Get ready for three days of PD that's as refreshing as a popsicle and as powerful as the curriculum behind it.
This workshop will teach you how to use the Voces Digital curriculum. You'll explore powerful, acquisition-driven strategies, like storytelling and gesturing, while also learning about thoughtful approaches to grammar and assessment. You'll be introduced to the brand-new Voces platform, discover best practices for pacing the curriculum, and learn new ways to incorporate music, posters, readers, and more into your teaching.
You'll also enjoy...
- Games, raffles, and prizes
- Interactive discussions on key topics
- A strong community of teachers
- Trusted, effective strategies for real educators, like you!
Throughout the workshop, you'll hear from members of the Voces Team, many of whom are former classroom teachers, as well as from special guest speakers who bring years of expertise and inspiration to the table.
The Voces Virtual Summer Workshop is one workshop you won't want to miss!
Registration is $100 and includes a full-year teacher-only subscription to Voces (a $100 value). If you're a current Voces subscriber, then registration is completely free! Just email [email protected].
All sessions will be recorded, and every participant will receive a certificate of completion.
CONFERENCE SCHEDULE
Monday, July 28
Main Voces Training Track
Ancillary Training Track
Opening
Meet the Voces team! Over the next three days, our amazing team will be leading sessions, sharing insights, and connecting with you throughout the conference. During this opening session, you'll also get an overview of the conference schedule and a look at recent updates to the Voces library.
with the Voces Team
Seasoned and Fresh: Back-to-School Strategies
The first few weeks of school are the perfect time to set the tone for a successful year. In this session, get inspired to organize your classroom space (think desk setup, reading nooks, calming walls, and helpful posters), build routines, and set goals using “Can Do” statements. We'll discuss tips for building community, getting parents on board, and introducing students to tools like Voces and the basics of how language is acquired. New teachers and seasoned pros will leave this session with concrete takeaways to help you start the year strong!
with JJ Morgan
Guest Speaker - Maintaining and Growing Your World Language Department
Special guest Bryan Kandel will highlight sections of his book Give Them What They Want: A Guide to Increasing Enrollment in World Language Class and offer strategies for maintaining and growing a language department. He will emphasize the importance of engaging classes that create undeniable momentum within a program and keep students coming back for more.
with Bryan Kandel
Introducing Voces "V4": The Newest Version of the Voces Platform
Are you ready to see the newest version of the Voces platform? Learn how we've improved the Voces experience for you and for your students. Kris will take us through the brand-new teacher dashboard, spotlight some exciting updates to familiar features, and talk about some of our plans for the future. Join us later this week for an in-depth exploration of the updated editing tools.
with Kris Warshefki, Kelsey Rankin, & Neall Gleason
Discover the Science behind Acquisition-Driven Instruction
In this session, we'll examine both brain science and linguistic research supporting a number of principles and practices of Acquisition-Driven Instruction (ADI), such as personalization, repeated exposure to comprehensible input, focusing on form in context while primarily focusing on meaning, sheltering vocabulary more than grammar, minimizing stress, and using stories. You'll learn a lot about your and your students' brains and come away with several practical applications for your classes!
with Erica Peplinski-Burge & Justin Slocum Bailey
Tuesday, July 29
Beyond Food and Festivals: Teaching Culture with Depth and Purpose
Move beyond surface-level facts and bring culture to life in your language classroom! This session will explore practical ways to weave the authentic materials, stories, and cultural comparisons within the Voces titles into your teaching—highlighting the products, practices, and perspectives of diverse communities. You'll learn how to make culture meaningful and relevant through level-appropriate activities that promote empathy, engagement, and global awareness. You'll leave with flexible strategies and ready-to-use ideas that make culture an integral, exciting part of your instruction—not just an add-on.
with JJ Morgan
Exploring Primaria Step by Step
Take your students on a digital journey through the Spanish-speaking world with Voces Primaria 1 and 2! In this interactive session, you'll get a hands-on tour of key components, engaging features, and flexible ways to bring language and culture to life in your classroom. Discover how to boost student engagement with songs, visuals, and games, while maintaining structure and adaptability in your teaching day. And yes, we'll play a little too!
with Erica Peplinski-Burge
Authentically Awesome Lessons with Authres and IPAs
Students study a World Language because they want to use it. Authentic Resources and Integrated Performance Assessments bring the “real world” to your classroom with texts, videos, conversations, and more that let students experience the language in genuine contexts. Discover how you can use authentic resources as a springboard to help students connect with language, culture, and one another. In this session, you'll learn how to maximize any authentic content to guide your students through interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational interactions.
with Melisa Ferguson
Open Q&A
Join for real-time help and answers to your questions!
with the Voces Team
Fun and Freebies + Top Pick Tricks
Join us for a few quick games to get us moving and meeting! We'll also chat about the new project-based learning sections in Voces!
with Erin Almeranti
A Story from Start to Finish
Build belonging with story-driven instruction that engages both minds and hearts. In this session, we'll explore how narratives can do more than teach language, they can invite identity, empathy, and joy. You'll experience interactive techniques for introducing vocabulary, ways to tell a story, extending stories through meaningful follow-up tasks, and personalizing content to spark student confidence and connection. Help students see themselves in the language, and walk away with stories they won't forget.
with Erica Peplinski-Burge
Movement and Motivation: Teaching with Kinesthetic Activities
Play isn't just for the youngest students. Bring back lightheartedness and imagination for an energizing approach to World Language teaching. In this presentation, you'll learn go-to activities to get students moving, interacting, and—most importantly—acquiring language. You'll find games, competitions, and other interactions to use in both grammar-based and acquisition-driven classrooms to support language learning. Use kinesthetic activities as a purposeful break from “doing school” so your students can come back energized, refreshed, and eager to learn more!
with Melisa Ferguson
The Juicy Joys of… Grammar?
Some of the most intense conflicts among language teachers—and within a given language teacher—are about grammar. But what even is grammar, and what does it mean to teach it? Justin will offer fresh perspectives on these questions and then demonstrate several ways to teach grammar if you want or need to, regardless of what curriculum you use.
with Justin Slocum Bailey
Guest Speaker
TBD
with Nicole Hartung
Rethinking Assessments
Explore how to make assessments more meaningful, equitable, and effective in your World Language classroom. In this session, we'll dive into both formative and summative assessment strategies and look at examples from the Voces curriculum, sharing best practices to help you assess what matters most—comprehension, communication, and cultural understanding.
with All Curriculum Managers
Open Q&A
Have questions? Need some help? Jump into this Zoom room and get the support you need.
with the Voces Team
Wednesday, July 30
Assigning and Measuring
Learn how to use the Voces assignment tool to create structured activity goals wthin Voces as well as how to see student results. We'll explore the different assignment parameters available to help challenge and measure your students' progress. This session will also dive into the grading portal and how to give students feedback, see their scores, and generate gradebook reports.
with Kelsey Rankin
Open Q&A
Have questions? Need some help? Jump into this Zoom room and get the support you need.
with the Voces Team
Sequencing and Pacing in the Our Story Series
Voces' Our Story series—Nuestra historia, Notre histoire, Nostra storia, and Unsere Geschichten—is so packed with content and lessons that teachers can wonder how best to approach it. What does a given lesson look like in practice? What does a unit look like? What does a year look like? And how can we help students' proficiency and interest grow throughout it all? Justin will help you make sense of the content and its flow so that you can approach your lessons, units, and long-range plans with confidence.
with Justin Slocum Bailey
Pacing with Purpose with the Voices of the World Series
How do you decide what to teach, when? This session gives you a roadmap for navigating the Voces curriculum with clarity and flexibility. We'll explore what's essential, what's optional, and how to adjust your pacing to meet student needs. Learn how to simplify your planning process, adapt to different schedules, and how to keep students engaged while staying on track.
with Erica Peplinski-Burge
Fun and Freebies + Top Pick Tricks
Spend lunch playing some games and possibly winning prizes! We'll also chat about ways we can support students who are struggling to acquire the language and high-flyers who may need to be challenged in different ways.
with Erin Almeranti
Customizing Your Voces Experience
With some exciting new updates, customizing your Voces curriculum is now easier than ever. See how the on-page editing options can allow you to update, replace, or enhance the Voces materials. This session will touch on creating new pages, editing exisitng pages, and importing materials from one book to another.
with Kelsey Rankin, Hannah Meinecke, & Neall Gleason
Guest Speaker
Teaching a class novel
with A.C. Quintero
Wacky, Wonderful Walls: Using Posters to Elevate Instruction
Your classroom is your greatest teaching resource. It's where you create an environment for students to feel inspired, supported, and included. In this presentation, you'll learn strategies to get your students actively engaged with posters to reinforce key linguistic concepts, boost motivation, and bring the target culture to life. Participants will receive a link to the free Teacher's Inspiration guide for even more ideas on how you can surround your students with meaningful messages using the posters you already have in your classroom or the posters you plan to get for next school year.
with Melisa Ferguson
The Educator's Self-Care Toolbox
This session is for you… really. Teaching is demanding, and you deserve tools to stay energized and fulfilled. We'll share real strategies grounded in science to help you care for your body, mind, and heart. Come ready to breathe, reflect, and recharge.
with Erica Peplinski-Burge
Deep Tracks: Teaching with Music
Music is a powerful tool for building language skills, cultural understanding, and engagement. In this session, we'll explore ways to harness the full potential of music. We'll also look at how songs and music videos can be used to explore perspectives, deepen empathy, and develop cultural competence—moving past surface-level facts into the deeper layers of the “cultural iceberg.”
with JJ Morgan
How to Use a Classroom Library
Research is clear that extensive reading is a crucial component of developing proficiency in a language, and that independent, student-selected reading is especially powerful. To make this happen, though, you need lots of books and a system for using them that students actually buy into. In this short session, Justin will share both general principles and specific tricks and tools for making this happen.
with Justin Slocum Bailey
Closing
with the Voces Team
