Christine Williams

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.

Don’t lose heart when everything you do to help failing students doesn’t work, because this course will turn that around.  You don’t have to lose students through the cracks anymore, as research-supported strategies based on neuroscience and mindset can help inspire interventions for powerful change. Your instructor, Brenda McKinney, has spent her career teaching, creating programs, and developing curriculum for failing students. You will learn practical, data-driven strategies

Research shows that approximately 25%, 1 in 4 students, experience or witness a major traumatic event by four years old (Hydon et al., 2015). In order to reach and support all students, we must approach everything we do through a trauma-informed lens.

Vibrant societies need people who can think for themselves, but too many Americans don’t, and our democracy, as well as societal health, suffers as a result. In this course for teachers in grades 4-12, we will cover a wide variety of teaching strategies that provide incentives and opportunities for young minds to develop the courage, skills, and intellectual acumen for robust thinking.

When instruction moves online teachers need to prepare a digital space for learning, just like the physical classroom.  Designing online math instruction requires a blended approach of synchronous and asynchronous instruction coupled with distance learning activities to support exploration of concepts and development of procedural skills.  Technology tools to build students’ efficacy in math must be developmentally appropriate and aligned with student’s ability and interest.  This means online instruction must be highly personalized and accessible to all learners.   Delivering digital math instruction can be powerful with virtual manipulatives at your fingertips for teachers to model and students to demonstrate.