What is the relationship among literacy, metacognition, and STEM content knowledge, and what can we do about it?

Reading Apprenticeship is an instructional model that provides students with resources for approaching complex texts more confidently and strategically by engaging their instructors in a dynamic professional development process of making their thinking visible. This workshop engages STEM participants in metacognitive conversations centered on complex disciplinary texts that defeat many students. By discovering and reflecting on their own ways of unlocking STEM graphs, charts, illustrations, and problems, and more, workshop participants experience ways the Reading Apprenticeship approach helps students master core concepts. The workshop also helps instructors explicitly support academic literacy in their discipline. The facilitator shares artifacts of student work to demonstrate the efficacy of Reading Apprenticeship in STEM classrooms.

By the end of this workshop, participants know or are able to:

• Demonstrate their own reading and problem-solving processes and identify the disciplinary roots of those strategies.
• Connect the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework to other methods for establishing inquiry-based problem solving and active learning in STEM contexts.
• Experience and analyze the impact of several metacognitive routines in order to begin planning classroom applications.
• Analyze students' reading, talking, and problem solving skills with a focus on equity and on building on students' strengths rather than deficits.

Activities:

• Participate in text-based metacognitive routines, reflective pair and small group activities, a student video-case study, and classroom planning exercises.

During this two-part workshop, participants practice a series of exercises that can be used in remote teaching to engage students in interactive learning and exploration, even when they’re experiencing zoom fatigue. The workshop helps faculty build a sense of community within the classroom and emphasizes dialogic approaches to teaching the whole student and engaged learning. Participants gain hands-on experience practicing the exercises and leave the workshop ready to bring new approaches back to the classroom. Together with the facilitator, participants consider questions, additional remote teaching ideas, and key take-aways from the two sessions.

• During Module 1, participants practice and learn the name game, the five-minute poem, the culture box exercises, and other strategies.
• During Module 2, participants practice and learn the fishbowl exercise, the concentric circle exercise, in addition to other pedagogical approaches.

Have you ever wished you could change your students’ attitudes toward more positive engagement in their learning? YOU CAN! The secret rests in appreciating that all of us have a profound impact upon the emotional state of the students that we engage with every day. Whether interacting with individuals or groups, the neuroscience is clear: The affective domain powerfully impacts student cognition, persistence, motivation, and performance. During this multidimensional, highly-interactive, experiential, and fun workshop, participants explore ways to promote positive, enthusiastic, and engaged collaboration among students. They also explore how to encourage student learning in a manner that maximizes motivation, a sense of inclusion, and equity within the learning environment!

The workshop includes PowerPoint slides, stories, video, breakout room activities, and opportunities for full group discussions, all of which allow participants to interact with each other and process the information in a fast moving and fun format.

Module One:

• Demonstrate the impact of emotion on learning.
• Create positive learning outcomes associated with respectful and affirming relationships.
• Identify, nurture, and develop talents, rather than focus on weaknesses.

Module Two:

• Understand how positive emotions expand cognition and creativity.
• Understand how the affective domain profoundly influences persistence and practice compassionate correction.
• Apply premises behind the “Growth Mindset” and growing intelligence to our learning environments.

With the advent of new technologies that make teaching via live, online (a.k.a. synchronous) sessions easier and more accessible, learning how to facilitate these types of sessions is a critical skill for all educators. Most of us have attended an online class, presentation, or webinar that was just plain boring. During this workshop, participants do some major boredom-busting! Are you ready to create and facilitate sessions that leave your learners wanting more? Do you want to boost your online presence? Are you ready to harness the power of learning sciences to create humanized, fun, and positive online classes? This three-part workshop provides you with the skills needed to become an excellent online facilitator. Each module includes opportunities to connect with the facilitators and your peers to ask questions and complete a hands-on activities. This workshop will benefit anyone who wants to facilitate a great online learning experience, whether for a class, office hours, meetings, or conference presentations.

Module 1: Starting Strong

• The basics and definitions of online sessions.
• The pros and cons of synchronous and asynchronous approaches.
• Setting instructional goals.
• Selecting a platform.
• The critical first five minutes.
• Activating prior knowledge.
• Promoting your session.
• Security tips and avoiding intruders.

Module 2: Attention and Engagement

• The role of attention in learning.
• Getting and keeping learners' attention.
• Why you shouldn't require on-camera presence.
• Teaching trauma-aware sessions.
• Developing storytelling skills.
• Humanizing online learning.
• Slide design strategies.
• Accessibility best practices.

Module 3: Creating a Detailed Action Plan for Live, Online Session Success

• How will you know they learned? Creating an assessment plan.
• Activating the power of recall using a KWL activity.
• Using Google Jamboard and Google Docs.
• Avoiding common online facilitating mistakes.
• Time management of your session.
• Managing presentation fears.
• Troubleshooting tech issues.
• Creating and sharing your action plan.

Are you experiencing trouble concentrating? Are you struggling to regulate your emotions or experiencing sleep disturbances? These behaviors are normal reactions to high stress and trauma. Unfortunately, it’s easy for your brain to form pathways in response to anxiety, stress, and trauma. The more these pathways fire, the more likely they are to fire again and become “hardwired.” It’s important to rewire these pathways into feelings of calmness, resilience, and happiness.

Anxiety, stress, and trauma can damage your health and lead to long-term mental disorders such as depression. They also inhibit higher-order executive functions, while strongly activating the emotional centers. This makes it harder to remember, pay attention, think critically, plan, organize, and control emotions. Anxiety, stress, and trauma can affect family and home life, resulting in higher rates of substance abuse and domestic and health issues. Unfortunately, your anxiety, stress, and trauma are also contagious to students, and can impair their learning.

During this two-part workshop, participants learn the science behind how stress affects them and actions that can be taken to effectively address it.

• In Module 1, participants learn why their brain feels foggy and why they aren’t performing optimally. They also learn about two nervous systems: fight/flight and rest/digest, as well as how to switch their physiology into the calming nervous system. Participants acquire recovering strategies—including how to calm down quickly—and practices they can use to inhibit the fight/flight response that impairs mental and physical health.

• In Module 2, participants focus on renewing and rewiring. It isn’t enough to stop stress every time it occurs; you must learn to stop it from occurring in the first place. Participants learn lifestyle practices that renew the mind, brain, and body, and reduce feelings of high stress. Participants also learn about the process of burnout and where and how they can stop it. The module concludes with information about post-traumatic growth, so that when these difficult times are over, participants remain as mentally healthy as possible and are ready to resume a normal life.

Learn what science recommends when undergoing anxiety, stress, and trauma, and experience multiple ways to create calm, resilience, and happiness pathways that work specifically for you!

This workshop provides participants with specific tools they can use to teach critical-thinking skills in an online environment. An emphasis is placed on using the tools in Humanities and Social Sciences classes to improve students’ reading and writing skills.

Learning Outcomes/Objectives

1. Understand the fundamentals of critical-thinking skills.
2. Learn how to apply precise pedagogical methods that help students at any level improve their critical-thinking skills.
3. Learn how to apply precise pedagogical methods that improve students’ writing skills based on critical-thinking practices.
4. Learn how to create critical-thinking rubrics.

Activities

1. Participate in exercises that have been proven to enhance students’ critical thinking.
2. Create exercises that enhance and measure students’ critical-thinking skills.
3. Receive worksheets that have been shown to enhance students’ critical-thinking skills.

Participants can claim a digital badge and certificate upon completing the workshop and a post-workshop survey.

Mental health issues are becoming a crisis in education due to the effects of the pandemic. In addition to impairing physical health, anxiety, stress, and trauma make it harder for students to do higher-order thinking, focus, regulate emotions, get to class, budget time, and complete projects. But you can help! Workshop participants learn how to reduce these obstacles to achievement, whether they’re teaching in-person or online.

During this workshop, participants learn:

• The many ways anxiety, stress, and trauma affect academic performance.
• Research-based strategies for participants and students that:
• Reduce anxiety and stress in the moment,
• Help prevent physiological stress reactions,
• Increase coping self-efficacy and resilience,
• Create a brain/body/mindset for higher performance, and
• Create a trauma-sensitive learning environment.
• How to create an action plan for their students.

You have to set the table before you can eat. Participate in this engaging and interactive workshop and learn how to set the table to facilitate increased learning for their students.

It’s not what we know, it’s what we do that matters. This workshop series is designed to help educators reach diverse and struggling learners through a deeper understanding of underlying brain processes and science-based strategies. Huge gains in our understanding about how students learn best have been made in the last decade. However, many educators are still using outdated practices based on early brain research performed on rats. Multiple underlying brain pathways can be developed for more powerful learning. The facilitator models brain-compatible teaching practices in this energizing workshop series based on her book, Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain.

Module 1:
Participants arrive with a lesson in mind that they will develop and use as a model as they continue to enhance their instruction after completing this workshop. By the end of this module, participants know or are able to:

• Determine fact from fallacy about the brain and learning.
• Gain a deeper understand of how the brain learns.
• Understand the difference between thinking and real learning.
• Discover and apply the most significant factor to improve student learning.
• Explore multiple pathways involved in learning beyond visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.
• Acquire strategies for reaching diverse learners.
• Explore ways to apply multiple pathways in lesson design, presentation, assignments, and assessment.

Module 2:
Participants continue to explore multiple pathways and develop strategies using the same sample lesson used in Module 1. By the end of this module, participants know or are able to:

• Uncover the skill that predicts achievement and life outcomes and learn how to improve this skill to change the trajectory of a student’s learning path.
• Discover what triggers the reward/motivation pathway in the brain and how to implement it in lessons for maximum motivation and better retention.
• Learn why one pathway can either enhance learning or greatly inhibit learning, and the implications for classroom practices.
• Continue to explore multiple pathways involved in learning beyond visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.
• Continue to acquire strategies for reaching diverse learners.
• Continue to explore ways to apply multiple pathways in lesson design, presentation, assignments, and assessment.
• Complete a boilerplate ideal lesson that incorporates multiple pathways.
• Bring essential information back to colleagues.
• Complete an action plan of essential strategies to implement immediately.

Activities Overall

• Participate in an eye-opening quiz that explores existing beliefs and knowledge.
• For each pathway, engage with other participants in breakout rooms to share ideas about how to apply what was learned.
• Engage in a strategy scavenger hunt that provides an extensive toolbox that can be used over time.
• Participate in a scientific, interactive task in which participants experience an important concept that affects learning and test-taking.
• Apply multiple pathways to a lesson as a boilerplate for future lesson creation.

“Depleted.” “Just plain worn out.” As the COVID crisis caused a larger proportion of faculty members to teach remote courses than ever before, accounts of teacher fatigue and feeling overwhelmed are rife. Many professional development opportunities offer advice about the optimum use of technological tools, but most do not focus on ways to make online teaching less exhausting and more sustainable for teachers.

This workshop helps new and experienced online instructors understand the features of online practice that contribute to teacher burnout. Participants learn about specific, actionable strategies for reducing their workload without sacrificing student engagement and success.

Module 1: Before

• Emergence as a planning principle
• Reframing “content”
• Formative versus summative teaching

Module 2: During

• Managing personality
• Managing time and timeliness
• Managing community
• Managing feedback

Module 3: After

• Avoiding “Groundhog Day”: Invigorating the iterative
• Lasting lessons of emergence
• Practitioner troubleshooting and reflection