UNLOCKING THE NUANCES OF DISCOMFORT IN LEARNING

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 ready to take your social studies lesson to the next level? Revitalize and recreate social studies for today’s students. Bring social studies alive by integrating culture, history, economics, civics, and geography while discussing current events and high interest topics. Find out what you can do with maps, cultural exploration, and STEM through the social studies lens. 

Cyberbullying affects everyone from children to adults. Anyone who uses the internet could become a victim of online harassment. This course will explore the roots of the problem with cyberbullying and examine solutions on how to handle cyberbullying when it happens. The course includes multiple activities that can be used with children in a classroom or homeschool setting. 

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.  

Writing is an invaluable skill for our students. Literacy directly correlates with better student outcomes, including higher wages and more formal education (AAFP). Unfortunately, educators are rarely taught how to make writing engaging for their diverse classrooms. As a result, teachers struggle to motivate students who have internalized failure at writing.

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.

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.

According to the Dyslexia Center of Utah, one in five students, or 15-20% of the population, has a language-based learning disability. Dyslexia is the most common of language-based learning disabilities.

This course will introduce you to some practical ways you can help your struggling readers become proficient readers!

Many students lack the social and emotional skills that lead to success in work, community, and family life. Infusing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) practices is about how you teach what you teach and not something added on to the required curriculum. Through videos, articles, and our text by Dr. Bobbi Hansen (The Heart & Science of Teaching: Transformative Applications that Integrate Academic and Social-Emotional Learning)  participants in this course will cover:

• What does SEL encompass and why is it important
• What various SEL classrooms can look like
• Creating an emotionally safe environment
• Resolving student conflicts using peer mediation
• How to tap student assets
• Content accommodations for special needs
• Cooperative and collaborative learning
• Fostering community and world connections through service learning
• Nurturing students to become self-directed learners
• Cognitive and emotional engagement through projects 

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.

Based on classroom observations as well as the research of many psychologists, we know self-esteem is important to student achievement. Too often schools see children whose low self esteem interferes with their learning and too often we fail to relate to troubled students in an affirming way.