Professional Development Topics & Descriptions

1. The Rules for Engagement: Description. Provides powerful engagement strategies that will help nurture a positive climate.
2. Creating Positive Connections with Our Most Challenging Students: Description. Help teachers understand how to shift from a traditional deficit—based way of understanding kids with challenging behavior.
3. The Power of Expectations: Description. An understanding of how to maximize the learning potential of all students.
4. Giving Effective Feedback: Description. How to make the process of providing feedback a positive, or at least a neutral, learning experience for students.
5. Differentiated Instructions: Description. To help teachers understand better that differentiated instruction is an approach whereby they can adjust their curriculum and instructions in order to maximize learning of all students.
6. Rigor, Relevance, and Alignment to Students: Description. This training is to review and describe the strategies and best practices necessary to ensure that students achieve the level of rigor required by new state academic standards.
7. Developing Reading Skills. Description. To facilitate teacher’s use of strategies needed to improve students’ reading fluency, expand their vocabulary, and increase their confidence.
8. Classroom Management with a Smile: Description. To show how leveraging positive educator- student relationships is more effective than punishment in motivating students to adhere to classroom expectations.
9. Using Word Walls to Develop and Maintain Academic Vocabulary. Description. To help teachers learn how to use Word Walls to support vocabulary development and retention.
10. Improve Every Lesson Plan with SEL. Description. To help you synthesize all of the wonderful possibilities of a whole-child approach-social, emotional, and cognitive-into what you already have to do: make lesson plans.
11. Formative Assessment: How Educators can Use. Description. Provide an understanding of how to use results from formative assessments to help predict results on high-stakes testing which will give a better idea of student achievement and where intervention might be needed.
12. Why Parent Involvement? Description. Provide strategies on how to intentionally engage parents and community members in the school.