We are facing an epidemic-a life threatening, brain-paralyzing, heart-destroying disease known as the ‘doing disease,’ as described by Bec Heinrich. This relentless drive to keep moving, achieving, and fearing stillness is taking a toll on our well-being. In this course, Toxic Productivity Mindset, you will explore brain science and data-driven studies, along with personal anecdotes, to uncover the reasons behind why doing enough is never enough. If you find yourself overcommitted, compulsively overachieving, and constantly exhausted, join me to delve into why pursuing productivity at the expense of your physical, emotional, and mental health is detrimental. This course will help you identify deep-seated beliefs about overwork and provide actionable strategies for both your personal life and classroom.

Are you looking for a course that will inspire you with powerful scientific proof that gratefulness can change your life? Groundbreaking research on gratefulness has shown that people are better able to deal with everyday stress while building their resilience and satisfaction with life, improving relationships, and creating more powerful connections. This course is a perfect choice for all teachers experiencing stress while working to balance career and family life and for struggling students experiencing loneliness, social anxiety, and lack of motivation.  

Do you want to feel more fulfilled, successful and joyful at work? Do you feel depleted energetically and overwhelmed by what is being asked and expected of you as an educator? Do you have the energy necessary to tap into your creativity, productivity, and optimism needed for excellent teaching and learning? Working with Elena Aguilar’s book, Onward, you will cultivate your emotional resilience to help you thrive as an educator.

This course is designed to support teachers in developing language and techniques for teaching decision-making skills to students. Teaching this skill is important because our decisions shape the quality of our lives, communities, and environment. Many decision-making models are available; this course is designed around the Stakeholders-Consequences Decision Making (SCDM) model. It is a flexible model and can be used in many different ways, with multiple grade levels, and in many subject areas including academic and social-emotional learning. You can confidently use and teach this model which is powerful for both individual and team-based decisions. 

The Science of Reading is at the forefront of many educators' minds. Are you looking for practical ways to help your struggling readers become proficient readers? Are there simple shifts you can make in your reading instruction to effectively teach your students? This class will focus on the book, Shifting the Balance and provide opportunities to learn from current articles, podcasts, and videos. This class is guaranteed to change the way you see your students as readers. It will engage you in a powerful, informative, engaging, and classroom-relevant text and give you concrete ways to make your reading instruction more effective.

From Behaving to Belonging, The Inclusive Art of Supporting Students Who Challenge Us is a rare book that asks us to find out how some of the most challenging students can benefit most from feeling the power of belonging. 

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.

Social Media and our students - it connects them, yet also divides them. Many questions surround the use of social media in terms of our students:

• How much time on social media is too much?
• What are the effects of social media on students – their brain development, identity, possible addiction, and well-being? 
• Is there a positive side to social media in terms of student use?
• How can we keep our students safe from the negatives of social media, such as cyber-bullying?
• What advice can we share with our students and their parents to make the most of social media?

This class will delve into these questions (and more). You will learned about the positives and negatives about social media, form your own answers to some of these questions, and come away with ways to advise students and parents about the best way to use social media and the best ways to safe safe on social media.

Contributing to positive school culture and climate benefits all educators PP-K-12th grade. Especially administrators, professional learning communities (PLCs), grade levels, collaboration, book study groups, and or individuals that would like to explore stories from the trenches that we can all laugh about. This course is an excellent way to excite collaboration within any group grade level, professional learning community, staff-wide book study, or taken for self-enrichment.

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.

Understand and deal more effectively with a range of student disorders, such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attachment Disorders, and Self Injurious Behaviors. You'll learn signs and recognition aspects as well as effective strategies for helping children to be successful at school.