Trainings for ExpandED Schools Partner Sites
ExpandED Schools provides engaging, effective professional development for schools and community organizations on the following topics:
- Program Quality Development
- Staff Fundamentals
- Social-Emotional Learning
- STEM
- Literacy
These trainings are intended for after-school program staff members — from front-line workers to supervisors of multiple ExpandED Schools programs serving elementary, middle and high schools. These workshops are offered at no charge to staff serving in our ExpandED Schools Partner Sites as a benefit of your involvement.
If your program is not currently an ExpandED Schools Partner Site, you can still access our training for your staff for a nominal per-person fee. Register below.
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Winter/Spring 2021 Training
Videoconference: Strategies for Building Background for Multilingual Learners (K-8)
Have your multilingual learners ever looked like they simply had no idea about what you were talking about? Come learn how you can make learning easier for your students. In this workshop, you will learn concepts of second language acquisition and strategies you can use to help build background for your students. You will receive a toolkit with strategies that you can use to build background whenever introducing new topics for your students. This workshop is designed for educators who serve multilingual learners and want to be better prepared to support their unique learning needs.
Facilitator: Adriana Oliveira
Videoconference: Family Engagement
Engaging families is a practice critical to the success of the students in your program! In this workshop, participants will learn strategies for meaningfully engaging families at their program site. Featured strategies will include creating a welcoming environment, building relationships with families, communicating with families through a family newsletter, and hosting family learning nights. Participants should expect to participate in a rich learning community and to leave with a variety of resources for increasing family engagement at their site.
Facilitator: Kaychell English and Anyela Duarte
Videoconference: Relationship Building with Youth
The number, consistency, and intensity of positive relationships in young people’s lives are linked with a range of positive academic, social, and emotional outcomes. This workshop will evaluate the factors that lead to and best practices for nurturing sustainable, positive relationships with students and explore how communication directly affects student behavior. Using the Search Institute’s Developmental Relationships framework, participants will explore strategies for building, sustaining, and repairing relationships. Attendees will also explore the skills and strategies that can help you better communicate and get through to your students. We will present tools and techniques to positively redirect negative behavior and will provide opportunities to practice reframing our language to be more impactful and effective.
Facilitator: Deb Taylor
Videoconference: Growth Mindset
The way in which we think about our own brains and learning can have a huge impact on our future success. When students and educators have a growth mindset, they understand that intelligence is malleable. Students focus on improvement instead of worrying about how smart they are. They work hard to develop their abilities. Individuals who have a growth mindset are shown to make significant growth, year after year, in any field when compared to their peers who have a fixed mindset. During this session, participants will understand the growth mindset and its benefits. Additionally, they’ll walk away with resources and practical strategies for encouraging a growth mindset among their students.
Facilitator: Daniel Levitt and Mark Herreros
Videoconference: Character Building through Social Justice
The expanded day provides the perfect opportunity for supporting young people in developing character traits that will allow them to thrive. This is particularly important when the students we have the pleasure of working with are faced with a number of injustices that are not often discussed during the school day. In this workshop, you will gain the tools to support students’ character building process by providing examples of the many trailblazers and movements that have led to a more just society. Through these examples and activities, students gain actionable steps on their own character-building process through a lens of identity and empowerment.
Facilitator: Naa- Shorme Aidoo
Videoconference: Harmony ExpandED Overview
In this webinar, participants will receive a comprehensive overview of the Harmony model. Harmony is a social-emotional learning program for Pre-K-6 grade students designed to foster communication, connection, and community both in and outside the classroom and develop boys and girls into compassionate and caring adults. Attendees will be introduced to fundamental implementation practices for quality SEL for elementary and middle school students.
Facilitator: Barbara Browning
Videoconference: Youth Services Refresher
In this webinar, participants will learn about the YouthServices.net database management system used to collect enrollment/attendance data for internal/external review and research purposes. Attendees will learn to utilize the system functions, manage and interpret the data to make programmatic decisions, and discover ways to accurately reflect program schedules. This training will ultimately prepare users with the necessary skills to navigate efficiently through the system and manage their program data effectively.
Facilitator: Mark Herreros and Anyela Duarte
Videoconference: CS Unplugged
In this session, participants will explore computer science using hands-on activities that do not require computers. Participants will learn to facilitate activities while introducing computational concepts and vocabulary relevant for leading lessons.
Facilitator: Steve Roberts
Videoconference: Working with Students with Special Needs
What do you do when you find out a child in your program has an IEP or a paraprofessional during the school day? Activities in this workshop will cover brain differences, Individualized Education Plans (IEP’s), and the types of disability classifications. We’ll also practice making accommodations together so you can best support a child with special needs in your program.
Facilitator: Tiffany Perry and Anyela Duarte
Videoconference: Understanding and Supporting Multilingual Learners in the Afterschool Space (K-8)
How can you support Multilingual Learners (ELLs) in your afterschool program? Come learn about who Multilingual Learners are and how to meet their needs. This workshop will demystify some ideas about them and deepen your knowledge on best-practices that can be used to support their learning. You will leave this workshop with ideas for differentiated strategies and a resource packet to get started. This workshop is designed for everyone that works with multilingual learners and strongly recommended for staff in supervisory positions interested in creating a culturally-responsive classroom.
Facilitator: Adriana Oliveria and Tarilyn Little
Videoconference: Behavior Management: Conflict Resolution and De-Escalation
Even with proactive and positive behavior management practices in place, conflict is bound to arise when working with youth. The ability to intervene in and resolve conflict effectively is critical to maintaining after school spaces that are physically, mentally and emotionally safe and empowering for youth participants. In this session, Youth Development Workers will explore the sources and stages of conflict cycles when working with youth, strategies for intervening in the cycle before it escalates and steps for de-escalation when a young person has reached a state of crisis. Youth Development Workers will also practice engaging youth in coaching conversations to foster problem-solving and self-regulation skills.
Facilitator: Tarilyn Little
Videoconference: CS 201- Diving Deeper with Computer Science
In this session, participants will take a deeper dive into CS activities by learning more advanced functions of Scratch. Attendees will also learn how to implement physical computing exercises by implementing MakeyMakey into their programming. (Participants should be comfortable with Scratch.)
Facilitator: Steve Roberts
