FIRST DAYS OF SCHOOL: From Stress to Success

In today’s increasingly polarized educational landscape, curiosity is a powerful tool for connection and understanding. This course invites educators to explore how fostering curiosity can transform classroom dynamics, strengthen relationships, and build inclusive school cultures.

Grounded in the work of Mónica Guzmán and her book I Never Thought of It That Way, this course equips participants with practical strategies to:

Listen deeply and engage across differences

Model and facilitate respectful, open conversations

Navigate challenging dynamics with students, colleagues, and families

Through reflection, practice, and application, educators will gain tools to bridge divides, foster civil discourse, and create more compassionate, connected learning environments. This course is designed for PK–12 teachers, counselors, instructional coaches, and school leaders seeking to strengthen their impact and cultivate inclusive communities.

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.  

When discussing written composition, the terms sentence fluency, syntactic fluency, syntactic maturity, and syntactic complexity are all used to describe text containing sentences with varied structures that underscore, enhance, and contribute to meaning while tying together ideas so readers progress easily from beginning to end. Sentences that possess these attributes are not only easy to comprehend, but they often have a pleasant, rhythmical quality when read aloud. This course considers the above terms interchangeable and has been designed to help teachers improve their students’ sentence fluency/syntactic maturity. But, more than being a “how to teach” course, this is a “what to teach” course. It strives to fill in the knowledge gap left by most teacher training programs when it comes to understanding the fluency errors students make and the remedial strategies they can apply.

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.

Today's educators have been trained to teach opposition and defiant students by giving them rewards as they see them finally do the desired behavior. Studies show this is not working in most schools, and behaviors are escalating. The author of Conscious Discipline will give you the knowledge needed to understand why.

Generation Z comprises students born since 1995 into a digital world made up of the Internet and cell phones. They are enmeshed in social media and criticized for lacking social skills. However, they are the future and we need to teach them in a manner that will lead to their success. To do that, learn how to best meet the unique needs of Generation Z and how to engage them in the K-12 classroom. Learn about what they think, where they are going and how they may change the world.

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.

This course provides authoritative and reality-based best practices in classroom management from some of our best educational researchers, including Robert Marzano, Jana Marzano and Debra Pickering. It clarifies both what to do, and how to do it, with ample examples and action steps.