Consulting

My workshops and courses have been designed for educators of students from early childhood through secondary levels. Each presents a balance of theory and practice through experiential activities and personal reflection. The workshops and courses are modified for the needs of the particular group being addressed. Handouts are provided.

• Classroom Assessment Techniques uses assessment to help students learn and to help students and teachers enhance their skills in self-assessment. While short answer and multiple choice tests are addressed, there is a particular focus on developing performance-based assessments with clear, appropriate, and easy-to-use rubrics that include student input. This course is required in master-of-education programs in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland.
• Differentiated Instruction shows what to do when students are not all the same. It provides tools including diagnosing, tiering, compacting, and assessing, in order to engage students with diverse learning styles and levels of comprehension and to maximize the likelihood that each learner will succeed
• Science for Every Learner: Brain-Compatible Paths to Scientific Literacy combines discovery learning or constructivist approaches with accelerated learning, multiple intelligences and cooperative learning to help students achieve National or local Science Standards. Appropriate performance rubrics and other alternative assessments are considered.
• Learn to Think provides techniques for optimal information processing, including critical and creative thinking, inquiry learning, and social and emotional intelligences. Mind Gym exercises to remove blocks to learning and thinking can be included. The course can also address prerequisites to effective thinking – an environment of safety and nourishment for the brain – food water, air, and exercise.
• Problem-based and Project Based Learning show how to prepare, inspire, guide, and assess students as they engage in real-world projects so that students can transfer and apply their learning in authentic ways.
• A Guide to Great Field Trips shows where to go and how to squeeze the most value from the experience. Our city and surrounding area have some of the best opportunities for field trips and real-world learning in the world! We also include field trips to other cities and countries, as well as field trips in the neighborhood, on the school grounds, in the school building, and even in the classroom.
• Balancing Constructivism with Direct Teaching–What the Brain Research Says
  Traditional educational approaches often skim across a domain, making learning a mile wide and an inch deep. Constructivism, where students discover concepts for themselves, enhances motivation and deep learning. However, critics complain that learning becomes an inch wide and a mile deep. Through hands-on activities, role-play and music, this workshop provides a format for meeting the Standards that balances discovery learning with exciting, emotionally-engaging approaches to direct teaching. It includes a discussion of the brain-research that validates this approach.
• Kinesthetic Learning provides scores of techniques for engaging all kinds of learners, particularly the students who only succeed when they move and do.
• Using the Multiple Intelligences gives participants experiences and tools to design aligned curricula based on Gardner’s model of the Multiple Intelligences. The goal is to ensure that educators provide learning opportunities that are deeply engaging for all kinds of learners and aligned with worthwhile learning goals. Using the Multiple Intelligences gives a rationale and means for integrating the arts in academic subjects.
• Creative Problem Solving provides students and teachers with ways to generate options for solving problems, along with the tools to pick the best options. The focus is on real-world applications. These divergent and convergent thinking tools can be used with performance tasks, authentic applications of subject matter, school-wide problems and decisions, as well as personal life issues.
• Mind Gym presents simple, powerful movements from the field of specialized kinesiology to remove stress from reading, writing, math, and public speaking right in the classroom. Through Mind Gym students and teachers are empowered to take charge of their own state of mind, enabling them to become calmer, more centered, and receptive to learning.
• Using Music to Enhance the Learning Environment shows musical ways to help students achieve a receptive physical, mental, and emotional state for learning, get along with each other better, solve problems, appreciate the past, and remember important information for life. Suggestions for appropriate music are included.
• Songs and Stories for Learning gives research and techniques for using two of the oldest and most powerful techniques for learning that have ever existed. Includes examples of songs and stories for specific goals and strategies for incorporating them into the school day.
• Developing Students’ EQ concentrates on strategies that help students enhance their emotional and social intelligence as they develop character. Many of these strategies can be integrated right into the required subject matter, rather than taught as separate subjects. Conflict resolution skills will also be emphasized.
• Cooperative Learning is supported by decades of research that shows when students develop the social skills to help each other learn, academic gains are outstanding. At the same time students learn the teamwork essential to later success.
• The Compassionate Classroom makes practical Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) approach to creating an emotionally safe, responsible, effective, and caring school community. Research shows that when compassion thrives, so does learning.