Boutique Offerings

In this interactive workshop, you’ll be empowered with: an understanding of anxiety and executive function practical language to talk about anxiety and executive function productive responses to decrease anxiety and build executive function, particularly how to improve organization, transitions, routines, self-monitoring, self-regulating and mental flexibility—all without sacrificing too much instructional time. Learn how to help your students, particularly those with anxiety, ADHD or learning challenges, become less stressed and more efficient, autonomous and productive.

Do your students find it challenging to get started on a writing task? Do they have difficulty with stamina, effort, and self-regulation, or find it hard to remember the directions and steps of an assignment? If so, anxiety and underdeveloped executive function may be interfering with their productivity and motivation.

Executive function—which includes goal setting, planning, organizing, prioritizing, mental flexibility, self-monitoring, and thinking critically—is essential to writing. When highly stressed or anxious, the executive function goes offline, blocking students’ abilities to focus on the task, remember what they need to do, and be flexible in their thinking.

Teachers know that they should incorporate culture, history, and language authentically in order to create a culturally sustaining classroom that promotes the success of all their students, but knowing what to teach and how can be difficult when the culture or language is not one's own. 

To ensure that any teacher, regardless of personal background or language of instruction, can have the knowledge necessary to foster biculturalism and critical consciousness in their students, this workshop will cover:

• Latin American history and the language history of Spanish
• Similarities and differences between Caribbean, Central American, and South American cultures
• Key concepts of English and Spanish grammar

Content will be connected to different academic standards, giving participants tangible examples to use in their everyday practice.

In this 90-minute workshop, participants will first learn about bias in our classrooms and that there are multiple paths for addressing and disrupting bias. Leaders and teachers will review and analyze David Sadker’s 7 Forms of Bias and textual examples for each. Participants will then actively participate in informed decision-making around their own curricular texts and consider alternative approaches in mitigating detected bias.

ARC is currently used in a number of dual language programs. In order for these programs to incorporate SFL writing into the curriculum, they need guidance on how to distribute content across languages in order to make room for writing instruction and how to carry out the assessments for writing and content. They also need support with the distribution of writing lessons in connection with the curricular content and in coordinating the writing projects with the content provided by ARC.

Currently, Maria Brisk is working with the Umana school to create units where SFL writing is incorporated into the ARC curriculum at the elementary and middle school levels. These units will be tested in the last weeks of the school year.

Coaches and mentors in education settings are in increased demand. More and more schools and districts are recognizing the value of teacher coaching and mentoring as a pathway for improved student outcomes. Despite this growing recognition of the value of job-embedded professional development, there are limited opportunities to prepare coaches and mentors to perform their duties.

This 2 part series serves as an introduction to instructional coaching. Taking a coach-the-coach approach, the series addresses the coach's role and gets participants to think of how they are leaders, influencers, and agents of change. Participants are grounded in research-based approaches that promote best practices and continuous improvement. The workshop introduces participants to the key levers and processes required to support the development of coaches. It is ideal for those who are new to coaching or aspiring to be instructional coaches.

As educators, it is often difficult to plan ELA units while balancing the scope and sequence of the curriculum, ensuring best practices, and staying grounded in the work of equity and excellence. This workshop will be grounded in Gholdy Muhammad’s research, which has focused on the “social and historical foundations of literacy in Black communities and how literacy development can be reconceptualized in classrooms today."

Using Muhammad’s text, Cultivating Genius, participants will look at the big picture of a unit, analyzing all of the tenets of the equity framework. This work will include unpacking the framework through discussion of practices that will ensure teaching and learning that disrupts racism, sexism and other oppression.

Math Routines that Promote Mathematical Fluency and Access for All includes six mini-sessions: an introduction, 4 separate routine workshops, and a closing session. Participants will engage with math content through the different instructional routines.

After engaging with the routine, participants will learn the rationale and research behind each one. Knowing why the routine is structured the way it is helps educators make instructional decisions while planning in the moment with students and after leading the routine. The workshop will also offer some time for participants to explore materials and plan upcoming routines.

Creating a school culture that is authentically culturally responsive requires a leader to think through a culturally responsive, equitable, and critical consciousness lens. This two-part course supports anyone who leads in a formal education setting and who wishes to better serve students who have been historically underserved or marginalized.

Participants will begin to shape and articulate their vision for a culturally responsive school and explore the frameworks and actions that will support them in authentically transforming their school spaces.