Do you ever feel like you are lost in space in your own classroom, looking for evidence of intelligent life? Workshop participants explore their current practices in the classroom that encourage critical thinking skills. After watching videos of and participating in hands-on examples of critical thinking exercises, workshop participants create their own exercises to ensure higher-level critical thinking among their students.

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

• Clarify the meaning of critical thinking in higher education and employment environments, including the most recent research about employers’ desire for graduates who possess critical thinking skills.
• Evaluate teaching “scenes” from a selection of film clips and identify common mistakes teachers make when trying to elicit critical thinking responses from students.
• Review and apply the “Seven Valuable Intellectual Traits” identified by the Foundation for Critical Thinking.
• Practice strategies that indicate evidence of critical thinking in the classroom and in assignments.
• Observe and use Discussion Question Requirements, Diversity Day, Daily Exit Cards, the One-Minute Paper, the Interview Assignment, Annotation Station, and Question Fishbowl.

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.

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 part of the workshop, 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.

Participants continue to explore multiple pathways and develop strategies using the same sample lesson. By the end of this part of the workshop, 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.

Before

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

During

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

After

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

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!