Restorative justice is a theory of justice that focuses on mediation and agreement rather than punishment. Offenders must accept responsibility for harm and make restitution to victims. Teachers who use restorative discipline practices find that behavior in their classroom improves dramatically. They have better relationships with their students and, therefore, less stress from unresolved conflicts. For the growing number of districts using restorative justice, the programs have helped strengthen campus communities, prevent bullying, and reduce student conflicts. And the benefits are clear: early-adopting districts have seen drastic reductions in suspension and expulsion rates, and students report being happier and feeling safer. This course is appropriate for all K-12 school professionals.

Are you looking to engage all students creatively to develop 21st-century skills and meet state standards? Talk, Read, Talk, Write is a practical instructional routine that "makes the students responsible for the actual learning and thinking, all the while raising the bar on their communicative skills." This course will guide you in planning lessons using this format developed by Nancy Motley. We will review best practices in the field and engage in professional discussions on incorporating literacy into all subject areas. By the end of the course, each participant will be comfortable with each aspect of Talk, Read, Talk, and Write, create a lesson plan using this format, and use the lesson with their class. The instructor will offer office hours to support teachers as they develop and use aspects of this format with their classes.

You've worked with the basics of AI, such as ChatGPT, and now you'd like to level up and learn how AI can work for you and lighten your mental load. This course offers educators hands-on experience with AI tools-including custom AI prompts tailored to your specific work, grading assistants, presentation makers, and email summarizers-to streamline administrative and teaching tasks and grading. Participants will learn to integrate these tools into daily practice, allowing for more time to focus on engaging students. The course aligns with the Next Gen NYS K-12 Computer Science and Digital Fluency Standards.

Creative projects, hands-on activities, interesting lessons, choice boards, and practical use of AI represent the content of this course. K-12 teachers will have an opportunity to learn and apply a variety of strategies to boost student engagement and deepen mathematical understanding. Participants will gain varied and multiple tools and methods for math instructional success.

Play is one of the most important ways in which young children gain essential knowledge and skills. For this reason, play opportunities and environments that promote play, exploration and hands-on learning are at the core of effective literacy programs. Children become literate members in society by listening and interacting with the people that surround them. Participants will review the cognitive research revealing how children learn to read while examining the benefits of uninterrupted play and how it encourages language development. This course offers successful, evidence-based strategies to use during play that will enhance reading and writing skills while building a joyful classroom.

This course explores innovative and research-backed approaches to fostering health and wellness for both students and educators. Emphasis is placed on practices that support emotional well-being, effective stress management, and overall mental health. The course will integrate peer-reviewed research, videos, and real-world applications to promote healthier, balanced lifestyles that support optimal functioning in the educational environment. Students will learn about the importance of balancing life and work, emotional intelligence, mental health, and the well-being of both educators and students.

Compassionate School Practices: Fostering Children's Mental Health and Well-Being discusses how educators can establish a compassionate cultural foundation for strong relationships and holistic skills to weather stress, trauma, and promote well-being for their entire school population. The authors of this book explain how educators can discover a collaborative visioning process to elevate compassion through dialogue, policies, and protocol. Participants will explore how compassion shapes professional practice and organizational functioning. We will read and discuss insights about how educators can be more prepared to deal with students who face struggle, and hardship. Compassion has the potential to transform schools into places of healing, comfort, belonging, and connection amid these difficulties. Participants will also learn skills needed to demonstrate and nurture compassion within their schools, districts, and communities, and will better understand how compassionate instruction can directly support vulnerable populations within schools.

Based on Wiley Blevins' Differentiating Phonics Instruction for Maximum Impact, this course helps educators design whole-group phonics lessons that are practical, effective, and accessible to all students. Participants will explore how to use their existing data and phonics scope and sequence to anticipate needs, embed scaffolds and extensions, and adapt lessons using a clear and user-friendly template. Educators will leave with ready-to-use strategies and a complete differentiated lesson aligned to their classroom needs.

Anxiety and stress are major factors in the lives of both school professionals and students. The purpose of this course is to enhance student performance by minimizing the negative effects of stress in the classroom. Participants learn a working definition of stress and anxiety , study research findings on the cause of stress , learn reasons explaining its impact upon teaching and learning , and conduct a thorough assessment of stress factors in their classrooms. This knowledge facilitates application of tools and techniques to identify , prevent , and manage stressors to improve academic success. Participants will also identify specific students experiencing debilitating stress and take actions to address these problems and help the student restore personal equilibrium and enhance their performance. This course is appropriate for all K-12 teachers and school professionals.

Principles of Extraordinary Math is for anyone who teaches or helps people learn math. The course explores research ideas on mathematics learning and student mindsets that can transform students' experiences with math. Sessions are based on the work of Jo Boaler, Carol Dweck, Ron Ritchhart, Cathy Humphries among others.

This course is part TWO of a book study that uses The Onward Workbook: Daily Activities to Cultivate Your Emotional Resilience and Thrive. This course is a breath of fresh air for all teachers. It allows everyone to step back, think, reset, and grow to new levels. It explores the 12 traits that are essential for building and developing resilience in educators based on the book, Onwards, a four-part conceptual framework that rests on the key components of resilience and how it is developed. Through this class, we will use a workbook, podcast and classroom format where we will dive into empowering stories and strategies to develop resilience. The activities will boost community, restore mindfulness, cultivate compassion, become ongoing learners, develop creativity, and celebrate gratitude. Book: The Onward Workbook by Elena Aguilar

This 5.5-hour professional learning workshop consists of four interactive sessions designed to engage educators across all grade levels. Each session will address a variety of math topics, featuring presentations, hands-on activities, and opportunities for collaboration. Teachers will: Explore innovative strategies for teaching mathematics. Share ideas and best practices with colleagues. Engage in collaborative problem-solving across grade levels. Leave with practical approaches ready to apply in their classrooms. Future Sessions: January 24, 2026, and April 11, 2026. You must register with E Cornell to receive the Zoom link. Registration: https://ecornell.cornell.edu/portal/cornell-math-workshop/​

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept portrayed only in works of science fiction. Instead, it's impacting nearly every field, from farming to sports to the arts. The field of education is no different. Transformational uses of AI abound in teaching and learning-and it's likely this transformation is just getting started. Already classrooms are filled with invisible AI technologies in such forms as adaptive assessments, internet search engines, and autocomplete text. In this emerging and evolving AI field, new tools will continue to arrive on the scene, and the skills needed to effectively use them will be essential. For example, prompt engineering-constructing instructions to guide AI systems to generate the best possible responses-was mostly unheard of in education until ChatGPT arrived. Now, it's becoming a key piece of digital literacy for K-12 students.This book study will help educators get a better understanding of artificial intelligence technology in an educational setting. The author illuminates some of the most exciting things happening with AI in the classroom. In the course, you'll explore a variety of AI technologies with incredible potential to impact teaching and learning. The book also serves as a roadmap for bringing AI to the classroom, sharing frameworks and considerations for using AI tools and technologies with your students along with curated tools and classroom-tested projects that truly empower students to be innovative designers and creative communicators. Participants will be provided with an electronic copy of the book. Each week participants will read required chapters, participate in discussions, and complete activities that can be applied to their classrooms.

This course draws on the research and insights of David and Meredith Liben in Know Better, Do Better: Comprehension. Participants will examine common misconceptions about reading comprehension and learn how to shift from isolated strategy-based instruction to a more effective, content-rich approach. The course emphasizes the importance of building background knowledge, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and oral language to support deep understanding. Educators will explore what happens in the mind as students read, study the dominant research-based model of comprehension, and gain practical strategies to support student thinking before, during, and after reading. Through discussion, reflection, and lesson design, participants will leave with tools to strengthen comprehension instruction in meaningful and lasting ways.

Participants will be able to make every lesson accessible for all learners. Participants will work in small groups, in pairs, and in a whole group setting to collaboratively add scaffolds to lessons. Participants will investigate a lesson or a unit to see where support may be needed for MLLs. Participants will create a folder of resources to take with them to apply to their subject area.

Discover how to activate student focus, motivation, and memory with easy-to-implement brain boosters! This interactive session equips educators with research-based strategies to integrate short, purposeful movement breaks into daily routines-no gymnasium required.

The barriers that occur to learning can not be single-handedly removed. Unfortunately , one such barrier occurs when behaviors are disrupting the learning community. The climate of each school community is different. Therefore , a "one size fits all” approach is not as effective as interventions based on the needs of each school. Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a proactive approach to establishing the behavioral supports and social culture and needed for all students in a school to achieve social , emotional and academic success. A system focused on creating school-wide , classroom and individual supports improves academic and behavioral results. This course will assist educators in creating a support system for their classroom that will help to increase behavioral and academic results. This course is appropriate for all regular and special education educators.

Container Gardening: Agriculture in the Classroom (Grant-Funded). This course integrates topics in science, social studies, and health/nutrition under the umbrella of agriculture. We will explore plant choices for an edible garden and a sensory garden, as well as plant-related, hands-on activities that do not require an indoor garden. Topics addressed in this course include plant anatomy and life cycle, companion planting, propagation, growing in containers or using passive hydroponics, composting, and recycling. Project ideas come from existing curriculums as well as from the online resource, "New York Agriculture in the Classroom.” This course is suitable for teachers of grades K-12. Teachers must use Gmail accounts to register for this course because we will be using Google Classroom as our digital environment, as well as other Google Workspace applications. Individuals can sign up for a Gmail account at no cost in order to access its many features.

Practical Mindfulness Strategies to help students and educators reduce stress, enhance focus, and create a more balanced learning environment. In today's fast-paced world, stress affects both students and educators. The "Mindful Moments: Finding Calm in the Chaos" workshop offers simple, practical mindfulness techniques to enhance focus, reduce stress, and foster emotional well-being. Through guided exercises and breathing techniques, participants will learn how to incorporate mindfulness into their daily routines-both personally and in the classroom. Leave with tools to create a calmer, more focused learning environment for yourself and your students!

This course equips teachers with practical skills to communicate effectively with school administrators, parents, and staff fostering collaboration, advocacy, and professional growth. Participants will explore foundational communication skills, cultural competence, conflict resolution, persuasion techniques, and long-term collaboration. The course integrates video examples, peer-reviewed research, assignments, and discussions to ensure practical application.

We have all heard the expression , "on the spectrum ,” but what does it mean? What implications would this have on your classroom? This courses will review the characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder , Asperger's Syndrome and Pervasive Developmental Disorder. Participants will examine best instructional practices and methodologies. This course is appropriate for all teachers K-12.

This course is part THREE of a book study that uses The Onward Workbook: Daily Activities to Cultivate Your Emotional Resilience and Thrive. This course is a breath of fresh air for all teachers. It allows everyone to step back, think, reset, and grow to new levels. It explores the 12 traits that are essential for building and developing resilience in educators based on the book, Onwards, a four-part conceptual framework that rests on the key components of resilience and how it is developed. Through this class, we will use a workbook, podcast and classroom format where we will dive into empowering stories and strategies to develop resilience. The activities will boost community, restore mindfulness, cultivate compassion, become ongoing learners, develop creativity, and celebrate gratitude. Book: The Onward Workbook by Elena Aguilar

In this hybrid book study, participants will dive into the world of AI, especially looking at some of the potential risks of AI. As Dr. Joy Buolamwini writes, "Computers are a reflection of both the aspirations and the limitations of the people who create them." In addition to reading Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human In a World of Machines by Dr. Joy Buolamwini, participants will also explore the new AI Scope and Sequence for PreK-12. There will be 3 required synchronous Zoom sessions to discuss the book and related materials. Participants will complete online assignments around each session.

As the number of multilingual learners in our schools grow, educators need research based insights on teaching practices for MLLs. This book study will help educators teach key components of language and literacy and give them the knowledge base needed to help MLLs develop strong literacy skills and achieve academic success. Learning Outcome Goals for Participants ● Participants to enter the classroom with a full understanding of the language and literacy development of ELLs ● Participants will learn how to support acquisition of key literacy components: Phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing ● Participants will learn how to leverage technology to enhance instruction for ELLs Activity Outline: 4, 2 hour synchronous sessions (8 hrs) and 7 asynchronous hours = 15 total