Expand Skills, Inspire Minds, Shape Futures
Gain Insights and Tools to Ignite Passion and Drive Student Success in Your Classroom
Unlock Your Learning Potential
Dive into the wealth of professional learning opportunities we offer. From ‘Building Thinking Classrooms’ that challenge conventional learning environments, to ‘Engaging in Argument from Evidence’ which sharpens critical thinking, our courses are designed to revolutionize the way you teach. ‘Science Inquiry and Sensemaking’ will transform your science lessons into hubs of discovery, while ‘Evidence-Based Specially Designed Instruction’ offers strategies for inclusive education. Each program is crafted to enhance your expertise, inviting you to discover innovative practices, learn from the best, and lead your students to success. Join us to shape the future of education.
Explore Our Spectrum of Learning Opportunities
Breaking the Code of Spelling and Vocabulary in the English Language
Research shows that nearly 90% of English words follow a predictable spelling pattern. Learn instructional strategies to support students in learning the spelling patterns in words and the morphological structure of the English language for better decoding, encoding(writing), and comprehension.
Practical Instructional Activities to Strengthen Phonemic Awareness and Phonics Instruction
Letter-sound knowledge and alphabet knowledge are the foundational skills of reading. Learn practical activities that support the development of phonemic awareness, sound-to-letter correspondence, and the orthographic mapping of words based on the brain-based reading research of developing readers.
Reading Strategies to Build Reading Comprehension
The goal of reading is comprehension of text. Learn practical research-based strategies to support students in monitoring and deepening reading comprehension. This session also explores the impact fluency, vocabulary development, and knowledge building has on developing comprehension.
Best Practices in the Science of Reading
What is the Science of Reading? This session provides an in-depth look into the body of reading research that supports best instructional practices in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Learn practical instructional strategies based on reading research that can be used in whole group and differentiated small group instruction.
Counseling Options for Educational Leaders
- Wellness
- Building trauma sensitive schools
- Trauma and Resilience
- Trauma informed supervision
- Teacher Retention
Counseling Sessions for teachers
- Creating a trauma sensitive classroom
- Trauma and Resilience
- Wellness
Sessions for School Counselors, School Counseling Coordinators/Directors
- Leadership Coaching
- College/Career Counseling
- Executive Functioning Skills
- School Climate Improvement
- Trauma 101
- Helping students feel safe, connected, and regulated
- Building a student mentoring program
- Wellness
Project Management
Project management is the art and science of doing what you’ve never done before. That’s why projects are so critical to an organization’s continuous improvement. Our innovative and experienced project management services are here to support you through each aspect of delivering exceptional programs and projects.
Evidence-Based Specially Designed Instruction (SDI)
This session builds an understanding of SDI and discusses evidence-based instructional strategies that educators can utilize to support students with a disability or difficulty at any grade. The strategies are targeted at improving learning outcomes for students with a formal school identification of a specific learning disability and at-risk students without a formal disability diagnosis who experience difficulty.
Literacy Across the Curriculum
No matter what content you teach, literacy should be incorporated into all areas of instruction. Incorporating literacy into science, social studies, and mathematics not only strengthens literacy skills, it strengthens student understanding of the overall content. In this session, we provide practical literacy strategies in reading and writing that can be effectively embedded into all content area lessons and across instructional units.
Science Inquiry and Sensemaking
Sensemaking is actively trying to figure out how the world works. Students do science and engineering through the science and engineering practices (SEPs).
Inquiry and Sensemaking provides teachers with practical strategies for using the phenomena and the SEPs to design a student-centered classroom. Inquiry and Sensemaking includes discourse, small groups/stations, constructing and using models, and interpreting and analyzing data. Inquiry and Sensemaking is a great kickstarter for a student-centered teaching and learning.
Explore Before Explain: Engaging Students in Active Science Learning
This hands-on session will unlock the power of inquiry-based learning in your science classroom. It will guide educators through the principles and practices of the “explore before explain” approach, emphasizing student-driven exploration and discovery as the foundation for conceptual understanding.
Participants will actively engage with strategies that allow students to engage with science and engineering practices, fostering a deeper connection with the subject matter. Through a series of interactive activities, you will learn how to create opportunities for students to observe, question, experiment, and collaborate, making sense of scientific phenomena before formal explanations are introduced.
By the end of this workshop, you will be equipped with practical tools and techniques to facilitate a classroom environment where students’ curiosity leads the way. Empower your students to construct their own knowledge, develop critical thinking skills, and build a solid scientific conceptual framework.
Effective (and Practical) Ways to Connect Science and Literacy
Learn practical strategies to connect science and literacy and how to use these simple strategies that busy teachers can successfully employ to increase critical thinking. The session is designed with busy teachers in mind, offering simple and time-efficient techniques that can be easily implemented to enhance critical thinking skills among students. The strategies include scaffolds that support strategies with a variety of learners.
Science Thinking Routines
Science Thinking Routines are structured activities that are used to create a learning community, increase student discussion, enhance instruction, and develop concepts and big ideas. These routines can be used to initiate new learning or continue learning by activating prior knowledge and focusing attention through teacher facilitation.
They help to build a classroom culture that values evidence and encourages students to explain and justify their thinking.
Science Thinking Routines will provide a fresh look at warm ups and engage your students in a more productive way.
Engaging in Argument from Evidence
Critical thinking skills are important in every discipline, at and beyond school. Engaging in Argument from Evidence provides students with an opportunity to students to be prepared to take in, synthesize, and act on new evidence to justify their thinking.
Engaging in Argument from Evidence highlights reasoning skills, which is another key component of critical thinking, involving the abilities to think logically, evaluate evidence, identify assumptions, and analyze arguments.
Engaging in Argument from Evidence provides teachers strategies to create student-centered opportunities to think critically.
Investigating the 5E Model
Investigating the 5E Model will equip teachers with an understanding and experience with this research-based model. Teachers and administrators will experience a model 5E lesson to experience the science and engineering practices (SEPs) and conceptual development using this research-based model.
Discourse and Questioning
How do we ensure our students are doing most of the thinking? Discourse and questioning strategies ensure we elicit the levels of student thinking that are aligned to the curriculum. We will engage and demonstrate teachers in these strategies using examples in your curriculum.
Join our content-focused professional learning, delving into the art of student discourse while embracing the educational 5 C’s:
Communication: Explore strategies to ignite vibrant discussions, fostering articulation of reasoning and perspectives.
Collaboration: Elevate your classroom by nurturing collaborative problem-solving, creating an environment where students learn from each other.
Critical Thinking: Hone analytical thinking skills as students engage in meaningful dialogue, deepening their understanding, comprehension, and analysis of concepts.
Creativity: Cultivate an environment where innovative ideas flourish through interactive discourse, sparking creativity in problem-solving.
Citizenship: Foster a community of engaged learners, where students contribute to respectful discourse that nurtures respect, empathy, and inclusive participation.
Small Groups and Stations
Elevate your teaching practice in our specialized professional learning session. Explore the power of stations and small groups to personalize instruction, boost student engagement, and cultivate communication and collaborative problem-solving. Unlock strategies for creating a dynamic, student-centered classroom that fosters deeper understanding and confidence.
Building Classroom Communities with Reasoning Routines
Explore how to cultivate a supportive and engaging learning environment by integrating effective reasoning routines that promote critical thinking and inclusive discussions. Instructional best practices will be modeled to help you deliver these effectively. Walk away with a plethora of routines to implement that foster deeper student connections and meaningful learning experiences.
Math Workshop
How can we ‘change the story’ for students who have unfinished learning and math anxiety? Math workshop allows teachers to differentiate and creates an environment where students feel less anxious, take risks, and engage in discourse. Let’s explore how moving to a workshop model is best for everyone by changing what math classrooms look like.
Empowering Learning through Performance Tasks
Move away from multiple choice and bring balanced assessment into your classroom! Performance tasks are an effective instructional tool to get insight into what students really know. We will discuss how to deliver the Task and Share routine using the 5 Practices for Orchestrating a Math Discussion. In doing so, your students have opportunities to engage in a task promoting critical thinking, problem solving, communication, reasoning, connections, and representations.
Standards Revisions and Implementation Training
Change is hard! We are dedicated to helping teachers adjust to changes in content standards by having in-depth discussions about the standards, developing instructional resources that are aligned, and discussing strategies for implementing them into classroom instruction.
Instructional Best Practices & Content Alignment
Successful teaching and learning begins with the alignment of the Written, Taught, and Tested curriculum. We provide services that build the capacity of your teachers, schools, and district by supporting the use of effective, research-based instructional practices to engage and motivate all learners. Whether it is curriculum design, pedagogy, or instructional best practices, we tailor our professional development to meet your specific needs and goals.
Building Thinking Classrooms
The goal of thinking classrooms is to build engaged students that are willing to think about any task. As Peter Liljedahl says, thinking is a necessary precursor to learning, and if students are not thinking, they are not learning. Let’s explore the 14 teaching practices for enhancing learning and start implementing them tomorrow!
Increasing Student Engagement in Order to Impact Student Achievement
What can we do to foster positive student engagement in the classroom? We will model proven strategies that teachers and school leaders can implement to enhance student motivation and achievement.
I contacted Skip Tyler and CTLG because as a new supervisor of mathematics I felt that it was a prime time to bring our teachers back together for in-person professional development. I wanted to re-empower our teachers in using reasoning routines for number sense development, developing station/center learning experiences for our students, enhancing teacher’s use of small group instruction, and revitalizing the math workshop model in our K-8 classrooms. Skip met with me several times and helped cater and organize two days of professional development based on these ideas for our elementary and secondary teachers of mathematics. Our teachers left feeling empowered and reenergized for the start of this school year. Principals have provided feedback about seeing all of these areas being incorporated into more classrooms in just the first nine weeks of school. We are highly anticipating Skip’s return for a follow up professional development session with our teachers in the upcoming summer.
