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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Fall 2019 Training
Youth Development 101: Ages and Stages
In order to effectively support and work with young people in after school spaces, we must understand their needs. During this session, participants will explore factors that affect how youth develop, discuss physical, cognitive, emotional and psychological changes and needs at different stages and identify practices for supporting positive youth development in their programs.
Facilitator: Tarilyn Little
Lesson Planning and Delivery
Lesson planning is foundational to good instruction. New staff and veterans alike may struggle with questions around what a quality lesson plan looks like. Join us in this session as we organize content, explore methods of lesson delivery and plan actual lessons together.
Facilitator: Kody Melancon
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: Jacques Noisette
Best Practices for Budget Management
Are you a Site Director or Site Supervisor who wants to take your financial management to the next level? If so, this half-day workshop is for you! Budgeting is essential to good program management. This session will provide an overview of how to build and use your program's annual fiscal-year budget as a critical tool for financial planning and monitoring. Participants will explore effective budgeting practices that will get key personnel involved and ensure that your budget reflects programmatic priorities. This training will review best budgeting techniques including “resource storming”, implementing periodic budgets and reviewing actual variance reports in order to maximize your program’s spending. Attendees will walk away with the tools needed to assess your organization’s effectiveness in its budgeting process and identify areas for improvement.
Facilitator: Joe Colon
Youth Services 101
In this half-day training, participants will learn about the YouthServices.net database management system used to collect enrollment/attendance data for internal/external review and re¬search 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
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: Kody Melancon
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: Jacques Noisette
Math Games
Inserting math practice into ELT programming is often a struggle. In this training, educators will review the ways that Math Games provide engaging entry points for children to practice strong mathematical thinking. During this training, educators will review the value of math games, best practices for incorporating math games into their instruction and play a variety of games that can be brought into their program. This half-day training is designed to support educators working with students in grades 6-8.
Facilitator: Dan Levitt
Creating a Literacy-Rich Environment in Afterschool
Afterschool is a powerful space for bringing meaningful literacy enrichment to children and youth. In this workshop, we will explore strategies and activities to support youth engagement and development across all areas of literacy including reading, writing, listening and speaking. We will also discuss how afterschool staff can infuse literacy enrichment into current clubs and/or activities. All participants will walk away with a plan of action and resources for implementation back at programs!
Facilitator: Tarilyn Little
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.
