A life fueled by passions is like riding on the back of a dragon.

As teachers, we have to plan with the end in mind. Our understanding of what success looks like in our class and our ability to communicate that with students are imperative to their success. Learn how to craft rigorous and aligned Criteria For Success and corresponding exemplars, and how to use them to drive student outcomes in daily learning.

Why wait until it's too late to find out if students are on track? Here, we create intentional seating charts and monitoring pathways, practice identifying and addressing student misconceptions as they arise, and learn how to pivot our plan to support students in real time.

How to produce great work shouldn't be a secret nor a memory test, and when it comes to grades, the stakes for students are too high to have ambiguity in grading processes. In equitable schools, intentionality, accuracy, and transparency around grading practices are key. Unpack the relationship between standards, Success Criteria, and grading, in order to create school-wide systems that minimize the role of bias and subjectivity in grading, and that build trust and agency amongst stakeholders.

Learn how to use conjunctions to infuse integral literacy skills into core classes. Complex sentences allow for complex ideas, and dedicating time to explicitly teach syntax - beyond memorizing grammatical terminology - enables students to express themselves at a higher level across content areas.

Students' quality of responses are often dependent on the quality of the question posed. Practice crafting engaging, complex questions that push students' thinking and that lend themselves to analytical and evaluative responses. Incentivize students to push their literacy skills by adding daily language expectations into your lessons.

It's time to move beyond simple sentence stems that lead to inorganic and uninspired student discourse. Learn how to equip students with the vocabulary, syntactical prowess and confidence to engage with their peers in meaningful and academic ways. Culminating the skills learned in Sessions 1 and 2, here we get the sage of the stage and pass the mic to students!

The hard truth: racism, misogyny, and bias permeate our society, and subsequently, often pop up in our curriculums. We're here to support your team in learning how to audit curriculum prior to instruction to counter any areas where academic access or emotional safety may be jeopardized. From translating texts, differentiating activities, and incorporating student interest, we'll help you improve the inclusivity and therefore the impact of your curriculum.

Practice navigating the balance of fostering community and accountability for students with shared school expectations, and supporting young people whilst they grow into their authentic adult selves. Get comfortable in teaching students how to challenge respectfully, how to discuss causes they care about within the school meaningfully, and how to advocate for their personal needs within a school environment.

Sometimes, young people make mistakes. Sometimes, adults make mistakes. Our ability as educators to navigate conversations with students after harm has been caused either to a specific relationship, or to the larger classroom or school community, is crucial to maintaining an environment of accountability, but also grace. Practice common scenarios that warrant crucial conversations so that when the stakes are high, your words and actions communicate a belief in students and reflect your values.

Students' comfort and emotional safety in schools are a result of countless daily micro moments. From the conversation with the registrar when late to school, to the confiscation of their phone in PE, their interactions with humans and policies in your building will determine the extent to which they feel as though they belong. Examine your school systems and norm on shared language so that accountability, celebrations, and holistic culture are centered around students feeling safe and joyful.

Maximize time, strengthen relationships, and foster a commitment to continual growth at your school. We'll create impactful agendas and identify development areas, and practice leading engaging sessions that create trust and credibility within your team and a sense of investment in leadership. Great educators are hard to come by - let's commit to keeping them by providing them with great development,

Relationships with teachers are a direct result of our relationship with their teaching. Failing to observe, failing to give feedback, or giving weak or abrasive feedback, are all sure-fire ways to lose trust, lose credibility, and lose teachers. Practice how to maximize observations, to select instructional priorities, and how to deliver feedback and action items in ways that feel authentic, respectful, and collaborative - and that ultimately move the work.

Effective leaders are continuously learning alongside their teachers. Stay on top of your skillset by practicing how to support teachers in planning high quality lessons and desegregating formative and summative data in meaningful ways. We'll do the work as leaders in order to lead by example whilst also developing our abilities to coach up teachers in these key areas by creating and leading teacher-facing planning and data analysis meetings.

As we all know, a rough start to class is hard to come back from. Norm on entrance procedures that set students and teacher up for a calm and joyful start to class, and that communicate to students that adults are prepared and ready to maximize learning time - and that we expect the same from them.

The way we praise, redirect, or fail to redirect students, speaks volumes of how we view them and their learning. Practice using specific positive praise to affirm individual students whilst also communicating to their peers the behaviors and work we want to see replicated. Practice redirecting students in quick, non-personal but authentic ways that communicate to them that we need them to adjust their choices, and that we believe that they can and they will.

Speaking with conviction and clarity is a skill that needs to be honed. Practice scripting clear directions that leave little room for ambiguity (or student interpretation), and delivering them in a way that commands an authoritative and engaging presence. Results: minimize wasted learning time and decrease misbehaviors.

Great classrooms run like clockwork. There are routines for everything, students know them, and they are used consistently. Here, we'll create clear systems for the daily practices and classroom activities that are highest stakes for us, and create intentional opportunities for students to practice and perfect the routines. No activity should be off the cards because we don't know how to manage students through it - we've got this!

A bite-sized overview of the expectations of the Extended Constructed Response portion of the ELA STAAR exam. We examine and create exemplar responses for target grade levels, internalize the rubric and calibrate scoring, and debunk some dos and don'ts when it comes to teaching writing effectively.

A comprehensive session that guides ELA teachers in how to support students in writing successful ECRs. Prompt deconstruction, how to interact with the passage, structuring responses effectively, including rigorous ideas and language composition - this training covers it all, with time and space for both intellectual and instructional practice. If you want to teach writing with confidence and expertise and move ELA scores, this is the one.

The first 10 minutes of a class are often an indicator of how the rest will go, and students investment correlates to the intentionally with which we begin any given lesson. We share our most engaging and meaningful Do Nows, designed to create consistency without redundancy across classrooms and peak student interest in the lesson whilst practicing valuable skills.

A practical session that leaves you with efficient tools and strategies for adjusting materials to support multilingual learners and students with IEPs. Adapt proactive measures into lesson planning practices that broaden student access, and maximize teacher time.

Understanding the rubrics is just the beginning. We're here to help you internalize the standard for writing and how to guide students to meet it by intentional decisions from the jump. Every assignment, Success Criteria, and corresponding feedback work together to maximize student growth over the course of the year in alignment to the exam, whilst also preparing students for the skills needed to be successful in higher education.

English teachers: ever felt stuck on a hamster wheel of grading while students' writing stagnates? We're here to help. We'll work together to use the best Success Criteria and exemplars to grade efficiently and effectively, evaluate students' current strengths and areas for growth, calibrate scoring for accuracy, identify priority areas, and plan how to strategically move students to earn greater points on the exam.

Few things are more painful to a teacher than a student leaving an exam saying that they ran out of time, and on AP English exams, every minute counts. Students' ability to strategically navigate the time constraints is a crucial variable in their ability to pass the exam. We share our proven methods of how to divide time effectively and approach each component of the exam in order to enable students to put their best foot forward and showcase their skills with no regret for things left unsaid.

It's not a matter of whether we have biases; it's a matter of what they are, and how equipped we are to counter them. Self-awareness amongst educators is crucial to providing a safe and inclusive student experience. Here, we unpack potentially harmful mindsets and explore what our school and classroom policies directly or indirectly communicate to students.

Ignoring issues that impact our students, our country, and our world, is detrimental to our young people's academic development and emotional safety - so is addressing them without intentionality and due diligence. Here, we learn how to make our classrooms a safe space in which we encourage and facilitate student discourse on high stakes social and political issues whilst maintaining professional boundaries and preserving the well-being of all stakeholders within the space.