Accreditation

Issues and traumas from childhood combined with current personal and professional stress can cause any of us to feel lost and disengaged with life. But we don’t have to stay that way. Celebrated life coach, Martha Beck lays out a clearly defined path to recover a vital sense of self using her text and journal titled Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live, the basis for this course.

Personal and professional stresses can cause us to lose our “true north.” That inner heart center where we feel like our true selves and engage life with passion and confidence. Come and recover your inner compass back home to an inspired, hopeful you with the tools to maintain after your retreat. In our three days at the lovely Menucha Retreat and Conference Center.

Anxiety, stress, depression, and suicide are on the rise. Is it any wonder that the rise in these afflictions has happened lockstep with the rise in screen time among people of all ages? As educators, we increasingly need to become aware of this growing epidemic whether it is impacting us, our students, or those around us. Together we will explore the impact of screens on our population from birth through adulthood. We will explore the work of Thomas Kersting, Cal Newport, and Simon Sinek. You will learn strategies to optimize technology use both for yourself and those around you. Join us as we disconnect from technology and reconnect with each other. 

Children accomplish at a higher rate and with greater effectiveness when they are excited about learning. This course will investigate strategies to increase enthusiasm in students.  Each educator will read and view inspiring stories of success within the classroom and community. 

This course meets OSPI’s STEM requirements

Climate change poses the single largest, global threat to life on Earth, and yet the United States and our schools lag far behind the international community in educating and acting responsibly to mitigate the causes and effects of a warming planet. This online course for grades K-12 teachers uses excellent platforms developed by NASA and the EPA to educate about the science of climate change in kid-friendly, interdisciplinary ways. Youthful graphics, games, lesson samples that cut across science, social studies and math, virtual expeditions to places where climate change is visible, CO2 footprint calculators and more make this a rich learning environment from which grades K-12 teachers will develop their own units and themes—whether that’s oceans, birds, butterflies, fish, trees, fresh water supplies.  Many of your common science units can be modified with a climate change perspective (ie ocean life, plants and animals).