Training Opportunities

Social & Emotional Learning: Optimizing Learning Environments with Life Skills

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is teaching life skills that are foundational to motivation in the classroom and classroom management. Students who have strong social and emotional skillsets will be more successful in the classroom and in life in general. In this course, students will first examine what social-emotional learning is, including the research foundational to SEL.

Supporting At-Risk Young Learners & Their Families

This course is designed to help Early Childhood Educators gain strategies to reach and teach young children who are at risk of not meeting their potential. Participants will learn the internal and external factors that place a child at risk, how heredity and environment affect a child's development, the characteristics of various risk factors, and interventions for each risk factor. A major emphasis will be on the family's influence on the child's development and how Early Childhood Educators can work with families to support their child's growth in all areas of development.

Talented & Gifted

This course provides information on the history of exceptional students in relation to education, current law, and accepted methods for referral, assessment, and identification. It covers major program models and methods of differentiating instruction to meet the rate and level of learning of those students identified. The course gives the learner an understanding of ways to meet the affective needs of the gifted and talented student in the regular classroom and lists resources for teachers and parents who would like more information about the talented and gifted.

Teaching Diversity

Designed to give the learner the knowledge, tools and dispositions to effectively facilitate a diverse classroom, this course teaches how to understand and identify differences in approaches to learning and performance, including different learning styles and ways in which students demonstrate learning. An emphasis in this course is on understanding how students' learning is influenced by individual experiences, talents, disabilities, gender, language, culture, family and community values.

Teaching Elementary Math Conceptually: A New Paradigm

This course is designed to expand your methodology for teaching Mathematics. The course will explore an innovative teaching model that incorporates strategies for teaching concepts constructively and contextually. The goal is for you to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts of various math topics and explore the principles of teaching those concepts to learners. This course will focus on the topics of number sense, basic operations, and fractions.

Teaching Secondary Math Conceptually: Meeting Mathematics Standards

This course explores an instructional methodology that incorporates strategies for teaching concepts, constructively, and contextually. The goal is for you to gain a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts of various math topics and explore the principles of teaching those concepts to learners. The course also explores teaching methodologies that support many federal and state standards. This course focuses on the topics of integers, fractions, factoring, and functions.

Traumatized Child

This course is designed to help classroom teachers, school counselors, and other educational personnel gain strategies to reach and teach students who have been affected by stress, trauma, and/or violence. Participants will learn the signs and symptoms of stress and trauma and explore how stress, violence, and trauma affect a student's learning, cognitive brain development, and social-emotional development. The short and long term consequences of being exposed to stress, trauma, or violence, as well as the social and family causes, will be reviewed.

Try DI!: Planning and Preparing a Differentiated Instruction Program

This course is designed to provide you an opportunity to learn about an instructional framework, Differentiated Instruction (DI), aimed at creating supportive learning environments for diverse learning populations. Students will be presented a method for self-assessment of the extent to which their current instructional approach reflects the perspective, principles, and practices of the DI approach. The course reflects an approach that aligns the principles of DI with the practices of DI. The concept of a 'theory of action' will also be provided within a DI context.

Understanding Aggression

This course includes topics on violence, aggression in the classroom, youth gangs, aggression in sports and on television, how drugs and alcohol play a role in aggression and violence, and "hot spots" that tend to breed aggression and violence. It is designed to help school personnel become more aware of the causes of aggression and ways to evaluate it and intervene before it turns to violence in the schools. The course also discusses aggression in our communities through driving, dating, sports, television, music and how these issues are dealt with in modern society.

Understanding and Implementing Common Core Standards

An interactive computer-based instruction course designed to give you a deeper understanding of the rationale for and structure of this particular standards-based framework. In this course you will learn a number of factors that contributed to the overall design of the Common Core Standards as well as practical pedagogical approaches that will support practitioners working toward deeper implementation.