“WHY ARE THEY PICKING ON ME?” Understanding & Responding to Social Cruelty

Cyberbullying affects everyone from children to adults. Anyone who uses the internet could become a victim of online harassment. This course will explore the roots of the problem with cyberbullying and examine solutions on how to handle cyberbullying when it happens. The course includes multiple activities that can be used with children in a classroom or homeschool setting. 

Do you want to feel more fulfilled, successful and joyful at work? Do you feel depleted energetically and overwhelmed by what is being asked and expected of you as an educator? Do you have the energy necessary to tap into your creativity, productivity, and optimism needed for excellent teaching and learning? Working with Elena Aguilar’s book, Onward, you will cultivate your emotional resilience to help you thrive as an educator.

This course is designed to support teachers in developing language and techniques for teaching decision-making skills to students. Teaching this skill is important because our decisions shape the quality of our lives, communities, and environment. Many decision-making models are available; this course is designed around the Stakeholders-Consequences Decision Making (SCDM) model. It is a flexible model and can be used in many different ways, with multiple grade levels, and in many subject areas including academic and social-emotional learning. You can confidently use and teach this model which is powerful for both individual and team-based decisions. 

The notion of the “comfort zone” has been in the cultural lexicon for quite a long time. However, not many people talk about what lies outside the comfort zone. While we might recognize that, by definition, discomfort is outside of it, we don’t necessarily understand all the nuances that can be present with discomfort. In this course, you will dive deeply into a metaphorical “map” that helps to define and develop discomfort so that it is useful, nuanced, and not just an unknown sea.

It's February, known for Black History Month, and we reintroduce to our students Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, John Lewis, and other notable African Americans that have transformed our history. This course will look beyond Black History Month and focus on unsung heroes and sheroes that don't always make history books but have contributed to America in many profound ways. Using the required text, Four Hundred Souls, you will be engaged in the history of African Americans from 1619 to the present time through 90 diverse authors' powerful short stories, personal vignettes, essays, and poems. We will examine microaggressions and ever-changing voting rights legislation. In addition, you will have the opportunity to examine a plethora of websites, videos, and resources, as well as to adapt and create your lesson plans to integrate Black History into a year-long, interdisciplinary curriculum.

Social Media and our students - it connects them, yet also divides them. Many questions surround the use of social media in terms of our students:

• How much time on social media is too much?
• What are the effects of social media on students – their brain development, identity, possible addiction, and well-being? 
• Is there a positive side to social media in terms of student use?
• How can we keep our students safe from the negatives of social media, such as cyber-bullying?
• What advice can we share with our students and their parents to make the most of social media?

This class will delve into these questions (and more). You will learned about the positives and negatives about social media, form your own answers to some of these questions, and come away with ways to advise students and parents about the best way to use social media and the best ways to safe safe on social media.

Generation Z comprises students born since 1995 into a digital world made up of the Internet and cell phones. They are enmeshed in social media and criticized for lacking social skills. However, they are the future and we need to teach them in a manner that will lead to their success. To do that, learn how to best meet the unique needs of Generation Z and how to engage them in the K-12 classroom. Learn about what they think, where they are going and how they may change the world.

Are kids at your school mean to each other? Of course they are. When kids are cruel to other kids not only does it do direct harm to the victims, it also affects the learning environment for everyone.

Today's students differ greatly from each other and their learning needs vary more dramatically than ever! These differences are wide ranging and are being identified earlier. Such classroom disparities require all educators to think differently about teaching and learning; educators have been differentiating for ages. This class is intended to move you from where you are now (beginner, proficient, advanced) in the process of differentiation, to the next level essential for success.

Understand and deal more effectively with a range of student disorders, such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Attachment Disorders, and Self Injurious Behaviors. You'll learn signs and recognition aspects as well as effective strategies for helping children to be successful at school.

This course provides authoritative and reality-based best practices in classroom management from some of our best educational researchers, including Robert Marzano, Jana Marzano and Debra Pickering. It clarifies both what to do, and how to do it, with ample examples and action steps.