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.

If questions drive thinking and learning, how are we creating experiences and supporting conditions to ignite curiosity? Join us to explore the process of artifact analysis with the use of thinking routines. Collaborate with fellow historians to apply a design lens to history and reflect upon the power of these opportunities in our own instruction. Though the example in this workshop is with social studies, the ideas and approach are applicable across subject areas and grade levels.

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.

Who helped you become the educator you are today? And how can you help students discover the same for themselves? This session invites you to explore story, symbol, and identity through the Color Symbol Image routine. Through real world storytelling and personal reflection, you will design a meaningful artifact that represents your own journey. Walk away with a powerful, adaptable routine that inspires both thinking and belonging in your classroom.

In this interactive session, participants will explore how educators are leveraging AI to provide timely, actionable feedback that strengthens student learning. Through real classroom examples, attendees will examine the impact of immediate feedback on student revision and growth.

Participants will engage in the feedback process from both the student and teacher perspectives, experiencing how AI can support rapid, meaningful revisions. They will then design a feedback approach tailored to their own classroom context.

This session focuses not on specific tools, but on practical strategies for using AI to enhance feedback cycles, empower teachers, and help students improve more efficiently and effectively.

How do educators move from strong instructional practice to influencing the broader conditions that shape learning? This interactive workshop invites participants to explore the Activating Arts Learning framework, an arts learning theory of change grounded in Project Zero research, and to consider how it can inform systems change across diverse educational contexts.

Participants will examine how environmental conditions, elements of instruction, and learner outcomes interact to support deep thinking and understanding. Through close looking, reflection, and dialogue, educators will identify where their current practice already advances this framework and where shifts beyond the classroom may be needed.

Using a structured powermapping protocol, participants will apply the arts learning theory of change to real challenges in their own settings—identifying decision makers, sources of influence, and practical advocacy strategies. While rooted in arts learning, the tools and thinking routines shared in this session are relevant to any educator interested in shaping the conditions for meaningful learning and equity at a systems level.

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.

In this interactive presentation, participants will explore and practice evidence-based Cultures of Thinking strategies designed to deepen student learning and foster intellectual engagement. Through hands-on activities and real-world applications, educators will discover how to create classroom environments where thinking is visible, valued, and developed.

We ask students to take notes constantly, but we often teach it without understanding the scaffolding it requires. For many students, note-taking is copying, not thinking. This workshop reframes documentation as a visible thinking practice using Project Zero's Cultures of Thinking framework and thinking routines. What you'll do: Engage in hands-on activities including a schema-activation Buzz Word Sort, the Parts, Purposes, and Complexities thinking routine, and design thinking experiences where you prototype and reflect on documentation templates. What you'll learn: How activating schema — what students already know — lays the groundwork for notes that stick. Why documentation is genuinely hard (it's a design problem, not a motivation problem). How thinking routines make students' thinking visible, valued, and revisited. The executive function demands embedded in note-taking — planning, prioritizing, working memory, self-monitoring — and how these capacities develop through intentional practice. How to scaffold thinking without replacing it, supporting diverse learners across different grade levels and learning environments. You'll leave with concrete instructional moves ready to adapt to your own context. The real question is not what students wrote down, but what they understood. When we design for thinking, notes become evidence of learning.