Are you seeking more ways to connect with your students? Use your own learning experience and identity development to leverage powerful learning for students. Participants explore adult learning theories, strengths-based approaches, and cultivating a sense of belonging in the classroom. This workshop models interactive learning in the remote environment with an emphasis on practice and application.

Setting the Stage

• Identify best practices when working with individual students.
• Recognize how your own identity impacts students.
• Leverage your own identity to positively impact students.

Getting to Work

• Foster a sense of belonging.
• Practice using strengths-based language and cultivating a sense of belonging in student interactions.

Taking it Forward

• Define elements of powerful learning experiences.
• Identify effective uses of student success theories.
• Create an action plan to meet students where they are.

Many incoming community college students need remediation in English courses. This can be time consuming and lead instructors to believe that there isn’t enough time in the term to teach important thinking skills. This workshop provides participants with specific tools for teaching critical thinking skills in pre-college English courses. The facilitator provides proven methodologies to enhance critical thinking skills while teaching basic English writing and comprehension. By the end of the workshop, participants can better prepare students for transfer-level English courses and increase their critical thinking skills.

Key topics covered during the workshop include: 

1. Critical thinking, remediation, and open-mindedness.
2. Critical thinking as a foundation for college skills.
3. Recognizing and using evidence.
1. What is a fact?
2. How is a fact different from an opinion?
3. How should facts guide opinions?
4. Emotions, opinions, and facts.
5. Exercises to identify facts.
4. The structure of an argument.
1. Introduction.
2. Basic writing exercises for students.
5. Argument creation/formation.
1. Levels of difficulty in argument creation.
6. Moving from arguments to writing.
1. Levels of difficulty in writing about arguments.
2. Argumentation and rough drafts.
7. Improving reading skills: Argument analysis.
1. Understanding an author’s argument.
2. Research, using multiple articles, and college-level writing.

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

This workshop provides participants with concrete tools for teaching rationality and critical thinking skills in Science and Mathematics courses. By the end of the workshop, participants are able to help students be more rational, deploy scientific and mathematical thinking more consistently, and recognize reasoning errors that can be corrected with scientific and mathematical reasoning. Instructors will understand rationality, the concept of mindware, detect gaps in mindware, andrecognize contaminated mindware.

Topics covered include:

• Brain structure and rational and irrational processes
• The concept of rationality
• The science of rationality
• Rationality and intelligence
• The concept of mindware (Gaps/Contamination)
• Probabilistic and statistical reasoning
• Scientific reasoning
• Experimental design
• Anti-scientific attitudes
• Conspiracy beliefs
• Fundamental computational biases
• Dysfunctional personal beliefs
• The Theory of Evolution
• The arrow of science and mythological worldviews
• Science, mathematics, and opinion

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

If you teach second language learners or a foreign language course and are looking for more effective, neuroscience-based strategies, this workshop is for you.

If a bilingual brain is a better brain (and it is!), then why are your language learners struggling? During this workshop, participants learn how the brain processes first and second languages and how the effort to become bilingual presents challenges until fluency is obtained. Learn the science of language learning and acquire instructional strategies based on that science that will energize your teaching and enhance your students’ learning.

This workshop covers the following topics:

1. How the brain learns and implications for language learning.
2. The most important factor in learning.
3. Why students have trouble pronouncing words.
4. The best way to present vocabulary.
5. The so-called “learning style” that applies to all learners.
6. How to design lessons according to the brain’s natural learning style.
7. What to do about the pathway that can impair learning regardless of your strategies.
8. A hidden impediment to learning that you may be creating.
9. How to tap into the Motivation Pathway.

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

• 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.

• 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 workshop 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!

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