Personalized Coaching and Workshops

Anticipating difficult conversations with parents can be stressful and even lead to avoidance. In this workshop, learn how to prepare for potentially difficult conversations with parents and develop habits of mind and language for engaging in those interactions. We will share approaches, utilize case scenarios, and invite participants to role-play as they reflect on previous experiences and anticipate future exchanges. 

Students’ work can yield productive insights about their strengths and areas of struggle – if we know what to look for. Students’ strengths and vulnerabilities in language, neuromotor function, and attention are just a few examples of what we can discover by looking at student work in tandem with our observations of the students themselves. Using real examples, we will analyze work that students have produced to discover aspects of their neurodevelopment and content-specific skills that can then inform our practice moving forward. 

Every lesson makes demands on students in a myriad of ways. When we understand these, we can anticipate potential obstacles to learning and preempt those by embedding support within our teaching. Explore the various ways that lessons demand skills, content information, and neurodevelopmental strengths, so that you can begin evaluating and scaffolding your own lessons.

For students who struggle socially, school can be especially trying. Classroom teachers have up-close exposure to their students’ social interactions and have the capacity to develop empathy and foster growth in this realm. In this workshop, we will delve into Social Cognition in its various facets, so that participants can learn how to identify challenges and ways they can help students struggling in this area.

Temperament plays an important role in learning, socialization, and teacher-student fit. Learn about the nine temperamental traits and how they manifest in and out of the classroom. Understanding our own temperaments and those of our students can help us respect individual personalities while supporting individual needs.

Did you ever wonder about a student who struggles in math or has a hard time with Rashi script? Or the one with strong higher-order thinking who has difficulty with organization in writing? Spatial ordering and temporal-sequential ordering are integral to teaching and learning in every discipline. This workshop offers a deep dive into these systems and then asks the participants to consider how they manifest in their own subjects, classrooms, and teaching styles. We also focus on relatively easy strategies for supporting students whose ordering strengths do not match the demands of the classroom.

Higher-order cognition is a critical component of learning, and it plays a central role across all subject areas and grades. It is also integral in what may seem like simple activities in the classroom and on the playground. This workshop utilizes experiential learning to facilitate understanding of higher-order cognition in various academic and “fun” forms. It then asks participants to consider how their teaching encourages this type of thinking and how they can support students who need scaffolding in this area. 

How many times have we heard or said “She just doesn’t pay attention”? Attention is a multifaceted area of neurodevelopment that often gets oversimplified into a single diagnosis or all-encompassing label. Once teachers understand the components of attention, they can look for patterns in order to identify the particular areas that are challenging for their students. Strategies for helping those students and harnessing their strengths are also a component of this workshop. 

Assessments can be valuable parts of the learning process, not only mechanisms for evaluation. Learn how to conceptualize and create assessments that foster critical thinking, help students remember information, and encourage their awareness about their own learning strengths and potential. This can be applied across subject areas, and practice time is incorporated within the workshop.