Course Descriptions for Courses ABC-XYZ

Course #500 Educating Everybody’s Children: Strategies for Diverse Learners

This course is designed to promote reflection, discussion, and action among the entire learning community. The course will present what research has revealed about successfully addressing the needs of students from economically, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse groups and identifies a wide range of effective principles and instructional strategies. Although good teaching works well with all students, educators must develop an extensive repertoire of instructional tools to meet the varying needs of students from diverse backgrounds.

Course #501 The Key Elements of Classroom Management

Course #502 How to Teach So Students Remember

This course will offer seven steps to increase your students’ capacity to receive information in immediate memory, act on it in working memory, store it in long term memory, and retrieve and manipulate it in unanticipated situations. By consciously teaching for memory, we can remediate some of these differences and help students gain confidence in their abilities so they will be better equipped to be successful learners.

Course #503 Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom

Course #504 The Threads of Reading: Strategies For Literacy Development

Course #505 What Great Teachers Do Differently

Course #506 Classroom Motivation: Engaging Students in Learning

Course #507 Classroom Instruction That Works With English Language Learners

More and more English language learners are included in mainstream classrooms. This course will ensure that you can help them understand academic content and develop their English language skills. The strategies in this course include homework and practice, summarization and note-taking, and nonlinguistic representations, among many others. For each strategy a summary of the research will be provided as well as detailed examples of how to modify the strategy for use with ELL’S in mainstream classrooms.

Course #508 Discipline with Dignity

This course will detail an affirming approach to managing a classroom that promotes respect for self and others. The course offers practical solutions that emphasize relationship building, curriculum relevance, and academic success. The emphasis is on preventing problems by helping students to understand each other, work well together, and develop responsibility for their own actions. It will also include intervention strategies for handling common and severe problems in dignified ways.

Course #509 Learning and Memory: The Brain in Action

Course #510 Teaching Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom

In this course you will explore the eight intelligences of the mind. The eight intelligences are linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Resources in this course will help educators apply MI theory to curriculum, lesson planning, assessment, special education, cognitive skills educational technology, and much more. The dozens of practical tips and strategies will improve test scores and student discipline.

Course #511 Great Performances: Creating Classroom Based Formative Assessments

Now you have a powerful means to closely align curriculum, instruction, and assessment to the standards essential for student success. This timely resource presents the big picture of an integrated, standards based instruction and assessment system, and offers guidelines for:

Aligning school-based common formative assessments with district benchmarks and large scale summative assessments.
Predicting likely student performance on subsequent assessments in time to make instructional modifications.
Implementing and sustaining common formative assessments within the school’s or district culture.

Course #512 The Power of Professional Learning Communities

This course helps educators close the knowing-doing gap as they transform their classrooms and schools into professional learning communities. This course will help educators develop a common vocabulary and consistent understanding of key PLC concepts- Present a compelling argument that the implementation of PLC concepts will benefit students and educators alike-Help educators assess the current reality in their own schools and districts-Convince educators to take purposeful steps to develop their capacity to function as PLCs.

Course #513 Enhancing Professional Practice

Response to Intervention is a system for educational redesign based on a hierarchy of interventions which are implemented to meet the needs of students who demonstrate underachievement in core academic areas. This system for educational redesign aims to meet the needs of struggling students through a pyramid of interventions, collaborative team problem solving, data for monitoring student progress, and customized solutions that help every unique learner succeed.

Course #515 Thriving as a Teacher Leader

This course is applicable to all teachers who assume or desire to assume a variety of leadership roles in their school or district. It will identify leadership qualities and team building, enhance communication and assist in earning respect, help you overcome obstacles and implement change, provide you with the skills to energize colleagues and strengthen morale, and improve student and teacher achievement.

Course #516 Strategies for Classroom Inclusion

Many educators in classrooms feel unprepared to teach students with learning disabilities. Fortunately, brain research has confirmed that strategies benefitting learners with special challenges are suited for engaging and stimulating all learners. In this course you will explore how you can best help students by putting in place strategies, accommodations, and interventions that provide developmentally and academically appropriate challenges to suit the needs, gifts, and goals of each student.

Course #517 Get Your Students to Work Harder Than You and Other Principles of Teaching

If it ever feels like teaching is just too much work, this course will help you develop a more fluid and automatic way to respond to students and deliver great teaching experiences every time. This course will help you develop a master teacher mindset. Find out where you are on your journey to becoming a master teacher, which steps you need to take to apply the principles of great teaching to your own practice, and how to advance to the next stage of your professional development.

Course #520 The Challenge of Grading

Course #521 Improving the Performance of Economically Disadvantaged Students

This course takes a look at how poverty hurts children, families, and communities across the country and how schools and educators can improve the academic achievement and life readiness of economically disadvantaged students. In this course you will explore what poverty is and how it affects students in your classroom and school- what drives change within classrooms, schools, and districts and within each child-effective strategies from those who have succeeded and ways to replicate those strategies-how to engage the resources necessary to make change happen.

Course #522 Mathematical Mindsets: Creative Math and Innovative Teaching

Course #523 Write Like This: Teaching Real World Writing Grades 4-12

By helping teachers bring effective modeling practices into their classrooms, this course enables students to become better writers. The practices in this course will help students develop the writing skills they need to become adult writers in the real world. If students are to grow as writers, they need to read good writing, study good writing, and most important, they need to emulate good writers. Grades 4-12

Course #524 Strategies To Reverse Underachievement

In this course you will focus on smart kids who get poor grades-not because they’re unable to do better in school, but because they don’t want to. In this course you will examine underachievement from a unique perspective. The reason students underachieve is influenced by a wide range of factors. Helping students achieve when they don’t want to is not an easy task, but you can reengage and inspire students.

Course #525 When Teaching Gets Tough: How To Reclaim Your Game

Course #526 Teaching To Strengths: Supporting Students Living With Trauma, Violence, And Chronic Stress

In this course you will be provided with strategies for working with half of the students in the U.S. who are experiencing or have experienced trauma, violence, or chronic stress. In the course, you will work from a strength-based perspective that draws from the personal, cultural, and world experiences that students and families bring with them and that can be capitalized on to create successful academic outcomes.

Course #527 Cultivating Curiosity: How To Promote And Sustain Deep Learning

In this course you will create a structured, student-centered environment that allows for openness and surprise when inquiry guides authentic learning. We learn by engaging and exploring, asking questions and testing out answers, yet our classrooms are not always places where curiosity is encouraged and supported. This course will help you harness the powerful drive in all learners-the drive to know, understand, and experience the world in a meaningful way.