In this workshop we will discuss strategies and scaffolds that we can build into our lessons to make them more accessible for MLLs. We will consider ways to build on students' background knowledge and how to provide ample opportunities for student participation. We will review tasks that take into account academic content across all four modalities: reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Sue Baichwal will be facilitating this workshop. She is an ENL teacher in the Arlington School district and also an adjunct lecturer for SUNY New Paltz.

Welcome to Canva for the Creative Classroom! This 45-hour online course is designed for K-12 educators who are new to Canva and eager to integrate visually engaging and purposeful design into their classrooms. From building newsletters and classroom posters to creating engaging student materials and sprucing up your space for fall, you'll walk away with hands-on skills and beautiful, functional projects ready to use. No design experience needed-just a willingness to learn, create, and have fun! Essential Question: How can teachers use Canva to enhance student engagement, classroom communication, and creative expression through visually appealing and purposeful design? Overall Course Objective: By the end of this course, K-12 educators will be able to confidently use Canva to create engaging, visually appealing, and classroom-ready materials-such as posters, newsletters, student worksheets, presentations, and decor-while applying basic design principles to support student learning, classroom management, and effective communication.

This professional development course is designed for art educators who want to learn how to write meaningful, engaging curriculum and new units of study that integrate contemporary or modern artists as inspiration. Educators will explore strategies for curriculum writing, project development, and assessment creation while designing an original unit of study that culminates in a new student project.

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.

The ability to understand and present information in graphic form is key to achieving general literacy for people of all ages. The non-linear nature of graphs facilitates analysis and communication. This course is for teachers of grades 4-12, with a focus on graphing data from science and social studies content. Students will create pie graphs, bar graphs, line graphs, and combo graphs. We will customize graphs and insert formulas for automatic computations. In addition, we will explore ways to operationalize ideas into numbers that can be graphed, and to discuss the importance of sample sizes, outliers, and scale. Students must use Gmail accounts to register for this course because we will be using Google Classroom as our digital environment, as well as Google Sheets as our spreadsheet application. Google Sheets is free for anyone to use who has a gmail account, which is also free. Google Sheets is user-friendly and robust enough to handle most graphing needs in K-12 classrooms.

This course is part one 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 book study course, participants will dive deep into Rigorous PBL by Design to explore how to effectively implement Project-Based Learning (PBL) that is meaningful, challenging, and aligned with educational standards. Through a combination of guided reading, collaborative discussions, and practical application, participants will learn how to design and facilitate PBL experiences that promote critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity while maintaining academic rigor. Educators will examine the key frameworks and strategies presented in the book, focusing on how to create high-quality projects that captivate students and foster authentic learning. Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how to design PBL units that align with curriculum goals, incorporate formative assessments, and empower students to take ownership of their learning.

In this course, participants will explore the current state of mental health among adolescents, which has shown a marked decline since 2012 in a number of measures. We will examine the role of technology, play, and independence among children and adolescents. Participants will read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt and explore not only the current state of teenage mental health but also discuss and explore possible solutions. There will be 4 required Zoom sessions to discuss the books. Participants will complete online assignments around each sessions. Participants may purchase the book on Amazon or borrow from Libby.

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.

In this 6 hour workshop, participants will learn some ways to identify if a student is struggling because of difficulty with language acquisition or because the student has a learning difficulty or if it is both. In the first session, participants will learn about the ENL program in NYS. We will also explore how students acquire a second (or third) language. We will look at data from the state about ELLs and Sped services. In the 2nd session we will look at RTI and the tiers of intervention. We will also look at how these can be adapted for ELLs. In the 3rd session we will break into small groups to look at case studies to determine if the student has a learning disability or difficulties with language acquisition or if it is both. Interactive Google Slides, Google Docs, and Jamboard will be used to help participants communicate and build lessons using the strategies shared in this workshop. All participants are expected to contribute to the group discussions and use the documents and slides to interact and respond to the other participants.

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.

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.

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

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.

Book Study Structured Literacy for English Learners/Multilinguals: A Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Approach by Elsa Cardenas Hagan