PZ PGH Learning and Thinking that Make a Difference (Oct 2026)

This workshop is for educators who are looking to reconnect to their sense of purpose - their “why” - for teaching. Using arts integration practices that can be applied to a variety of subjects and classrooms, this workshop will provide an opportunity for educators to engage in and deeply reflect on their role in the education system and consider how they want to contribute to or work against it. Exercises will include a diversity of approaches, including movement, dialogue, play, and visual art.

Participants will be able to:
•    Identify and practice a diversity of arts integration practices to engage students in deep, student-centered learning.
•    Articulate and share their “why” for teaching through interactive exercises.
•    Engage in collaborative play and consider how to bring in these playful practices into their own classrooms.

Experience how nervous system regulation supports meaningful learning and understanding through this movement-based practice. Guided movement, meditation, breathwork, and artful mark-making invite participants to explore how shifts in the body influence attention and engagement.

Participants will move through a cycle of experience, reflection, and discussion, using thinking routines from Project Zero, including Headlines and Connect–Extend–Challenge, to make thinking visible and connect insights to classroom practice.

Participants will build awareness, creativity, and a greater sense of agency while exploring how regulation can support their presence and teaching practice. They will also leave with a toolkit of embodied strategies that can be used immediately with students to support focus, memory, creativity, and connection.

Wear comfortable clothing, bring a yoga mat if available, and come ready to actively engage in a movement and meditation-based experience.

This interactive workshop invites educators to observe “learning in the wild” and discover the many ways thinking and learning are made visible in spaces beyond the classroom. Participants will engage with a transferable routine they can bring back to their own settings to help identify and interpret examples of thinking and learning in the environments around them.

The session also emphasizes the importance of using a lens to guide observation. Educators will explore how focusing on themes such as joy, collaboration, failure, community, curiosity, or agency can deepen their understanding of how environments are intentionally designed to support different forms of learning.

Participants will have time to explore the Children’s Museum—the country’s largest children’s museum campus—and experience its inspiring learning spaces firsthand. Through guided observation and reflection, they will leave with practical strategies for noticing, interpreting, and designing for learning in a wide range of educational contexts.

This hands-on workshop invites educators to move beyond play as a "break" and re-examine it as a pedagogical tool for deep thinking and equity. Drawing on Project Zero frameworks—including Pedagogy of Play, Art | Play, and Agency by Design—participants will consider how we might think critically about play and its relationship to learning and equity in educational contexts. Practical questions we will think about together include: What are we talking about when we talk about play? What are some connections between play and learning? And, who gets to play, where, and how? Attendees will test-drive a new Play Journaling tool that can be used in a variety of teaching, learning, and childcare contexts to support critical reflection on play and its place in equitable learning. Attendees will gain frameworks, tools, and examples for fostering more inclusive and critical approaches to play in diverse teaching and learning contexts.