Professional Development Courses for Educators.

Are you looking for practical ways to reach all of your student's diverse needs? This class will allow you to empower your students to become stronger leaders in their learning. Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, will engage you in a powerful, concise, easy-to-read, and classroom-relevant text. You will learn how to integrate culturally responsive pedagogy, equity, and brain-based learning to promote authentic engagement and rigor in your classroom.  A POWERFUL COMBINATION! 

The course is PERFECT for teachers to collaborate on their pedagogy and bring about change in their classrooms and is appropriate for grades P-12, including teachers, para-educators, counselors, and other support personnel.

The course text, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, by Zaretta Hammond, is approximately $33.00 at Amazon.

Educators who are not currently teaching should contact the instructor for alternative assignments.

It's February, known for Black History Month, and we reintroduce to our students Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, John Lewis, and other notable African Americans that have transformed our history. This course will look beyond Black History Month and focus on unsung heroes and sheroes that don't always make history books but have contributed to America in many profound ways. Using the required text, Four Hundred Souls, you will be engaged in the history of African Americans from 1619 to the present time through 90 diverse authors' powerful short stories, personal vignettes, essays, and poems. We will examine microaggressions and ever-changing voting rights legislation. In addition, you will have the opportunity to examine a plethora of websites, videos, and resources, as well as to adapt and create your lesson plans to integrate Black History into a year-long, interdisciplinary curriculum.

Students who respond to us the least might actually need us the most. This course introduces an approach that prepares teachers to counter the harm inflicted when students internalize the negative stereotypes society aims at black, brown, native and other groups of marginalized students. In The Innocent Classroom, the author of our course text Alexs Pate reveals how internalized stereotypes create a sense of unwarranted guilt in these students that adversely affects their engagement in learning. This course is designed to help teachers create individual relationships that can guide our hard-to-reach and marginalized students to shed this sense of guilt, restore their innocence, and re-engage in learning.

Whether a family, student group, classroom or school, every group has a culture which is the invisible but powerful influence that affects peoples’ felt experience as well as group outcomes. 
When a group taps into these three skills: build safety, share vulnerability and establish purpose, they feel happier; they know they can navigate the challenges presented to them. 
Do you know groups who would like to take their performance to the above and beyond? If so then come along and explore more about how that might happen with The Power of Group Chemistry.
 

Albert Einstein said, “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” These words are the basis of peace in our classrooms. Peace means empathy for others, comprehension of differences, and knowledge of how and why to bridge those differences.

This course meets OSPI's STEM requirements.

Teaching in a virtual, physical, or hybrid environment demands an additional set of skills and strategies for teachers.  

In this course, participants develop the skills needed to build a virtual classroom rich with interactive content while focusing on a positive class culture and community.

The key to student success is not how well they perform on standardized tests or their ranking in school, but their ability to work hard, struggle, and persevere until they accomplish a task. Learn how to instill grit in your K-12 students through relationship building, challenging tasks, goal setting and active reflection. Students should perceive mistakes as an opportunity to grow. When taught in the classroom research suggests grit may have an impact key to long term success and happiness.

Today's students differ greatly from each other and their learning needs vary more dramatically than ever! These differences are wide ranging and are being identified earlier. Such classroom disparities require all educators to think differently about teaching and learning; educators have been differentiating for ages. This class is intended to move you from where you are now (beginner, proficient, advanced) in the process of differentiation, to the next level essential for success.

As a teacher, there are so many different things you have to keep track of and organize.

This course meets OSPI's STEM requirements.
(Formerly: MORE REAL WORLD MATH)

Math is a fundamental component of much of our modern world and can be taught using real world problems, data, and examples. This online course will take advantage of Internet resources in the use of real life math. By assessing resources on the web, we will begin to prepare a portfolio of both on-line and off-line classroom projects that can be used to teach math in your specific classroom.

This course addresses the vital topic of childhood and adult stress, providing strategies to help children to direct their stress through coping skills into positive avenues. Peer relations, chaotic family structures, generalized feelings of anxiety, failure and negative thought processes, as well as many other topics will be covered.

Poor social skills are the leading reason why people lose jobs, according to Labor and Industry research. While educators know the importance of social skills, schools do not provide adequate training in this area.