featuring their work.
The 2025 One Teen Story Teen Writing Contest will open in fall 2024.
Leonard L. Milberg ’53 High School Poetry Prize
The Leonard L. Milberg ’53 High School Poetry Prize recognizes outstanding work by student writers in the 11th grade in the U.S. or abroad. Contest judges are poets on the Princeton University creative writing faculty. The 2024-25 contest will open in mid-fall 2024.
First Prize — $1,500
Second Prize — $750
Third Prize — $500
YoungArts National Arts Competition
For many young people, applying to YoungArts may be the first step in affirming “I am an artist.” YoungArts is one of the only organizations in the U.S. that supports artists across 10 disciplines at all stages of development, beginning with the critical moment when they decide to pursue a life in the arts, and continuing throughout their careers.
Artists ages 15–18, or grades 10–12, in the U.S. are encouraged to apply in the discipline of their choice. All applications are judged by esteemed discipline-specific panels of artists through a rigorous blind adjudication process, and award winners are offered a lifetime of artistic support and ongoing connection with an extraordinarily robust network of peers and mentors.
YoungArts accepts applications in Writing. This discipline encompasses fiction, nonfiction, play or script, poetry and spoken word.
The 2025 YoungArts application closes on October 17, 2024 at 8 PM ET.
Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest
Sponsored by Hollins University, the 60th Annual Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest provides scholarships, prizes, and recognition for the best poems submitted by young women in their sophomore or junior year of high school.
First place: $350
Deadline for Entry: October 31, 2023
Rattle Young Poets Anthology
In 1998 Rattle published an issue featuring poems written by children. Starting in 2013, this journal extended that idea, and began publishing an annual anthology of young poets, ages 15-18. The books are available in print, and all of the poems appear as daily content on this website on Saturdays throughout the year. Every poet contributing receives two free print copies.
Deadline:
Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers
The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, created in 2007 to recognize outstanding young poets, is an annual contest for poets who are sophomores and juniors in high school. The contest is named in honor of Patricia Grodd in recognition of her generous support of The Kenyon Review and its programs, as well as her passionate commitment to education and deep love for poetry.
The poems by the winner and runners-up will be published in TheKenyon Review, and the winner receives a full scholarship to a Kenyon Review Young Writers workshop. Submissions for the contest are open every year November 1—30.
Jane Austen Society of North America Essay Contest
JASNA conducts an annual student Essay Contest to encourage the study and appreciation of Jane Austen's works in new generations of readers. Students world-wide are invited to compete for scholarship awards in three divisions, including high school.
The 2025 contest topic and rules will be available on this webpage in November 2024, and they will begin accepting submissions in February 2025.
What is the difference between a story written by a human and a story written by artificial intelligence?
The best-selling novelist Curtis Sittenfeld decided to find out. After identifying elements of an ideal beach read, she wrote a 1,000-word story. Her editor used the same prompt and fed it to ChatGPT.
Read the results for yourself, and see if you can tell the difference. Sittenfeld reveals the answer at the end of the story along with some insight into her own writing process.
Taking inspiration from a recent title of a story from One Teen Story, "Eleven Things You Don't Remember," create a list for yourself or a character of your own invention. What things do you or that character not remember? Was the memory so long ago that the details are fuzzy around why you and your best friend in third grade got into a fight? What perfume did your grandmother wear? Once you have built a list, pick one item from it and write more deeply for five minutes. Your writing can be in prose or poetry.
Have ideas for the newsletter? Reach out and let me know! I would be happy to pass along pertinent information, professional development opportunities, and more.
Cheers, Jason Stephenson Program Manager, Secondary Education
