• July 28-August 1, 2025: Camp CSTP

Camp CSTP Registration is Starting to Fill Up!

It’s time to start getting ready for the BEST week of the year! That’s right, it’s CAMP CSTP 2025!

This summer CSTP is hosting two sessions in-person at the Rainbow Lodge Retreat Center in North Bend, WA including "Communication and Collaboration for Equity-Focused PLC" and "Transformational Leadership." Our intimate sessions are limited to 24 attendees and focus on connecting educators while diving into important topics. These sessions are an excellent opportunity for educators to retreat and recharge in community while getting ready for the new school year with options to register for one or both learning sessions.

See here for registration and more information about each session! Each session will include lunch, dinner, overnight lodging, breakfast, and snacks, and will be eligible for 6 clock hours. Registration is open through July 15!

Standard Price: $220.00 (or combine with another session for $400)

Session I: Communication and Collaboration for Equity-Focused PLC

Dates: 12:00 PM on July 30, 2025 - 11:30 AM on July 31, 2025

In this session, participants will co-construct a definition of equity and co-create a shared understanding of high-functioning PLCs. With this grounding, we will utilize the critical aspects of Communication, Collaboration, and Equity Lens from CSTP’s Teacher Leadership Framework to deepen the knowledge skills and dispositions that lead PLCs and learning teams toward collective efficacy. Participants will have opportunities to practice these constructs and leave with tools and protocols to support their PLC.

Session II: Transformational Leadership

Dates: 12:00 PM on July 31, 2025 - 11:30 AM on August 1, 2025

Guided by CSTP’s Teacher Leadership Framework, this session is designed to specifically address the knowledge, skills, and dispositions educators need to successfully lead others – formally, informally, and all spaces in between! This session will address all six aspects of the Leadership Framework (Working With Adult Learners, Communication, Collaboration, Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy, Systems Thinking, and Equity Lens) and guide participants to reflect on their own strengths and opportunities for growth in their ability to lead successful collaborative teams. Our time will be spent answering the driving question, “What is required of me to be an effective teacher leader?”

CSTP Professional Development Survey

CSTP wants your feedback as we approach the end of the 2024-25 school year and look towards the future. What trainings and learning opportunities would you like to see us provide teachers and educators next school year and beyond? Fill out the following survey to let us know your thoughts if you have not already done so!

Take the survey here.

Contact ada@cstp-wa.org with any questions.

Partner with CSTP to Offer Clock Hours at Your Next Training

Are you running a course, professional development or book study and want to offer Washington State clock hours? CSTP is an approved Washington State clock hour provider and can approve your courses for clock hours. It is free for the instructor to apply for the course with participants paying a nominal fee.

Learn More and Apply for Clock Hours

WEA National Board Certification Resources

National Board Jump Start

National Board Jump Start is a comprehensive, multi-day seminar designed to provide National Board candidates with important information about the certification process, time to examine component and Assessment Center requirements, the opportunity to plan how to meet requirements, and time to collaborate, gather resources and information needed to pursue certification. All this happens in a supportive, constructive and collegial environment.

There are a total of six (6) training modules that will be offered each training week. Registration fee is $75 and open to WEA members only. Foundations I is a required entry course. Select as many of the remaining 5 modules (C1, C2, C3, C4, Foundations II) as you like for the flat $75 Registration fee. Up to 30 WEA Clock Hours can be earned for attending all 6 modules.

• June 23 - 27, 2025
• August 4 - 8, 2025

Save the date! Registration will be posted on the WEA website.

See here for more trainings and details from WEA!

Where is CSTP Going This Summer?

Our CSTP team is preparing for summer outings and vacations! Keep an eye on our social media feeds on Instagram and Facebook as we will be posting some photos of our various travels. We'll all have our new green CSTP notebooks to accompany us. Let's see what we are looking forward to--which also includes Camp CSTP, July 28-August 1, for all of us!

Lindsey Stevens is all about her just-graduated post-high school daughter this summer! The whole family is heading to Mexico for a senior trip, and later in August they're headed to Southern California to drop her off for college--with a visit to Disneyland on the itinerary as well!

Anzara Miller is going to have a very lake-focused summer with her trips. She'll be heading all the way to Lake Superior to visit Michigan's Upper Penninsula (or U.P. if you want to be cool about it). For slightly smaller lake she'll pay a visit to Holden Village Reatreat Center on the banks of Lake Chelan.

Saara Kamal is excited to see all of her Peace Corps friends as they have a reunion. This group lives all over the world at this point, so their yearly reunions move each time. This year, it will be Minnesota's turn! This will also be the first reunion with babies since three families added little ones to their flock over the past year.

Jeannie Gruber is spending three nights in Portland, OR to visit her brother and sister-in-law who have been living in Brazil while they teach at an international school. They are one year into their two-year contract, so Jeannie is excited to hear how it's going!

Ada Foote will be taking her middle school teacher wife to Ashland right after school gets out to attend the Oregon Shakespeare festival. Shakespeare is her wife's comfort food! They will also be traveling with the in-laws to Lake Chelan for their semi-annual sit-and-bask-by-water trip.

ReadyWA Storytellers: College Apps and High School Friends

Ready WA Storyteller Helen applied to 21 colleges — and got her application fees waived for all of them! In her new blog post, she shares how UW STEMsub, a college readiness program, supported her with workshops, essay feedback, and personalized guidance throughout the college application process.

In her new blog post, Ready WA Storyteller Lizzy reflects on the ups and downs of high school friendships — and what it took to find people who truly support and uplift her. Through moments of doubt, growth, and self-discovery, Lizzy shares how surrounding herself with the right friends changed everything.

June is LGBTQ+ Pride Month!

From the Library of Congress: "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. The Stonewall Uprising was a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as "Gay Pride Day," but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the "day" soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBTQ Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.

In 1994, a coalition of education-based organizations in the United States designated October as LGBT History Month. In 1995, a resolution passed by the General Assembly of the National Education Association included LGBT History Month within a list of commemorative months. National Coming Out Day (October 11), as well as the first "March on Washington" in 1979, are commemorated in the LGBTQ community during LGBT History Month."

Read more and find more resources here.

Join us for fun facts, obscure knowledge, and exploration of physics, genetics, etymology, art, and more!

Queering by Numbers

There are several sociocultural ways to discuss and define attraction. Common labels like gay, straight, bi, and pan can be helpful buckets in which to put ourselves, but these broad brushes sometimes lose some nuance. How often might you talk to someone who says something like, “I’m definitely gay–except for that one celebrity” or “Honestly I don’t like anyone except my wife.” For some people, “mostly straight” or “mostly gay” seems reductive. Could we use numbers for greater accuracy?

Social scientist Alfred Kinsey first defined his eponymous Kinsey Scale in 1948. It places straight and gay orientations as opposites on a scale that runs from 0 to 6. A rating of 0 indicates exclusively straight/opposite-gender behavior while 6 indicates exclusively gay/same-gender behavior. At 1 and 5 we find the mostly straight or mostly gay. Then 2/4 is “predominantly straight/gay but more than incidentally gay/straight,” with 3 being an equal mix of both.The scale also has an X, representing a lack of behaviors or reactions.

Even Dr. Kinsey knew that this was reductive to an individual’s experiences, flattening together behavior and psychological attraction. Outside of the X, this scale also does not account for the varying intensity or presence of attraction. Using today’s more standard vocabulary, the scale doesn’t account well for the ace spectrum.

There are several other scales, questionnaires, and self-assessments that have been proposed in the intervening 57 years that attempt to redress this imbalance. Some focus on the fact that attraction and behavior change over time. Some split the measurements of gay attraction and straight attraction onto separate axes, instead of placing them as opposites. Instead of 1 number, you might get 2, or 3, or 21. All of these psychological tools can gather useful data, but as the tests themselves get more granular, answering them accurately may get more difficult.

In addition, these scales, focused on attraction as they are, omit trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming individuals. When attraction is based and measured entirely around the gender of the participant, how gay or straight can a non-binary person be stated to be? Attraction, orientation, and gender identity are intertwined in ways these tests are not designed to measure.

This is why sociocultural terms exist in the first place, to place behavior, attraction, presentation, and identity into large enough boxes that they have room to move–even if it takes more words to define your exact place in the space. Social sciences yearn for hard numbers and exact data, but giving some leeway to identity usually preserves more nuance than tying it all to numbers.

This is true, at least, until we can finally design and comprehend the attraction + behavior + identity + gender infinitesimal hypercube. That’ll be able to measure all of us messy humans with complete accuracy, I’m sure of it!

Happy Pride Month, everyone.