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Instruction Professional Learning

  • BUILD effective relationships with students and help them see achievement as a reachable target
  • EFFECTIVELY TEACH diverse learners and make your content meaningful to every student
  • CONNECT data analysis to instructional practices
  • EXAMINE current practices and identify areas for improvement
  • DEVELOP strategies for remote teaching and virtual learning

Our On-Site Instruction Professional Learning

Establish innovative instructional strategies and teaching methods to effectively engage, empower, and motivate all students to succeed. Through our resources and services, we can help you develop and implement high-yield instructional strategies, tools, and best practices that lead to thriving classrooms for all learners—including differentiated instruction for special education students, English learners, and high-achieving individuals.

Your Goal

Building Your Skills

One‑Day Services

Keynote

A keynote supports and motivates your teachers to use best practices and new research related to classroom instruction. Solution Tree authors and associates are available and capable to customize their work for your needs.

Implementing Culturally Responsive Instruction

Support underserved students using culturally and linguistically responsive teaching strategies across content areas and grade levels.

  • Examine techniques for culturally and linguistically responsive teaching.
  • Access sample activities that can be used in classrooms immediately.

The Will to Lead, The Skill to Teach

Recommended Resource

The Literacy Triangle: High Impact Strategies to Accelerate Learning Using Reading, Discussing, and Writing

Today’s educators face any number of challenges when trying to satisfy their students’ literacy needs, including heated debates within the profession on best practices. Authors LeAnn Nickelsen and Melissa Dickson examine today’s literacy wars by combining educational neuroscience, the formative assessment process, and differentiation to create The Literacy Triangle, a three-sided model incorporating reading, discussing, and writing tools.

Compatible with nearly any reading curriculum and subject area, this session's user-friendly tools are designed to help transform students into active learners and independent thinkers. During this one-day workshop, you will get high-impact tools to help you:

  • Strengthen students’ comprehension of challenging texts (Reading)
  • Deepen student discourse (Discussing)
  • Build writing fluency across the curriculum (Writing)

Cultivating Student Agency and Independence

Educators in any grade level or content area will learn the essential tools needed to help students take ownership of their learning. Support your students as they build their metacognitive skills, motivation to learn, ability to regulate their emotions, and strategies for problem solving.

  • Learn 12 core metacognitive skills that will help students to become self-regulated autonomous learners.
  • Utilize targeted techniques to help your students develop the mindset and resilience they need to stay motivated.
  • Implement strategies for mindfulness and emotional regulation to help students reflect on behavior and make positive changes.
  • Discover ways to strengthen executive functioning skills and help students stay focused, organized, and on track.
  • Equip students with the problem-solving and creative thinking strategies they need to become more independent learners.

The Independent Learner

Recommended Resource

Shift Students to the Center of the Learning Experience

The transition from traditional teacher-led learning to student-centered blended learning can be daunting, so education leaders must have a clear vision. This impactful session will explore the why, how, and what of blended learning so leaders can communicate the value of this shift to teachers, students, and parents.

  • Why: Articulate the why, or value, of blended learning
  • How: Explore blended learning models to understand how they work and what teaching and learning will look like in classrooms
  • What: Identify “pillars of learning” and create a blended learning rubric that allows leaders and coaches to provide uniform feedback about progress toward teaching and learning goals

The Complete Guide to Blended Learning

Recommended Resource

Increase Retention, Application, and Transfer

Improve curriculum and student achievement by implementing the most effective and efficient instructional techniques. Educators in all grade levels and subjects will benefit from learning how learning occurs and how to use brain-based teaching techniques.

  • Learn how the brain changes and how learning occurs in response to instruction techniques.
  • Discover three desirable difficulties that decades of research have shown to be some of the most effective instructional techniques.
  • Create ways to implement the techniques in the classroom.

Stick the Learning

Recommended Resource

What STEM Can Do for Your Classroom

Geared toward all elementary school teachers, this session focuses on practical, research-based strategies and methods to implement STEM in the classroom. Get the information and context you need to make informed decisions about implementing STEM.

This workshop will help K–6 educators:

  • Define and provide examples of integrated STEM learning
  • Identify the importance of starting STEM early
  • Understand the benefits of approaching all students as STEM learners
  • Share ways to foster student engagement, collaboration, and choice in their STEM classrooms
  • Identify how to create a classroom environment where students view failure as a goal
  • Apply principles of guided discovery learning

What STEM Can Do For Your Classroom book cover

Recommended Resource

Refine and Energize Your MTSS: Improve Processes, Implementation, and Effectiveness

Examine and improve the multitiered system of supports in your school or district through The Road to Success With MTSS professional learning supports. Expert practitioners in the field will guide your teams through a critical review of your existing MTSS elements and design an updated plan that adds to and strengthens your systems of academic and behavioral supports that benefit all students.

This workshop will help K–6 educators:

  • Analyze the comprehensiveness and effectiveness of your current MTSS efforts in relation to the researched-based elements of MTSS and in relation to district and school data.
  • Identify gaps that need to be filled and elements that need to be refined.
  • Design and prepare to implement a new and improved plan that supports all educators and students.

The Road to Success With MTSS

Recommended Resource

Making the Most of Your Read Aloud: Planning Content-Area Read Alouds in K–8 Classrooms

With an extensive research basis highlighting their cognitive, socioemotional, linguistic, and even physiological benefits, read alouds are a key element in building students’ language comprehension. Yet, statistics show that 50–70 percent of elementary teachers do not devote intentional planning time for their read alouds (McCaffrey and Hisrich 2017). In this workshop, experts highlight effective read-alouds as complex instructional interactions that require thoughtful preparation and deep understanding of a text. Discover how to plan and implement read alouds optimized to support all learners.

This workshop will help K–8 teachers:

  • Embrace a daily read aloud as essential for all children—all grade levels, content areas, and genres
  • Identify the role of read alouds in the science of reading
  • Understand an easy applicable protocol for planning effective read alouds across content areas: evaluate, explain, engage, and extend

Read Alouds for All Learners

Recommended Resource

Move to Learn: Instructional Strategies to Amplify Student Engagement through Movement

Incorporating student movement while learning can amplify students’ focus and interest in the learning process. During this workshop, participants discover instructional strategies that use movement to engage students in learning. Explore ways to immediately integrate these effective techniques in the classroom.

This workshop will help K–12 educators:

  • Gain practical, research-backed strategies that get students moving and maximize engagement
  • Identify opportunities to incorporate movement utilizing classroom design, class climate, and classroom management
  • Create plans to immediately implement movement strategies that boost cognitive engagement and achievement

30+ Movement Strategies to Boost Cognitive Engagement

Recommended Resource

The FRAME Model for Optimizing Student Success

With this results-oriented approach, learn how to create a meaningful and motivating learning experience across grade levels and content areas. Rely on the model’s five steps—(1) focus, (2) reach, (3) ask, (4) model, and (5) encourage—to help you launch engaging lessons, articulate clear expectations, and offer effective feedback.

This workshop will help educators:

  • Explore how the FRAME model supports teachers in planning and delivering a meaningful learning experience to every student
  • Discover strategies for engaging students within the first ten minutes of class and carrying this motivation throughout the lesson
  • Understand how encouraging peer observations and feedback among teachers will improve instructional practice

Ready to Learn: The FRAME Model for Optimizing Student Success

Recommended Resource

Agents to Agency

Discover a proven, measurable, and transparent framework for cultivating learner agency from kindergarten to postsecondary education. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of agency in schools, showing that when students have agency over their learning, they are more engaged, motivated, and successful.

In this service, educators will discover effective solutions for fostering agency across diverse needs and educational levels.

  • Extract the essential understandings, critical concepts and individual perspectives from the curriculum to identify learning intentions and achievement standards.
  • Employ destinations, milestones and footsteps for learners to engage in goal-setting, self-efficacy and self-determination.
  • Identify progressive points of withdrawal to effortlessly shift responsibility to the learners.

Agents to Agency

Recommended Resource

Your Goal

Deepening Your Skills

Two‑to‑Four‑Day Services

Daily Differentiation Strategies for the Classroom

Discover how to determine students’ learning needs and help them reach their fullest potential.

  • Explore various lesson plans and activities.
  • Unite curriculum design, assessment, and instruction through the lens of differentiation.

Best Practices at Tier 1 Elementary, Best Practices at Tier 1 Secondary

Recommended Resource

Motivating Students

Motivate students who are disengaged in the learning process. Explore a range of strategies for connecting with these students, developing their competence, and creating a fun learning environment.

  • Access proven strategies for engaging students.
  • Explore the impact of positive reinforcement and feedback.

The New Art and Science of Teaching

Discover a framework for substantive change that comprehensively addresses the most alterable effect on student achievement: instruction.

  • Utilize ten design questions and a general framework that will help determine which classroom strategies you should use to foster student learning.
  • Analyze the behavioral evidence that proves the chosen instructional strategies are helping learners achieve academic success.

The New Art and Science of Teaching

Recommended Resource

Succeeding as a Beginning Teacher

Designed for teachers in the early stages of their careers, as well as mentors, coaches, and supervisors, this two-day training identifies six phases every beginning teacher goes through, offering crucial advice and strategies for each.

  • Explore the six phases of beginning teachers—(1) anticipation, (2) survival, (3) disillusionment, (4) rejuvenation, (5) reflection, and (6) second anticipation.
  • Understand the feelings and challenges associated with each phase.
  • Discover practical strategies for instruction, classroom management, and relationship-building.
  • Learn how to practice self-care to avoid early career burnout that so often leads to teachers changing careers.
  • Develop a plan for decreasing stress and increasing student achievement.

Beginning Teacher Field Guide

Recommended Resource

Establishing a Learning Culture

Lead your school to success with key strategies and practices that establish a learning culture, such as creating an inclusive environment and inspiring teachers to become leaders.

  • Explore the four principles of systems thinking—relationships, communication, responsiveness, and sustainability.
  • Study the critical characteristics of unstoppable learning leadership.

Leading Unstoppable Learning

Recommended Resource

Adapting Instruction for Diverse Populations

Provide effective differentiated instruction to students with varying needs, from disabilities to twice-exceptionality.

  • Learn how to adjust curriculum in ways that maintain appropriate levels of rigor for all students.
  • Consider the importance of collaboration and communication in learning adaptations.
  • Explore a plethora of high-tech and low-tech accommodations for student input and output.
  • Examine graphical and content assessment changes for maximum accessibility.

Adapting Unstoppable Learning

Recommended Resource

Supporting Classroom Growth Mindsets and Increasing Learner Autonomy

Cultivate meaningful student engagement by understanding the theories and teaching strategies of learner autonomy, motivation, self-determination, and participation in the classroom.

  • Become familiar with the different student engagement mindsets and gain classroom instructional strategies that help establish a growth mindset for all students.
  • Consider differentiated instruction and classroom scenarios that increase participation and boost intrinsic motivation for students.
  • Boost students’ competency and independence to help deepen their learning by tapping into student engagement strategies designed to consolidate their thinking.

Launching and Consolidating Unstoppable Learning

Recommended Resource

The New Art and Science of Teaching Art and Music

Ensure your art and music programs thrive with music- and arts-based teaching strategies built upon the research-based framework of Dr. Robert J. Marzano’s New Art and Science of Teaching. Educators will learn how to enhance their daily practices and promote the artistic expression, creative growth, and critical thinking skills of every student.

  • Explore a model for strengthening instructional strategies for art and music.
  • Understand which elements of instruction are best suited to teaching art and music and prioritize the specific suggestions and techniques for implementing these elements.
  • Discover time-tested strategies and ideas to improve teaching and learning in art and music classrooms.

The New Art and Science of Teaching Art and Music

Recommended Resource

The New Art and Science of Teaching Mathematics

Make the most of The New Art and Science of Teaching model in math classrooms. Discover tools and instructional strategies for math that will aid teachers in articulating learning targets, conducting math lessons, tracking students’ learning outcomes, and more.

  • Explore how The New Art and Science of Teaching framework can optimize instruction methods and establish best practices in teaching mathematics.
  • Discover a four-step process designed to help math teachers deepen their expertise of math teaching strategies.
  • Articulate learning targets and conduct math lessons to engage students, track progress, and celebrate successes.

The New Art and Science of Teaching Mathematics

Recommended Resource

Brain-Friendly Teaching Strategies

Implement a four-step instructional cycle based on the synthesis of educational neuroscience, formative assessment, and differentiated instruction. As teachers are able to gradually release learning to students, these high-impact strategies, tools, and concepts have the power to double the speed of their learning and transform students into active learners and independent thinkers.

  • Examine effective teaching strategies and differentiation practices so you can adjust instruction according to student needs.
  • Consider the four-step instructional cycle and understand the components of chunk, chew, check, and change.
  • Learn how to plan instruction and preassess efficiently so that daily learning targets and formative assessments enable each student to meet standards.

Teaching With the Instructional Cha-Chas

Recommended Resource

Differentiation and the Brain

Explore ways in which findings from educational neuroscience inform the big ideas and key practices of differentiation, and how applying those ideas helps teachers create brain-friendly classrooms. You’ll also gain instructional strategies and practices that support teachers in addressing the varied learning needs of their students.

  • Learn which practices support the brain in learning—and which ones create roadblocks.
  • Discover findings from education neuroscience and psychology that can help you plan more effectively.
  • Understand why an invitational learning environment is key to student success, and how to work with your students to create one.

Differentiation and the Brain

Recommended Resource

Engineering Creative Critical Thinking in Your Classroom

Bring the real world into your classroom and encourage creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, and innovation with activities and projects based on engineering design thinking. Model and develop strategies and approaches to connect your current curriculum to real-world challenges and to engage all learners in designing solutions.

  • Explore the engineering design process (EDP) and unpack the key stages of problem definition, background research, brainstorming, prototyping, testing, and optimizing.
  • Model activities designed to build agility, resilience, and lifelong learning skills in your students as they learn to think like engineers—learning from failure, evaluating multiple options, and exploring the positive and negative aspects of possible solutions.

Designing the Future

Recommended Resource

Strategies for Instructional Coaches

Instructional coaches play a crucial role in helping educators meet the ever-changing demands placed on teaching and learning. In this on-site professional learning engagement, coaches will discover seven drivers they can use to best support teachers in their daily work: (1) collaboration, (2) transparency, (3) inquiry, (4) discourse, (5) reverberation, (6) sincerity, and (7) influence.

  • Gain strategies to strengthen relationships and improve outcomes with teachers and teacher teams.
  • Access tools to help self-assess and adjust daily coaching practices.
  • Understand the sociocultural psychology and education research that support the seven daily drivers.
  • Learn approaches you can use to keep pace with the demands on today’s educators, coaches, and instructional leaders.

Everyday Instructional Coaching

Recommended Resource

Personalizing Learning Through Voice and Choice

The term ”personalized learning” carries all kinds of connotations for all kinds of people. When considered from the perspective of the learner, this term becomes more accessible and even exciting for educators. Engage with practical, proven strategies, stories, and resources that empower individual educators, schools, and districts to authentically personalize learning.

  • Receive inspiration that will help you change the culture of learning for students.
  • Learn the roles of students, teachers, school site administrators, and district administrators in this culture change.
  • Explore readiness tiers, indicators, and supports.

Personalizing Learning Through Voice and Choice

Recommended Resource

Making Learning Flow

Rethink student engagement and bring flow to the classroom to inspire students to love learning and reach optimal achievement. Using the key components of flow, generate a state of flow in the classroom every day to spark optimal student performance.

  • Learn the fundamentals of flow.
  • Reimagine student engagement to create conditions that foster a state of flow regularly.
  • Motivate students to become naturally curious, creative critical thinkers.
  • Make learning inherently fun—encouraging students to love learning.
  • Gain effective strategies for improving motivation, instruction, pacing, and feedback in the classroom.
  • Understand how intrinsic motivations can better inspire students’ learning than extrinsic rewards.
  • Grasp how to effectively match students’ perceived skills with an equal level of challenge.
  • Issue immediate and effective feedback to help students monitor their own learning progress.

Making Learning Flow

Recommended Resource

Sustainable Project-Based Learning Foundation

During this three-day workshop, participants will develop a completed individual sustainable project-based learning (SPBL) unit design infused with high-impact strategies, a clear assessment plan, and a way to measure the evidence of student learning through teacher action research.

  • Discover a five-step process for planning and implementing a comprehensive SPBL framework.
  • Learn how to integrate social-emotional learning, project-based learning, and teacher action research into SPBL.
  • Acquire an array of protocols and strategies to enhance both classroom learning and teacher collaboration time.

Sustainable Project-Based Learning Foundation

Recommended Resource

Embracing Relational Teaching: How Relationship-Focused Instruction Can Promote Student Self-Regulation and Efficacy

Put the student before the score, the process before the product, and relationships before evaluation. The Embracing Relational Teaching professional learning engagement explores and implements relational teaching practices to create a more inclusive and supportive learning environment. Training sessions provide an interactive experience that explores key topics such as building relationships, promoting student voice and agency, integrating social-emotional learning into instruction, and more. Participants will leave with practical tools, resources, and strategies to build strong, authentic relationships with their students that can positively impact their well-being and achievement.

Key takeaways:

  • Participants will discuss the components of relational instruction, including student-initiated action stimulating student thinking, helping them make judgments about their learning, and learning how to give feedback.
  • Participants will learn how to create lessons in which students can explore their thinking, discover the value of collaboration, and build self-trust.
  • Learn about the challenges schools face when implementing relational pedagogy and grading practices.
  • Create practices and policies that make relationships a core tenet of their school.
  • Reflect on current initiatives and explore how relationships with students can change grading practices.

Embracing Relational Teaching

Recommended Resource

Multiplication Fact Fluency: A Schoolwide Solution

How can students achieve a deep understanding of multiplication that allows them to develop fluency with their basic facts that goes beyond recall to explain and justify their thinking? Experience the six strategies that make up the Fact Tactics™ Fluency Program, designed to shift from drill-and-kill instruction to an approach that helps students make sense of multiplication while developing automaticity and procedural fluency.

This workshop (offered as a full face-to-face day, as a half face-to-face day, or as 2–3 shorter, spaced-out virtual experiences) will help grades 3–6 teachers, coaches, and administrators:

  • Examine structures for developing fact fluency grounded in multiplicative reasoning
  • Make sense of the Six Fluency Tactics
  • Explore the Fact Tactics Fluency Program as a schoolwide solution

Multiplication Fact Fluency: A School Wide Solution

Recommended Resource

Essential Literacy Skills to Support Achievement in Every Content Area

Without the mastery of essential literary skills, students fall behind and struggle to reach their full potential in the classroom and their chosen career. In this multiday workshop, educators discover the tools they need to embed literacy into all subjects and support developing students as they learn to read, write, and think critically.

  • Explore ways to prioritize essential skills in your classroom.
  • Gain practical strategies to introduce literacy into daily lesson planning.
  • Create a supportive classroom culture to sustain long-term skill-centered instruction.
  • Scaffold instruction using literacy strategies to boost subject-area comprehension.
  • Equip students with the tools they need to thrive.

Clearing the Path for Developing Learners

Recommended Resource

Foster Student Learning with Productive Struggle

The ability to overcome learning challenges, struggles, and setbacks is a skill that empowers students throughout their lives. In this multiday workshop, educators explore the why and how of creating resilient learners through the power of “not yet.” Discover how to cultivate a classroom where productive struggle is encouraged, obstacles are valued, and students deeply value themselves as learners.

  • Design classrooms and routines that normalize productive struggle as part of the learning process
  • Write and apply rigorous learning intentions and scaffolded success criteria that are student friendly
  • Gain strategies and protocols that support instruction, reflection, and the not-yet approach
  • Empower students to see themselves as capable learners and risk-takers

Not Yet . . . And That’s OK

Recommended Resource

Your Goal

Sustaining Your Skills

Multi‑Day Services

Embedded Coaching

Ensure best-practice instruction is adopted throughout your school or district with job-embedded coaching. Our expert coaches will provide professional development tailored to the needs of each staff member, with a custom mix of classroom observations, lesson-planning support, targeted feedback, and more.

Customized Services

Give your team personalized support and guidance focused on instructional best practices. Together, we’ll develop a customized learning plan featuring on-site professional development and virtual training opportunities specifically designed to help your staff provide quality instruction that leads to quality learning.

Global PD Teams

Access hundreds of instructional videos and resources, including the New Art and Science of Teaching video playlist, that reveal specific, proven actions you can take to ensure all students achieve academic success. Choose Global PD Teams when you need:

  • Daily, convenient access to real-time school improvement models and strategies
  • Job-embedded professional development
  • Resources to build collective teacher efficacy
  • Clear learning paths toward student achievement and school improvement
  • Quality content from authors you know and trust

Featured Instruction Presenters