Reflecting on KATE Con 2025: Inspiring Educators, Improving Classrooms

​   This insightful reflection comes to us from Avery Gathright, a senior at WSU and an aspiring educator. As we step into the new year, Avery’s experience serves as a beautiful reminder of the lasting impact the KATE conference has on pre-service teachers. KATE Pages invites you to take a look...

     I recently had the privilege to attend the Kansas Association of Teachers of English (KATE) 2025 Conference, Empowering Voices, Inspiring Change: Navigating Change in Turbulent Times. As a pre-service teacher and an introvert to a fault, this was my first KATE conference, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned and the fact that I even enjoyed the experience. I was lucky enough to be able to attend every breakout session and learn from a diverse group of experienced educators and experts. Although I entered uncertain, worried that I was missing a day in the classroom and that I would just be overwhelmed, I left the conference feeling incredibly inspired and ready to make plans for my own future classroom.
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Spotlighting Reading in Your Classroom
    Every single Keynote speaker over the weekend was absolutely incredible, but the standout speaker was author and elementary educator Colby Sharp. Throughout his presentation, I found myself tearing up, and a look around the room told me I was not the only one. Although I plan to teach secondary education, Mr. Sharp’s experiences teaching elementary students and classroom suggestions seemed highly transferable. He reminded the room of the importance of engaging students not only in our classroom materials, but also the importance of letting students to fall in love with reading, to fall in love with books again. He emphasized the importance of highlighting reading, specifically independent choice reading, in the classroom. Like a couple of my mentor teachers, Mr. Sharp ensures that the first thing students do in his classroom is reading, followed by writing. That’s because, as he explained, if they don’t practice those skills first, they run out of time, and those two skills are too important to run out of time for.

    Although we educators know the importance of reading, it is often hard to make students care about it, especially as they get older and busier. Mr. Sharp told us teachers the story of an acquaintance who needed to take a test to be a certified union electrician, a test that would make about a $30,000 difference in his salary. A test that the acquaintance had failed before because he couldn’t read. He told us about his own experiences, reading 2-3 books throughout all of middle and high school before failing a college course – Biology, even, not English – due to his inability to get through the textbooks. The whole room was moved, but it’s not just us English teachers affected by these stories. Mr. Sharp tells these same stories to his 5th graders, who are also moved by them. He also surrounds them with books on countless subjects and shows them his own passion for them. By the end of the year, it seems that each of his students have consistently found at least one meaningful book that has ignited a passion for reading in them again. However, he noted that after the students leave his classroom, it’s hard to know what will happen with their reading journeys. Some students may keep reading, but many will experience more obstacles and pauses in their reading journeys. This is why it is so important for us educators of all levels to spotlight reading in our classrooms and give students the space to fall in love with it, for the first time or once again.

Classroom Practices
    On the subject of reading, one breakout session I particularly enjoyed was “You’ve Got to Read (and Teach this Book!” The session featured eight different Award-Winning 2025 books, along with suggestions on activities to teach the books. However, the presenters also suggested that these books would all be great for book talks or mini book clubs in your class, and as potential independent choice reads. As they explained, the whole-class text is being turned away from by many scholars in favor of student choice, and the books they discussed would appeal to many different types of students. 

     Although all of the options they presented were appealing, there were a couple of standout books for me from the session. One of these was Kareem Between by Shifa Saltagi Safadi, which was actually highlighted in another session I attended on using refugee literature to teach students about current and difficult events, as well as to teach empathy, a trait that is essential in the modern classroom and world. Another book that stood out to me, and that would also be great to highlight empathy, was Brownstone, a graphic novel by Samuel Teer and illustrated by Mar Julia. Both of these books, written more for middle grades, seem to be excellent additions to any classroom library and provide authentic, diverse perspectives.

    In addition to letting students choose books that appeal to them, I attended a session on “Writing with Purpose,” highlighting the importance of student writing and how showing students, who the overwhelming majority of only write in or for school, the purpose and uses of their writing in and beyond the classroom can positively influence the quality of their writing and improve test scores. The session presenters provided a lovely acronym to help teachers plan purposeful lessons that I hope to be able to implement when designing my future lessons and units. The acronym, PURPOSE, is as follows:

P: Plan Purpose
U: Understand Audience
R: Review Models
P: Ponder Models’ Moves
O: Organize Ideas
S: Scribe ideas
E: Evaluate Impact

    This useful framework, which you can use in lesson design, and model and discuss with your students, considers the 5 Ws of student writing assignments and keeps students involved, allowing them to see the importance of their work. The presenters also recommended a daily writing journal, which presenter Julie Buzard described as “a collection of our soul in this mess of a notebook.” What a beautiful way of looking at such an important practice. Although the daily writing was not always directly related to a larger piece of writing, it provided a safe space for students to practice and hone their skills, alongside a teacher who was writing at the same time, modeling the expectations and creating a sense of community. I absolutely want to implement this in the future.

Concluding Thoughts
     Although I was apprehensive at first, I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to attend KATE Con 2025, and I’m looking forward to attending future events! As a pre-service teacher, I left with a lot of new ideas and resources to explore, and I’m so excited that I may be able to implement some of them from Day 1 as a licensed teacher in my own classroom. I will always strive to highlight reading, writing, and, perhaps even more importantly, empathy for my students. As NCTE Executive Director Emily Kirkpatrick told us in her Keynote speech, I will be ready to “embrace the ‘yes, and ... '” along with my fellow educators, whom I will remember to lean on and learn from as I start teaching. Overall, KATE Con left me feeling inspired and excited for the road ahead, even in these turbulent times.

This post was originally published at elawithavery.blogspot.com.

Author Bio: 

​Avery Gathright is a senior at Wichita State University studying secondary English education, currently in her pre-service teacher internship in a 12th grade ELA classroom. She can be reached via email at [email protected].  

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