University of North Dakota

Using a Common Core State standards-based assessment and grading approach Dr. Kay Burke teaches a comprehensive course on the critical role that assessments play in today’s classrooms, both formative and summative. Dr. Burke promotes the use of performance-based tasks that make real-life connections, and explains how to use rubrics to assess the critical skills and understanding that the tasks target. In the course you’ll see Dr. Burke working with teams of teachers to plan instruction and create common assessments and implement them in real classroom settings.Read more...

Todays 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 from classroom footage and lecture 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 come to conclusions. Educators will learn to teach their students to use these tools as vehicles for exploring rigorous academic concepts in authentic environmentsi.e., in the world around them. They will help their students become genuine innovators who will thrive in the 21st century culture of collaboration.Read more...

The issue of Character Education has, in many districts, largely shifted from the job of the family and community to a critical component of classroom instruction. To create and maintain a positive and productive learning environment students must develop as moral, civic-minded, well-mannered, non-bullying and, generally well-socialized young people.

The pervasive influence of violence, drugs and gang activity and the shifting role of family structure and parents have contributed to the negative changes in the behavior dynamic among many students that negatively impacts schools, classrooms, teachers and, of course, the ability of everyone to learn.

This course helps educators identify character issues in their own classroom and provides strategies for how to mobilize resources including parents and community members. In addition educators will learn how to create a positive moral community and will explore historical and modern concepts of character and consider how to foreground those concepts for students’ learning sake.

As part of the curriculum, character education through insight, understanding, instruction, problem-solving and conflict-resolution activities will help educators improve relationships in their classroom communities and provide a safer environment for learning and collaboration among their students.
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Educators are powerful role models for students and can impact student behavior, learning and academic success. This course encourages teachers to create an environment conducive to learning by helping students take personal responsibility for their actions and by creating a positive moral climate for solving conflicts. Educators will also explore their own roles as leaders as they pursue the “eight habits of the heart”: a nurturing attitude, responsibility, dependability, friendship, brotherhood, high expectations, courage, and hope. Strategies are also presented to encourage the participation of family and community in the modeling of good character and the creation of a school-wide character education program that leverages involvement from businesses, faith communities, parents, and coaches.Read more...

Charlotte Danielson's A Framework for Teaching defines teachers responsibilities, which fall into four domains: planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. Through lectures, classroom observations, and vigorous panel discussions, educators work through how to use the Framework to scrutinize and strengthen classroom teaching practices to improve student learning. Punctuated by worksheets and activities, the course prepares educators to use the Framework to become their best professional selves.

Required Text: Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching (Charlotte Danielson, ASCD, 2007) Click the link on the right to order from Amazon.com.Read more...

This course provides a dynamic series of sessions to develop coaching as a process, a relationship, a specific set of skills, and a powerful strategy for creating change in people and organizations. The role of “coach” is becoming more widely used in our schools. This course clarifies the roles and skills necessary for effective coaching which leads to successful change.

This workshop illustrates techniques of a leader in coaching as teachers, superintendents, and other educators role play and determine effective and appropriate coaching scenarios to improve academic achievement, professional development and organizational change.
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Based on the acclaimed book, Data, Data Everywhere, this course documents the efforts of one school staff to improve student achievement at every grade level, in every subject area, and with every student group. 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. The course features interviews, workshop footage, and lectures, explaining participants learn how to engage in the Education for the Future Institute’s Continuous School Improvement process.Read more...

This course takes a fresh approach to capturing and analyzing student data, moving away from the conventional Bell Curve which reflects the failures of teachers and students as much as the successes. Instead, this course looks at data-driven decisions which use classroom data well beyond letter grades in the form of graphs, charts and diagrams which inform instructional practice, not just reflect the current status, to improve student achievement.
In this course educators will learn how to choose the right tools to make data-driven decisions and be given examples in workshop settings of the process for charting and reading data that provides insight and helps guide instruction and resource deployment.
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This course in differentiated instruction prepares educators to pre-assess their students for readiness, interest, and learning profile; design appropriate differentiated instruction that appeals to various intelligences; meet academic standards; and manage the differentiated classroom. Educators will engage in quality differentiation of quality curriculum. Educators also explore emerging brain research on the neurobiology of emotions and its links to learning, as well as applications of classroom strategies designed to foster emotional health and enhance students ability to learn.Read more...

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 will learn techniques to assess student understanding of skills and concepts so lessons can be adjusted to meet student needs and expand their understanding of mathematical concepts.Read more...

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 will learn techniques to assess student understanding of skills and concepts so that lessons can be adjusted to meet student needs and expand their understanding of mathematical concepts.Read more...

Outbursts of anger among students can be a major distruption in classrooms and have the capacity to escalate out of control and frighten, even harm fellow students and their teachers. Research overwhelmingly shows that a well-managed classroom with discipline and consistent guidelines is the ideal learning environment and this course is designed to help educators gain control over anger issues-their own as well as their students’-to manage classrooms more effectively.

Participants will be introduced to current brain research that will explain neurological and bio-chemical responses in anger-evoking situations. Practical coping strategies will help teachers deal with related emotions such as shame and help students prevent their anger emotions from interfering with learning.
This course can be taken alone or with Effective Classroom Discipline: Anger Management, Part II.
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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 I.Read more...

Proactive reading instruction—in everything from phonics to comprehension—is required both to prevent problems with and to promote authentic literacy. This course offers elementary educators a research-based menu of reading intervention strategies that prepare educators to intervene immediately and effectively at the first signs of students’ struggles. The course equips educators with routines and activities that will make confident, able readers of all their students. Educators will learn proactive strategies to prevent literacy problems and be instructed on reading interventions that address existing literacy problems.Read more...

Education experts Robert J. Marzano, PhD and Tammy Heflebower explain the research, theory and practice of their widely adopted methodology based on the assumption that to design instruction that advances all their students’ achievement, teachers must be able to design assessments that fully illuminate what their students are learning. Participants will learn how to track student progress through detailed descriptors of the essential skills and knowledge students must learn for meaningful and purposeful learning; the kind of feedback, assessment, and grading students need to help them learn; how to construct those assessments; how to create rubric-based scales to inform both formative and summative assessments; and how to monitor and affect student progress. The course features interviews with teachers and students, classroom footage, workshop activities, presentations, and an accompanying text. Grading criteria can also then be more adequately communicated to parents in measuring student achievement. Read more...

In this course instructional leaders, team leaders, teacher mentors, educational coaches, and administrators will learn a new model of strategic conversations designed to help quickly understand and assess 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. Four conversational types are modeled by the presenter: reflective, facilitative, coaching, and directive. Modeling shows how to have conversations with teachers about recognizing the impact on their behavior on students and assisting them in making the necessary connections, commitments, corrections, or changes to their teaching practices to keep students motivated, engaged and focused on learning.Read more...

Meaningful learning achievement requires a high level of student engagement. This course teaches educators how to foster and encourage engagement through a variety of techniques and strategies including crafting the classroom environment, structuring lesson plans and using innovative teaching techniques. The course features interviews with teachers and students, classroom footage, workshop activities, lectures and an accompanying eBook.Read more...

Assisting underachievers before a pattern of failure becomes engrained can lead to improved student success in school. In this course educators learn to identify the prototypical causes of underachievement such as low self-esteem and peer pressure, identify underachievers in the classroom, including gifted students, and 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 differentiated instruction (DI) and RTI, educators become flexible planners providing viable choices and monitor progress to identify academic strengths to motivate progress. The course also includes the crucial role of flexible groupings as an essential strategy and studies 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.Read more...

The Pyramid response to intervention (PRTI) has been notably successful and in this course, PRTI experts share their experience with implementation which consists of systematically identifying students’ needs, providing targeted interventions, monitoring students’ progress, modifying interventions as necessary. Participants will go through the critical stages of establishing professional learning communities (PLCs) within schools and districts, using universal screening tools to ascertain students’ learning needs, and devising interventions for students at three tiers: 1) the classroom teacher differentiates instruction to meet all of his or her students’ needs 2) teachers begin targeting their interventions to meet the needs of those students not met in Tier 1 and 3) teachers call on the expertise of others and practice one-on-one interventions for the remaining few. The presenters emphasize the role of collaborative teamwork and instruct participants on how to make their meetings purposeful and effective. Interviews and classroom footage illustrate how constructive PLCs and PRTI has been for all parties invested in the mission of helping all students achieve at the highest levels possible.Read more...

This invaluable course explains the strategy and methodology of the School-wide Cluster Grouping Model to educators, parents, and administrators. The SCGM identifies gifted students who receive differentiated curriculum and instruction by teachers who understand and can readily respond to their learning needs. SCGM implementation meets the special needs of gifted students without major budget implications and has the potential to raise achievement for students of all ability levels. In this course participants will learn the responsibility of the SCGM model and the training necessary to become at SCGM teacher, administrator, mentor or specialist.

The course features instructional demonstrations from primary, intermediate and middle school classrooms with effective activities in action such as the name card game, various uses of questioning and other differentiated instruction techniques.
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For ELL students the foundation of language acquisition and development are essential for setting the stage for developing instructional strategies that are comprehensible across the curriculum. In this course presenter Elizabeth Jiménez demonstrates a comprehensive strategy for ELL educators including: assessing student knowledge, identifying language learning objectives, and developing differentiated instructional practices. The course also features research-based pedagogical tactics 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 will also learn how to preview 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 contextual factors such as motivation, peer pressure, family values, and L-1 proficiency that impact the success of academic pursuits. An interview with a student about the influence of gangs in his community provides perspective and insight for teachers about reaching disaffected students.Read more...

Presenter Elizabeth Jiménez puts theory into practice with a review of Cummins’ theory of task difficulty (Cummins’ Quadrants) followed by a powerful lesson demonstration using a language other than English to showcase how comprehension is enhanced using sheltered instructional techniques. The course features observations of several ESL classrooms where Jimenez demonstrates key sheltered instruction strategies such as Total Physical Response and literacy techniques such as Language Experience Approach and how to plan for and address task difficulty through sheltered instruction techniques. The benefits of ESL techniques are also explored: team teaching, peer tutoring, educational technology, and working with bilingual paraprofessionals to support student learning. Educators will explore the importance of cultural diversity, how to organize lessons around meaningful themes, how to communicate effectively with families, and how to engage families and communities in student learning. Additional features include a culture quiz to appreciate cultural differences and their impact on student behavior and interviews with EL literacy experts Dr. Gil Garcia, Dr. Maria Quezada, and 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.
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Using media selectively in the classroom can greatly enhance instruction, assessment and student engagement. In this course, teachers will learn the best practices for using images, video, audio and selective hardware, software and web-based collaborative tools. Panel discussions, interviews and practice sessions will also help educators sort through projects and resources to replace textbook-driven instruction with media-based tools and tips are provided for digital interventions for students with learning differences and/or struggling students.Read more...

This course addresses the increasing problem of middle grade and high school students entering their grade levels with significant deficits in literacy skills. The presenters explore the latest research on how the human brain is actually restructured during the process of learning reading skills and how this groundbreaking research can be applied in the classroom with the selective use of technology to improve literacy instruction for readers at all ability levels.Read more...

This course focuses on eight learning attributes and the core teaching and assessment strategies that connect with today’s students, born in the age of the Internet and whose learning habits have been heavily influenced by their digital world. Teachers will learn to develop research-based constructivist models to help students think, explore, and develop their own learning process which will help them with classroom testing and lifelong learning expectations beyond. Information bombardment, interactivity and general communication is fundamentally different for digital natives than previous generations and presenter Ian Jukes introduces neuroscientific and psychological research explaining how the use of technology, including frequent interruptions and shifts in attention, impacts the functions of the brain. Jukes explains how a shift in teaching is required to prepare teachers and students for the Information Age. After identifying and challenging unconscious and outdated assumptions about schools and learning, educators will analyze and update their criteria about what constitutes knowledge, critical thinking, and problem solving to better adapt their instructional practices and assessment strategies to the requirements of the digitized 21st century.Read more...

Presenter Nica Lalli helps educators discover routes to dedicated art instruction-through Internet research, image study and museum trips-to help students enhance their skills at observation, interpretation and implementation for all curriculum subjects. In this course, teachers will discover how to use art to introduce a broader field of inquiry from studying diverse cultures and points-of-view to creative writing projects and even match curriclula. The course features classroom footage of Lalli asking critical questions of the art object’s origins and meaning, modeling the rewarding tasks of looking at art with students and engaging with them in hands-on projects that reinforce lessons.
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