Aimee Hardy is a 7th-year Secondary ELA teacher. She has taught Secondary and Post-Secondary English in Hawaii, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. She has her Master of Art in English and her Bachelor of Art in English from National University. She is published professionally for her creative writing in anthologies and literary magazines. Additionally, she has given professional presentations for Virginia Beach City Public Schools’ Digital Summit 2018, NTCE 2019 Annual Convention, NCTE 2020 Annual Convention, NCTE 2021 Annual Convention, Gear Up Birmingham Spring 2021 Real-World Writing Series, and other district and school-wide professional development sessions. Her work focuses on engaging students and empowering them to use their voices in order to create a positive change. She currently teaches at Pinson Valley High School and is involved with the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Red Mountain Writing Project. She loves technology and incorporating new ways of playing with language so that students grow in their practice. Her teaching philosophy focuses on engaging students and empowering them to be lifelong learners.

Presentations

  • Red Mountain Writing Project Convention 2021: Writing to Heal- Bottling Memories
    • Memories serve as an anchor to writing. Included are techniques to write about memories, inclusing text sets, lessons, and strategies to get students engaged in the writing process.
  • NCTE 2021 Presentation: Teaching Through Trauma: Harnessing the Power of Narrative in the ELA Classroom
    • Attendees will leave the session with trauma-informed exercises, text sets, and assessment ideas. They will be able to engage in some of the lessons themselves to see first-hand the power of language. Additionally, teachers will receive tips that they can use to restore their own spirit throughout the year through writing prompts, reflection practice, and community-building ideas. With these tools, teachers will be able to take care of themselves and their students in order to create an equitable classroom and a positive change for the future. 
  • Gear Up Birmingham: Spring 2021 Real World Writing Series
    • Join local teachers in the Birmingham, Alabama community in discussing approaches that connect writing to skills students will need in the real world. Each professional development session is pack with resources and activities that you can use immediately in the classroom.
  • NCTE 2020 Presentation: Show Me the Mastery: An Evidence-Based Approach to Standards Mastery and Authentic  Learning
    • Humanities studies—a confluence of reading, discussion, and language—can be stagnated by too much discrete skills practice. Imagine students writing and revising every day, mastering skills in context. Come learn how two teachers made space for authentic humanities work by replacing all previously graded assignments with 6 standards-aligned learning artifacts.
  • NCTE 2019 Presentation: Augmented English
    • Cite. Infer. Synthesize. Annotate. In ELA classrooms, skills acquisition coated in empathy and respect is the goal. Teachdes seek to improve reading comprehension and critical reader responses. Skill and drill practices (alone), though, lack relevance and dilute the complex mental work of engaging with literary works. They can have a side effect of containing student curiosity. The question: how can the ELA curriculum create space for creative, higher-level, student-driven thought? Our answer: Augmented English, using digital tools and student ownership models to foster critical thinking and curiosity. Our presentation will focus on creating and interactive experience for students.
  • Virginia Beach City Public School’s Technology Conference 2018: Are You Serial? Using Podcasts in the ELA Classroom
    • Podcasts provide a mixture of relevant audio and written experiences for students in the secondary classroom. They give students the opportunity to play with current issues while giving them resources to parse through and examples of excellent rhetoric for a variety of purposes. Once students understand the elements of rhetoric, they can then use these tools to write and produce quality arguments of their own.

Text Sets

Rick text sets and thoughtful units are the keys to allowing access to skills for all kids. Here are some text sets/units that help students think outside the box and engage in the writing process:

*Additionally, Aimee often records “Daily Writes” and other mini-PD sessions posted to her social media pages linked below.

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