ePD: Online Course Descriptions

Featuring Margaret Bausch & Ted Hasselbring

Too many students are entering middle and high schools with such deficits in literacy skills that they are unable to participate in grade‐level learning. In this course, research on how the human brain is restructured during the process of learning to read is presented. The course then shows how this research can be applied to better use technology to enhance literacy instruction for all readers, especially struggling ones.

Featuring Victoria Bernhardt

Course Description:

In her book Data, Data Everywhere and in this course, presenter Victoria Bernhardt describes what one school staff did to increase student achievement at every grade level, in every subject area, and with every student group. Through interviews, workshop footage, and lectures, participants learn how to engage in the Education for the Future Institute's Continuous School Improvement process. As they trace one school's progress, participants also engage in the stages of data collection and analysis, self‐assessment, identification of specific problems and pathways to solutions, articulation of a vision, and design and implementation of a plan to implement that vision.

Featuring Carolyn Coil

Course Description:

Stepping in to assist underachievers before a pattern of failure becomes ingrained can lead to improved student success in school. Educators learn to identify the prototypical causes of underachievement—including fear of failure, low self‐esteem, negative peer pressure, and lack of motivation—and to locate the underachievers in their classrooms, including gifted students and those eventually identified for special education. Educators then learn to select specific research‐based interventions to target those students, using the three‐tier Response to Intervention (RTI) system to reverse a pattern of underachievement. Through the combined efforts of both differentiated instruction (DI) and RTI, educators become flexible planners who supply their students with plentiful choices and frequently monitor their students' progress, to help them exploit their strengths and become lifelong learners. Educators explore the crucial role of flexible groupings as an essential strategy for assisting underachievers improve academic results. For classrooms with students below, at, and above grade level, educators study compacting, scaffolding, and tiering strategies. For classrooms with a range of learning preferences, educators learn techniques to accommodate them and then how to monitor students' progress within and beyond those preferences. This course prepares teachers to intervene for underachievers, helping them to experience success in the classroom and the world beyond.

Featuring Charlotte Danielson

Course Description:

Charlotte Danielson's groundbreaking book Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching presents a clear language to describe the complex work of teaching. Now you can experience the Framework, not only through Danielson's words, but through the discussions of teachers and administrators who have incorporated the concepts into their daily practice. Along with Danielson and a diverse panel of educators, you will assess real classroom footage for its strengths and weaknesses in each of the four domains of the Framework. Throughout the course, you will reflect on your own experience and participate in active learning with the teacher panel. Through this dynamic combination of engaging lectures, classroom observations, educator interviews, and vigorous panel discussions, this course will help you to become the best teacher you can be.

Featuring Charlotte Danielson & Karyn Wright

Course Description:

Schools and districts across the country have found in Charlotte Danielson's Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching a tool to promote and assure quality in teaching and continual professional learning for educators. Danielson offers an evaluation system that compels its users to address the fundamental questions of how good is good enough in teaching—and good enough at what exactly? How do we know and who should decide? Participants will learn a range of functions for the Framework, from supporting self-assessment and reflection, to providing formative assessment of teachers' practice, to providing support for improving their practice. A panel of administrators with experience implementing the Framework in their schools and districts detail necessary steps to implementation and guidelines to facilitate the process. Karyn Wright and her panel add to the discussion considerable detail about what constitutes evidence of teaching practice, where and how to locate relevant data, and how to read that data. They also augment the course's consideration of professional learning's role in teacher evaluation, returning to the Framework itself and scrutinizing the role of mentoring and inducting. In a project‐based unit, participants conduct a complete evaluation to reinforce the course content. They will come away prepared to instigate and utilize this evaluation system that has been adopted and touted by so many—teachers and administrators alike.

Featuring Rushton Hurley

Course Description:

Digital media can provide highly engaging access to knowledge — particularly when students are the makers of that media. Research suggests that incorporating multimedia into instruction extends students' critical and creative thinking skills and increases their motivation and self‐esteem, even while they develop skills essential to the 21st-century, including technological expertise and productive collaboration. Participants will learn why and how to use a range of tools and strategies to empower their students to express themselves through digital media and to develop their learning of curriculum through such projects as creating slideshows, screen casts, audio, and video projects. Presenter Rushton Hurley's screen casts walk participants step‐by‐step through the essential stages of such projects; student projects provide models of good practice; and interviews with teachers who have incorporated these projects into their curriculum highlight the student benefits and provide inspiration for participants ready to embark on their own.

Featuring Robyn Jackson

Course Description:

How do teachers begin talking about teaching? In this course, instructional leaders, team leaders, teacher mentors, educational coaches, and administrators will learn the delicate art of conversing about teaching to improve instruction. Educational leaders learn to collaborate and communicate with teachers to improve teaching practices and to increase student achievement. They will learn a new model of strategic conversations designed to help them quickly assess and understand the primary needs of the teaching staff, strategically apply their leadership skills to motivate and support teachers, and help teachers make connections between their instructional techniques and student performance. The four conversational types—reflective, facilitative, coaching, and directive, modeled by the presenter with guests performing the roles of teachers—help teachers recognize the impact of their teaching behaviors on students, providing the assistance in making the necessary connections, commitments, corrections, or changes to their teaching practices. These steps will help increase their educational community's ability to make knowledge accessible to all students, organize instruction to meet instructional goals, and keep students motivated, engaged, and focused, leading to increased student success.

Featuring Robyn Jackson

Course Description:

Learn how to support your struggling students without sacrificing rigor. Presenter Robyn R. Jackson starts by helping educators understand why students struggle. From there, participants will learn specific strategies for supporting students, such as acceleration strategies designed to prevent students from struggling in the first place, progressive intervention strategies that directly address sources of student struggle and quickly get struggling students back on track, and remediation strategies that target specific areas of difficulty and prepare students for summative assessments. Dr. Jackson will also introduce participants to the four stages of rigorous learning — acquisition, application, assimilation, and adaptation — and show participants how to support students through each stage. Participants will learn specific instructional and support strategies for increasing students' capacity to engage in rigorous learning experiences, ways to increase the rigor of their own courses, and assessment strategies that extend students' rigorous learning throughout the unit. Finally, participants will develop a proactive intervention plan that supports students' rigorous learning before the lesson, during learning, and through the summative assessment.

Featuring Lee Jenkins

Course Description:

In this course, educators learn how to make data‐driven decisions using classroom data to inform their instructional practice, resulting in higher student academic achievement. How many teachers strive to reach a bell curve by the end of a term? While this may be common practice, teachers will learn that the bell curve actually represents teachers' failure to teach and students' failure to learn. By capturing and analyzing student data in the form of graphs, charts, and diagrams, educators learn to adapt and focus their instructional strategies to achieve greater student academic achievement. Furthermore, educators learn how to use the tools to make data‐driven decisions so that students can achieve higher academic success in less time. Jenkins presents lively examples in a workshop setting, modeling for online participants the processes of charting and reading data.

Featuring Elizabeth Jiménez

Course Description:

How can academic content be delivered in the classroom so that English language learners succeed in all subjects? Ms. Jiménez puts theory into practice by reviewing Cummins' theory of task difficulty (Cummins' Quadrants). Then, through a brief, powerful lesson demonstration, using a language other than English, Jiménez showcases how comprehension is enhanced using sheltered instructional techniques. Participants observe several classrooms where English language learners are engaged in content‐based ESL lessons. Jiménez demonstrates through examples the key sheltered instruction strategies and illustrates how to plan for and address task difficulty through sheltered instruction techniques. The presenter discusses and models ESL techniques such as Total Physical Response and literacy techniques such as Language Experience Approach. Jiménez presents the benefits of various instructional supports, such as team teaching, peer tutoring, educational technology, and working with bilingual paraprofessionals to support student learning. Educators explore the importance of students' culture, how to organize lessons around meaningful themes, how to communicate effectively with families, and how to engage families and communities in student learning. Participants will take the culture quiz by Judie Haynes to appreciate cultural differences and their impact on student behavior in the classroom. The course also showcases expert interviews with EL literacy author Dr. Gil Garcia, bilingual education advocate Dr. Maria Quezada, and dual-language teacher Cheryl Ortega. The course addresses instructional strategies using assessments for analyzing data, setting goals, differentiating instruction, and monitoring instruction. Through demonstrations, classroom observations, anecdotal examples, and interviews with students and educators, participants learn to apply ELL strategies to their own classrooms in all four domains of language — reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Featuring Elizabeth Jiménez

Course Description:

What is the ultimate goal for ELL students? The answer is academic success across the curriculum. In this course, educators learn the foundations of language development and language acquisition, setting the stage for developing instructional strategies that are more comprehensible for ELL students across all subject areas. Elizabeth Jiménez demonstrates strategies for assessing students' knowledge, identifying language learning objectives, and developing differentiated instructional practices that address the varying levels of language proficiency often present in a typical classroom. She introduces research‐based pedagogical practices that promote comprehension, such as background building, frontloading vocabulary, using graphic organizers to enhance higher-order thinking, leveraging the primary language to facilitate learning, using culturally responsive materials, and employing media, technology, and other visual supports to enhance learning. Participants learn how to preview their textbooks for idiomatic expressions and multiple meaning words, to plan lessons that incorporate academic language development, and to utilize primary language cognates. In addition, Jiménez reviews the contextual factors, such as motivation, peer pressure, family values, and L‐1 proficiency, that impact the success of academic pursuits. In an interview with Sal Flores, a young Latino who recently earned a GED, he explains why, as a youth, he was attracted to gang affiliation and offers some advice for teachers about reaching disaffected students. Jiménez demonstrates classroom strategies such as sorting activities, jigsaw, and cooperative work, followed by well‐designed interactive activities for online participants to practice and ultimately to apply in their own classrooms to help their students succeed.

Featuring Ian Jukes

Course Description:

Because of digital bombardment and the emergence of the new digital landscape, “digital natives” process information, interact, and communicate in fundamentally different ways from any previous generations. In this course, Ian Jukes introduces neuro-scientific and psychological research that explains how the use of technology, including frequent interruptions and shifts in attention, impacts the functions of the brain.

Featuring Nica Lalli

Course Description:

Bringing art into the general classroom can make students better observers, thinkers, and doers in all their subjects. Presenter Nica Lalli helps educators discover routes to access art — through reproductions, the Internet, and museums — and for various purposes—to introduce diverse cultures and points‐of‐view; to enhance language arts, social studies, and math curricula; to animate the past and present; and to instigate creative writing and art making. Participants will become adept at asking basic questions of art — from ‘how is it made?’ to ‘what does it say?’ — which will help their students to improve observation, inference, and interpretation skills. The course features classroom footage of Lalli modeling the rewarding tasks of looking at art with students and engaging with them in hands‐on projects that reinforce lessons.

Featuring Paul Lawrence

Course Description:

With an emphasis on real, whole, and negative numbers, presenter Paul Lawrence provides educators with easy‐to‐implement, well‐sequenced activities that promote conceptual understanding and relate concrete understanding to symbolic interpretation. Educators learn techniques to assess all students' understanding of skills and concepts so that lessons can be adjusted to meet students' needs and expand their understanding of mathematical concepts.

*Note: Requires Discovery‐Based Math Manipulatives Kit ($69). The supplemental kit includes a custom‐tailored workbook to follow the online courses, as well as correlating handouts, Discovery Templates, a Self‐Study Guide, and the patented “Communicator,” along with many hands‐on math manipulatives. (The materials are packaged in a convenient carrying case.)

Featuring Paul Lawrence

Course Description:

With an emphasis on mastering multiplication and division and on the concepts of fractions and decimals, this course provides educators with easy‐to‐implement, well‐sequenced activities that promote conceptual understanding and relate concrete understanding to symbolic interpretation. Educators learn techniques to assess all students' understanding of skills and concepts so that lessons can be adjusted to meet students' needs and expand their understanding of mathematical concepts.

*Note: Requires Discovery‐Based Math Manipulatives Kit ($69). The supplemental kit includes a custom‐tailored workbook to follow the online courses, as well as correlating handouts, Discovery Templates, a Self‐Study Guide, and the patented "Communicator," along with many hands‐on math manipulatives.

Featuring Paul Lawrence

Course Description:

This course explores the concepts of fractions and decimals. Paul Lawrence provides participants with activities that require students to master pattern recognition and operational procedures to compute fractions and decimals. The presenter demonstrates effective strategies for teaching addition and subtraction of fractions with same and compatible denominators as well as non‐compatible and overlapping denominators. Educators will be able to utilize activities that combine creative practice with operational skills. They study teaching methodologies that promote student understanding of number sense, estimation strategies, and foundational understanding. All lessons reinforce the goal of teaching students to apply their knowledge of underlying concepts to determine the most appropriate and efficient problem‐solving strategies.

*Note: Requires Discovery‐Based Math Manipulatives Kit ($69). The supplemental kit includes a custom‐tailored workbook to follow the online courses, as well as correlating handouts, Discovery Templates, a Self‐Study Guide, and the patented "Communicator," along with many hands‐on math manipulatives.

Featuring Cheryl Lemke

Course Description:

Today's global high‐tech world requires instruction and assessment that incorporate the latest social, learning, and neuroscience research on critical thinking, multi‐tasking, multimodal learning, collaboration, and engagement. Educators will learn how to use technologically advanced tools that extend students' thinking by serving as a means to explore ideas, research questions, test hypotheses, compose thoughts, and draw conclusions. Educators will learn to teach their students to use these tools as vehicles for exploring rigorous academic concepts in authentic environments — i.e., in the world around them. They will help their students become genuine innovators who will thrive in the 21st-century culture of collaboration.

Featuring Meg Ormiston

Course Description:

Raised on technology, students today thrive on media, both in and outside the classroom. In this course, with the help of exuberant presenter Meg Ormiston, teachers and administrators learn to engage and educate the millennial learner using still images, video and audio clips, assorted technological software and hardware, and Web 2.0 collaborative tools to augment instruction and assessment. Aided by energetic panel discussions, interviews, and screen capture sessions, educators will investigate new projects and resources to replace staid, textbook‐driven instruction and to motivate and edify their “powered up” 21st-century students.

Featuring Karla Reiss

Course Description:

How can changing thoughts and beliefs influence future success? This course provides a dynamic series of sessions that consider coaching in classrooms and schools as a process, a relationship, a specific set of skills, and a powerful strategy for creating change in people and organizations. Educators will learn specific skills that coaches need to successfully meet the challenges of educator‐as‐coach, a role essential to promoting positive personal and organizational change. Teachers, superintendents, and other educators role‐play to model effective and appropriate coaching that will help participants improve their students' academic achievement, as well as their own and their peers' professional development. Presented by a leader in the field, this course may be taken alone or with its companion course, Mentoring to Improve Student Learning, which provides strategies to implement an effective mentor program within schools.

Featuring Ferdi Serim

Course Description:

School leaders face the immediate challenges of raising student achievement while also preparing students for success in a digital age. In this course, educators learn about the visible thinking process, which provides a practical pathway for developing 21st-century skills and strengthening student core subject‐area learning. Educators also learn to implement research‐based, evidence‐based practice to strengthen and assess the ISTE NETS‐Standards.

Featuring Debbie Silver

Course Description:

Effective teachers successfully navigate their students' often unpredictable classroom behavior; they establish a classroom environment that facilitates learning; they differentiate instruction and assessment; they facilitate learning through cooperative groups; and they find time to meet their personal goals. How do they do it all? Veteran teacher Dr. Debbie Silver shares her classroom management techniques and strategies as she explains how the teacher sets the tone and climate of the classroom. Educators will learn to head off discipline problems before they occur using student‐centered discipline techniques. With strategies in place for managing the classroom, Dr. Silver shifts to designing high‐quality curricula, integrating standards, using backwards-design principles, and developing activities suited to different learning styles. Dr. Silver explains how she uses “discrepant events” to challenge students' prior assumptions — a technique that improves learning and increases retention. Using zone of proximal development strategies, educators learn to develop activities that are attainable but just beyond their students' reach. Educators learn to use cooperative learning as a teaching strategy, where the teacher's role shifts from direct instruction to facilitation. Using this approach, teachers reinforce concepts, clarify directions, encourage students, and affirm positive group interactions. To motivate students, teachers will learn to use intrinsic rewards, which prepare students for lifelong learning and success rather than extrinsic rewards, which are generally short lived. Finally, because teachers never have enough time in the day to do everything, they will learn how to evaluate and prioritize their own activities, delegate, and make time to reach their personal and professional goals. Designed for new and veteran teachers, this course provides timesaving strategies, practical tips, and great ideas for all teachers to create an effective learning environment for their students.

Featuring Grace E. Smith & Stephanie Throne

Course Description:

Today, most students are technology‐savvy, having grown up in the computer age, surfing the Internet, making friends through social networking, tweeting, playing electronic games, downloading music to their iPods^®, and viewing or posting videos on YouTube^®. Research shows that students find school more satisfying and have greater academic success when they are taught in ways that are responsive to their interests, readiness levels, and learning profiles. Using technology in the classroom is a way to connect with students across all subject areas by offering many approaches to differentiate instruction. Participants will learn to incorporate technology tools and resources that engage students in their own learning and to implement strategies for differentiating instruction based on their students' learning styles and multiple intelligences. Participants will learn to differentiate instruction in English language arts, social studies, science, math and encore subjects using traditional technology tools and Web 2.0 tools for collaborating, communicating, and creating multimedia projects. Participants will come away with the skills needed to create technology‐driven 21st-century classrooms that address the varying levels of their students' learning needs and actively engage students in their own learning.

Featuring Diane Wagenhals

Course Description:

The expression of anger at school can disrupt instruction, create a hostile environment, and make students and teachers feel unsafe. This course explores the relationship between anger, violence prevention, and effective discipline in schools. Participants study how to better manage and respond to anger — their own and others' — and thereby enrich their classrooms and schools. Participants also learn to support calm brain states for students and to promote emotionally safe climates in which students' productivity can thrive. Adopting a healthy philosophy of anger will make participants adept managers of that unruly emotion. This course can be taken alone or with Effective Classroom Discipline: Anger Management, Part II.

Featuring Diane Wagenhals

Course Description:

The unruly emotion of anger can disrupt a classroom and frighten students and educators. This course is designed to give participants control over anger — their own and their students' — in order to manage their classrooms more effectively. Participants are introduced to current brain research that can help clarify neurological and bio‐chemical responses to anger‐evoking experiences. Research clearly indicates that students learn better when classrooms are emotionally safe and provide clear and consistent guidelines. Participants will also learn to deal with anger's related emotion, shame, and keep that emotion from interfering students' learning. This course can be taken alone or with Effective Classroom Discipline: Anger Management, Part I.

Featuring Susan Winebrenner & Dina Brulles

Course Description:

This course will cover an in‐depth set of topics that describe the School‐wide Cluster Grouping Model to educators, parents, and administrators. The SCGM is a method for providing full‐time gifted services without major budget implications. Implementing these strategies has the potential to raise achievement for all students. With the SCGM, all students are purposely placed into classrooms based on their abilities and potential. Participants will learn the responsibility of the SCGM and the training necessary to become an SCGM teacher, administrator, mentor, or specialist. There will also be video of primary, intermediate, and middle school classroom demonstrations in which participants will be shown the name card game, various uses of questioning, and other differentiated instruction techniques.

Presenter: Rick Wormeli

Course Description:

How can educators meet standards, prepare students for high‐stakes testing, and still offer students differentiated instruction that respects their individuality? Educators learn the tools to create lesson plans and assessment systems that enable them first to discover, then meet the different needs of their students. Formative assessment takes a primary role in the differentiated classroom, providing feedback, documenting progress, and guiding instructional decisions. Educators will learn to use assessments to communicate rather than compensate or reward, they will scrutinize grading systems to identify when they are unfairly norm‐referenced or biased, and they will acquire the skills to convert assessments to nonjudgmental, criteria‐referenced systems instead. Finally, this course prepares educators to manage the differentiated classroom by offering their students nurturing, rigorous, fair, and differentiated instruction that promotes student engagement and academic success.

Featuring Susan Winebrenner & Dina Brulles

Course Description:

This is the second course in the School‐wide Cluster Grouping Model. This course will cover the meaning and use of effective extension menus. The course will review all aspects of gifted cluster meetings for teachers, mentors, and specialists. There will be two separate panel discussions, one with administrators and one with gifted program coordinators. The panels will discuss the administrators' and coordinators' roles in the SCGM. The course will cover methods for monitoring the progress of the SCGM, placing gifted students in cluster groups, and evaluating student growth. Participants will also learn how to create a database for tracking gifted students and how to handle special-population gifted students. Participants will also observe classroom demonstrations of differentiated instruction techniques as well as research surrounding the SCGM theories.