Increasing Student Engagement and Participation in the Common Core Classroom

Are you looking to find new ways to engage students who have difficulty learning or appear reluctant to participate in the classroom? This workshop will examine classroom structures and instructional delivery methods designed to energize the classroom. Find ways to reach those hard-to-reach students by exploring Common Core State Standards with a lens of access and opportunity for all students!

Participants will:

• Learn about common areas of challenge faced by struggling learners, including attention difficulties and environmental factors.
• Discover strategies and tools to engage learners and increase participation within the classroom.
• Learn how to differentiate lessons from the Common Core State Standards to activate learning for all students.

Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions

(Building and Facilitating Academic Discussions In Your Math Classroom)

Have you been wanting to get your students talking about math but don’t know where to start? Are your students talking but it’s just not as productive as you were expecting? Five practices introduced by Margaret S. Smith & Mary Kay Stein, NCTM, constitute a model for effectively using student responses in whole-class discussions that can potentially make teaching with high-level tasks more manageable for teachers.

Participants will:

• Gain an understanding of the five practices (Anticipating, Monitoring, Selecting, Sequencing & Connecting)
• Understand how to provide concrete guidance for engaging student in discussions that make the mathematics in classroom lessons transparent to all.
• Learn how to link the Standards for Mathematical Practices into your Mathematics Discussions.

Deconstructing Language: A Look at Complex Text

Teachers are instrumental in supporting their students’ language development and their ability to think and talk about how language is used and structured for different purposes. A great starting point to look at language structure is the different texts that we require our students to read, understand and produce in our classroom.

In this workshop teachers will:

• use the complex, content-rich texts from our classrooms to isolate the language structures, organization, and specific language resources for instruction
• gain strategies for teaching language structures in meaningful and relevant contexts
• identify specific English language resources that are important to explicitly teach to our EL students

Reading Like A Writer: Strategies to Help Students Notice the Moves Writers Make

Writing is difficult - agreed? So let’s help our students build their communicative skills and develop an identity as writers by making visible what is traditionally invisible: the moves that writers make. This workshop will teach you how to read like a writer - not for what the author is saying but for how he/she is saying it. This workshop will provide you with the skills and strategies to build a mindset towards writing in your classroom, where language learning and vocabulary go hand in hand with the detective work of sentence construction and routine writing practice.

Participants Will:

• Gain knowledge about the discipline of writing
• Learn writing strategies they can take to use in the classroom right away, regardless of content area or discipline.
• Learn how to link CCSS Writing Standards to ELD Standards and Research Based Practices

BREATHtaking: Social Emotional Wellness for Educators

Our own Social Emotional Wellness is the best prevention/intervention tool that we can offer our students and colleagues. Mindfulness is gaining a great deal of attention as hospitals, corporations, the U.S. Military, and schools are incorporating mindfulness practices to improve focus and attention, and have a greater sense of overall well-being. In this highly engaging workshop, participants will explore the neuroscience supporting mindfulness for both adults and students, and participants will learn mindfulness activities that can can be put into practice immediately, both in and out of the classroom.

MIND MATTERS--Using Neuroscience to Help Increase Growth Mindset

The more we understand how our brain works, the more we can use it to strengthen our mind, body, and spirit. Participants will learn about the neuroscience that anchors the key components of Social Emotional Learning: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, positive relationships, and decision making. They will learn about the research on Mindset-- as a critical component impacting their teaching as well as an essential tool in their work with students. Participants will engage in lessons that they can replicate in the classroom. We will examine the research on neuroplasticity, growth mindset, and how shifting perspectives of both staff and students will turn frustration, learned helplessness, and apathy into engagement, perseverance and hope.

Words Their Way: Getting Started

Words Their Way (called Palabras a Su Paso in bilingual classrooms) is a differentiated spelling and word work program designed to help students move through the developmental stages at their own pace. Come learn how to get started using this new resource!

Words Their Way: Next Steps

Words Their Way (called Palabras a Su Paso in bilingual classrooms) is a differentiated spelling and word work program designed to help students move through the developmental stages at their own pace. Come learn the next steps to use this resource effectively in your Common Core Classroom!

History-Social Science Framework

This workshop provided by UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project and will introduce secondary teachers to the revised framework for History-Social Science, which is awaiting final adoption, and provide time to revisit a current unit in light of the anticipated framework.

Goals:

• Identify key changes in the draft H-SS framework.
• Evaluate a current unit based on anticipated changes to the H-SS framework

Special Education: Student Rights, Student Dignity, and providing a Normalized Environment

Why are inclusion and mainstreaming necessary? How can I create a supportive environment for students with special needs in the general education setting? How does inclusion/ mainstreaming benefit general education students? How can I easily modify age-appropriate activities? How can I avoid stigmatizing certain students?

This training will address the history of Special Education in the US, the justification behind current legislation, and how to create less-restrictive, more rewarding and normalized environments for students in inclusive settings.

Strategies for Supporting Instruction

How can I support student learning in a classroom? What can I do to establish instructional control? There are many strategies paraeducators can use to help students access academic learning and supporting teachers in the classrooms. This is an interactive workshop that aims to help participants understand different learning styles, explore different teaching strategies, and to add more “ready to use tricks” to your bag of instructional strategies.

Mental Health Seminar

Come and learn about the Willow Rock Facility and the services it provides and learn from our panel of experts about the following topics :

• How to handle 5150s
• Conduct suicide assessments
• Discuss the difficult topic of “cutting”

First Aid Class

By attending this instructor-led course you will learn how to respond to emergencies and how to administer first aid. A certified instructor will guide you through hands-on practice of how to administer first aid. Upon successful completion of the class you will receive a certificate of First Aid valid for 2 years.