Tag: Fall 2026

Executive function skills play a critical role in helping children manage responsibilities, regulate emotions, and navigate daily challenges with greater independence. In this session, caregivers will explore practical strategies to strengthen key executive function skills, including time management, planning, organization, task initiation, and self-monitoring. Participants will learn how to establish routines, use visual supports, and implement goal-setting practices that help children manage tasks, transitions, and expectations at home. The session will also focus on developing emotional regulation and coping skills to support positive behavior and resilience. Caregivers will leave with actionable strategies they can immediately use to foster independence, self-regulation, and success at home and in school. 

 Key Learning Objectives:  

• Understand the connection between time management, self-regulation, and other essential executive function skills that support student success.  

• Learn practical routines, visual supports, and home-based strategies that help children plan, organize, initiate tasks, and manage transitions more independently.  

• Explore goal-setting and progress-monitoring techniques that enable children to break tasks into manageable steps and build ownership of their learning.  

• Identify effective strategies for supporting emotional regulation, coping skills, and positive behavior management at home.  

• Examine appropriate use of digital tools and technology resources that can help children develop executive function skills, manage responsibilities, and build independence. 

Date: Wednesday, Dec. 2, 1:00- 2:00 pm EST
Instructor: Jackie Britt- Friedman, PsyD
Grades: Grades 2–8
Location: Virtual
Price: $60
Credentials: 1 Approved CTLE hours 

This workshop is built around one idea: the teacher as an agent. Before any AI tool goes in front of a student, the educator sits in the designer’s seat, directing the tool and deciding what is worth keeping. This is not a general AI overview. Every segment is a build, and participants bring one real assignment and one content-area text to work with throughout the day. 

The focus is on the three things teachers ask for most: creating classroom resources, streamlining grading and feedback, and supporting students who need scaffolds to show what they know. Participants build with Claude for Teachers, Brisk, and Gemini with Gems, then get oriented on Diffit, Snorkl, and SchoolAI for leveling texts, hearing student reasoning, and guiding supported practice. By the end, participants leave with materials ready to use the next morning, plus a curated resource bank for continued learning. 

 Key Learning Objectives: 

• Direct AI as a design partner to create rigorous, standards-aligned lessons and student-facing resources from your own curriculum. 

• Prompt Claude to generate interactive, web-based games and activities that run in the chat window, with no coding knowledge: math mini-games, vocabulary match-ups, science simulations, interactive timelines, grammar and fact detectives, and role-play interviews. 

• Generate and audit assessment materials, rubrics, targeted feedback, and leveled questions, keeping professional judgment at the center. 

• Use and adapt reusable Gemini Gems (via edugems.ai) for scaffolds, differentiation, and grading routines you will reach for weekly. 

• Know when to reach for Diffit, Snorkl, and SchoolAI to level texts, hear student reasoning, and guide supported practice. 

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 4:30-6:30 pm EST
Instructor: Joan McGettigan, Ed.D
Grades: K-12
Price: $120
Credentials: 2 Approved CTLE Hours 

Engaging math games can transform K–5 classrooms by building number sense, strengthening problem-solving skills, and fostering mathematical thinking. Educators will explore how to use high‑impact games to reinforce essential concepts across elementary grades. Experience games firsthand and discover how to use playful practice to promote reasoning, fluency, and student discourse. Leave with a toolkit of ready‑to‑use games that make math meaningful, active, and fun.  

  Key Learning Objectives:   

• Understand how math games support number sense, fluency, and conceptual understanding.   

• Gain strategies for selecting and adapting games to meet diverse student needs and skill levels.   

• Gain practical routines for integrating games into whole group, small group, and independent practice.   

• Explore techniques for using games to promote student discourse, reasoning, and collaboration.   

• Obtain a collection of easy-to-implement games for your classroom 

Date: Tuesday, Oct. 27, 4:30- 6:00 pm EST
Presenter: Samantha Downey
Grade: K- 5 
Location: Virtual 
Price: $90
Credentials: 1.5 Approved CTLE Hours

Effective reading instruction depends on understanding what students know, where they are struggling, and how to respond. In this interactive session, participants explore the role of progress monitoring in daily reading instruction and learn how to use efficient, research-based assessment tools to measure word reading, language, and reading comprehension. Through the analysis of student case studies, educators examine formative and summative assessment data, identify instructional implications, and determine appropriate next steps for learning. Participants leave with a practical teacher toolbox of assessment-informed instructional strategies that can be applied across a variety of reading programs and curricula to support student growth and achievement. 

 Key Learning Objectives: 

• Understand the purpose of progress monitoring in the context of daily reading instruction through materials that align with targeted outcomes  

• Learn the most effective and feasible tools for word reading progress monitoring  

• Identify the distinct roles of language and reading comprehension measures  

• Engage with student case studies to collaboratively analyze formative and summative assessment results and determine implications for instruction  

• Take away a “teacher toolbox” filled with instructional strategies that align with progress monitoring data, ready to be implemented across various curricula 

Date: Thursday, Dec. 3, 4:30-6:30 pm EST
Instructor: Alison Leveque, PhD and Dana Carr-Ford, MA, MEd
Grades: K-8
Location: Virtual
Price: $120
Credentials: 2 Approved CTLE Hours

Make learning fun! Imagine phonics drills replaced by games your students actually ask to play again. This course shows you how to make that shift, grounding playful, competitive activities in the Science of Reading so every round builds real reading fluency, executive function, and motivation. Participants leave with a full toolkit of hands-on activities, group games, and curated virtual resources ready for Monday morning. 

 Key Learning Objectives: 

• Facilitate collaborative and competitive educational games—including Magic Square, Suffix Extravaganza, and Homophone Roller—to reinforce complex language patterns. 

• Utilize virtual platforms and generators such as Wordwall, digital interactive whiteboards, and custom puzzle makers to differentiate and scale literacy games. 

• Align classroom game implementation with the Word Recognition and Language Comprehension strands of Scarborough’s Reading Rope and explicit instruction models. 

• Create structured vocabulary lessons that explicitly teach letter-sound correspondence, Greek and Latin roots, affixes, and word-building matrices to enhance advanced decoding and spelling. 

Date: Tuesday, Dec. 1, 4:30 PM -6:00 pm EST
Instructor: Kinjal Nicholls, MA
Grades: Prek-3
Location: Virtual
Price: $90
Credentials: 1.5 Approved CTLE Hours 

Graphic organizers are powerful tools that help students organize ideas, uncover connections, and tackle complex concepts with confidence. In this workshop, participants learn how to use visual frameworks, such as story maps, vocabulary grids, concept webs, and semantic maps, to make abstract ideas concrete and accessible. Through hands-on activities, discover practical techniques to scaffold instruction, boost engagement, and foster independent thinking. Leave with a ready-to-use collection of graphic organizers. 

Key Learning Objectives    

• Understand the role of graphic organizers in literacy to support comprehension, critical thinking, and writing development.  

• Learn how to use story maps, vocabulary frameworks, concept and semantic maps to enhance student learning. 

• Discover practical strategies for using these tools to implement in all aspects of your literacy lesson: before, during and after instruction.  

• Gain techniques to make abstract concepts accessible and promote independence for diverse learners. 

Date: Thursday, Oct. 22, 4:30 pm- 6:00 pm. EST  
Instructors: Alison Leveque, PhD and Alicia Kempin, MS  
Grades: 2 – 8 
Price: $  90   
Credentials: 1.5 Approved CTLE Hours 

Close reading is a powerful instructional approach that helps students engage deeply with complex texts, develop critical thinking skills, and support their ideas with evidence. In this interactive workshop, participants will explore the what, why, when, and how effective close reading instruction through research-based practices and live modeling. Through hands-on practice and disciplinary examples, attendees will leave with a practical toolkit for planning and implementing close reading experiences that strengthen comprehension, analysis, and evidence-based thinking across content areas. 

Key Learning Objectives: 

• Understand the purpose and essential components of close reading and how it supports comprehension, critical thinking, and evidence-based analysis. 

• Learn how to select appropriate complex texts, anticipate knowledge demands, and plan scaffolds that maintain rigor while supporting student success. 

• Develop effective close reading lessons using text-dependent questions, purposeful annotation strategies, and formative assessment practices. 

• Apply close reading techniques across disciplines and leave with a toolkit of classroom-ready strategies to deepen student engagement and understanding of complex texts. 

Date: Monday, Nov. 16; 4:30- 6:30 pm EST
Instructor: Dana Carr-Ford, MA, MEd
Grades:  3-8
Location: Virtual
Price: $120
Credentials: 2 CTLE credits

This session helps educators translate research into engaging, print-based classroom practices — connecting sounds to print through game-based activities for early reading approaches and developmentally appropriate approaches to building motor skills essential for early writing. Leave with a fully planned, print-based literacy activity that integrates phonological awareness, early reading, and writing, ready for immediate classroom implementation. 

 Key Learning Objectives 

• Strengthen early foundational skills instruction by implementing routines that build sound–spelling knowledge, including letter identification. 

• Apply phonemic awareness skills to print-based activities that support early reading development.  

• Learn and implement early reading strategies that support decoding and meaning-making. 

• Develop and practice instructional approaches that support early writing skills.   

• Design integrated literacy activities that connect reading, writing, and play, including planning a print-based lesson that incorporates phonological awareness, early reading, and writing. 

Date: Wednesday, Oct. 21, 4:30 – 6:30 pm EST
Instructor: Dana Carr-Ford, MA, MEd
Grades: PreK-2
Location: Virtual
Price: $ 120
Credentials: 2 Approved CTLE Hours

Quick-writes are short responses to structured prompts that can be used in all content-area classes at any point during a learning opportunity. Grounded in the reading-writing connection, this workshop explores how structured quick-writes support long-term retention and recall, progressive skill development, and fluency in thinking and writing. Drawing on research showing that sentence-level instruction leads to better, faster sentence construction, reduces cognitive load, and ultimately frees up resources for idea generation and organization.  Participants will learn to design writing tasks that build composition fluency and leave with ready-to-use strategies and templates that are adaptable to any subject or grade level. 

 Key Learning Objectives:  

• Understand and articulate the reading-writing connection and how it encourages knowledge through the discovery of new ideas.  

• Apply sentence-level writing instruction within a contextualized skill framework so students can see how complex sentences are used in relation to real academic tasks across subjects such as science, social studies, math, and the arts.  

• Design and implement structured quick-write for use as Do-Nows, guided practice, exit tickets, and formative assessments.  

• Use the Sentence Doctor’s three-step protocol to help students diagnose sentence-level problems, choose a treatment, and revise their writing, framing revision as problem-solving rather than criticism.  

• Leverage quick-writes as formative assessment tools that increase student progress by focusing on daily learning, clear misunderstandings, create rigor, and improve motivation and engagement. 

Date: Monday, Nov. 9, 4:30 PM-6:00 pm EST
Instructor: Betsy MacDermott- Duffy, MsEd
Grades: 3-8
Location: Virtual
Price: $90
Credentials: 1.5 Approved CTLE Hours

For struggling readers, longer words pose a significant challenge. Morphology instruction addresses this by building connections between words, supporting spelling, word recognition, comprehension, and vocabulary development at the word, sentence, and passage level. It’s also embedded in most content-area knowledge, making it a valuable tool across subjects. Participants will explore the research behind this approach and leave with practical, classroom-ready techniques for teaching it. 

Key Learning Objectives: 

• Define morphology as the study of the structure of words and explain how a morpheme functions as the smallest unit of meaning.  

• Distinguish between free morphemes (which can stand alone) and bound morphemes (which require a partner), and identify subcategories including prefixes, roots, and suffixes.  

• Differentiate between inflectional suffixes, which change tense or number without altering part of speech, and derivational suffixes, which change the meaning or part of speech of a base word.  

• Apply a grade-level morphology progression — beginning with inflectional suffixes in first grade and advancing through Greek and Latin roots in upper elementary — to sequence instruction appropriately for students.  

• Implement evidence-based morphology instruction using a structured sequence that includes reviewing previously taught affixes, introducing new content with student-friendly definitions and examples, and providing repeated exposures through word building and independent practice 

Date: Tuesday, Oct. 6, 4:30- 6:30 pm EST
Instructor: Kinjal Nicholls, MA
Grades: 3-8
Location: Virtual
Price: $120
Credentials: 2 Approved CTLE Hours