TCM offers a wide range of popular, relevant topics to jump start your professional learning. In addition to the offered topics, we offer fully customizable PD.
We'll help you design the perfect Professional Learning Plan.
Improving Student Writing Skills: Learn how to develop skilled and enthusiastic writers.
Writing has many purposes – to think, to prove, to learn, and to summarize. In today’s alternate learning environments, writing offers opportunities to gauge students’ conceptual understanding across content areas.
That’s why learning effective strategies for teaching writing should be an integral part of any professional toolbox.
This workshop will provide:
Best practices in writing instruction and the research supporting short writing assignments
Discover innovative ways to help students master the four main categories of writing including Informative/Explanation, Opinion/Argument, Narrative Fiction, and Narrative Nonfiction
A guide for creating and assessing short writing activities including incorporating instructional mini-lessons and designing rubrics
Strategies for applying learning to tomorrow’s classrooms, wherever those classrooms might be
Effective Implementation of a Balanced Literacy Framework
Explore the elements that comprise a comprehensive balanced literacy classroom from phonics and word study to shared, guided and modeled reading to writing.
Educators will learn how to:
Marry guided reading instruction with increased text complexity
Develop close reading strategies during Guided Reading, Modeled Reading, and Shared Reading instruction
Learn high-yield instructional strategies for implementing all components
Formulate balanced assessments that align to each component
Foster the reciprocal connection between reading and writing instruction
Literacy, Language, and Learning: Effective Strategies for Early Childhood Instruction
Learn to meet the unique needs of early childhood students, including their ability levels and interests, with engaging activities and strategies for utilizing thematic curricula.
Educators in this workshop will:
Learn developmentally-appropriate instructional strategies to move students forward in their academic and social growth.
Create daily lesson plans and thematic units using tools and structures to make this task easier.
Discover the impact that a rich oral language experience can have on English language learners.
Help students detect and manipulate language through songs, role-playing, and other engaging activities that support the development of early literacy skills
Learn the important components needed to develop structure and a positive environment and explore the best practices to create a sense of order, continuity, and routine
Get the Picture: Visual Literacy in Content-Area Instruction
Literacy learning is no longer limited to reading, writing, listening, and speaking; we must include visual communication and expand our definition of what it means to be literate.
This professional development workshop will provide teachers with new and engaging strategies to help students learn how to analyze and create through visual communication.
Based on practical research, this workshop offers concrete tools and techniques and a wide range of suggested visual texts to effectively use in the classroom from primary sources, to digital media and the visual-heavy world of 21st century learning.
Attendees will:
Examine ways to incorporate visual texts into instruction, including what visual literacy lessons look like in the primary grades
Practice instructional strategies and develop sample lessons for teaching students to read visual texts for understanding
Practice and discover instructional strategies for guiding students to visually illustrate understanding, specifically targeting support for improving reading and writing
Guided Math: A Proven Framework to Reach All Math Learners
In this workshop you will learn how to provide an innovative approach to mathematics instruction that fosters mathematical thinking and conceptual understanding.
Explore the benefits of a variety of research-based instructional models, including mathematical discourse, whole-group and small-group lessons, math warm-ups, workshops, and student conferencing. Discover how to use assessment throughout this model so that true data-driven instruction can take place.
Each attendee will learn:
The importance of student choice in selecting tasks that are purposefully planned to accelerate student achievement and meet the mathematical needs of students
How to accurately deliver a whole group lesson that is immediately followed up by intensive small group instructional activities using a menu of instruction and assessment options
Practical classroom management techniques that set up any Guided Math classroom for success
Facilitate students’ exploration of science and STEAM concepts with sound strategies for engaging, exploring, evaluating, elaborating, and explaining science concepts with real-world connections.
In this workshop, educators will:
Engage students in the scientific process and inspire curiosity and perseverance while developing crucial critical thinking and problem-solving skills
Captivate students’ minds with thought-provoking, open-ended discussions and projects.
Cultivate content-area literacy by using related texts and writing prompts to help them explain their thinking
Organize lessons and projects that provide interesting, content-based, grade-appropriate science activities that bring science to life for students
Defines concretely what is cultural responsiveness and why it is necessary in our schools today.
Builds knowledge and creates the context for addressing the needs of underserved students in terms of their sociopolitical and sociolinguistic relativity in the American educational system
Promotes the focus on effective instructional strategies utilization in a way that validates and affirms underserved students across content areas and grade levels
Keynote presentations and webinars are facilitated in partnership with Dr. Sharroky Hollie
Strategies for Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Classroom Practices
Introduces culturally responsive teaching and explains why it is necessary in our schools today
Places emphasis on the skillset of CLR with a focus on the use of culturally responsive classroom management strategies and culturally responsive texts to validate, affirm, build and bridge students across all content areas and grade levels
Strategies for Creating Social and Emotional Learning Environments
If there is one thing teachers can agree on, it's that social and emotional learning (SEL) is a hot topic in education. But beyond this, questions still remain. What exactly is SEL? How should it be taught? What does it look like in the classroom? How do we teach students non-academic life skills?
This session will help to define SEL and dig into the real work of how to incorporate SEL in K-12 schools. Strategies learned will help to addresses students' different interests and varied learning styles to help teachers recognize alternative opportunities for engaging students in activities that support SEL.
Explore the rationale and research behind social and emotional learning
Examine the classroom strategies needed to identify and regulate emotions effectively
Develop plans of action to help students make responsible decisions in and out of the classroom
Reflect on how the strategies presented in the session align to content-area topics and positive behavior support systems
Practice “Mindful Moments” that encourage understanding, learning, and reflection
Participate in professional development that focuses on the “how” of differentiation, supported by current theory and pedagogy.
Learn strategies for differentiating by content, process, and product and understand the role each plays in differentiated instruction
Develop new and effective ways of teaching English language learners, gifted students, special education students, general education students, and at-risk students
Experience model lessons using the strategies and apply the strategies in structured planning tasks
