ENHANCE PRACTICE
These engaging workshops help develop competencies in specified areas to impact teaching and improve student outcomes.
CATEGORIES
Workshops with an asterisk are eligible for ESSER funding.
Britannica’s Enhance Practice workshops are grounded in research and are developed and facilitated by a team of dedicated educators with real classroom experience.
Instructional Strategies K–12
Supporting ELL Through Rich Text and Media
Participants will explore how to successfully support ELL students by integrating rich resources and strategies into their curriculum. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions while navigating diverse multimedia resources to demonstrate how rich and authentic the teaching and learning experience can be for both students and educators.
Integrating SEL Across the Curriculum*
Participants will explore how to successfully integrate Social Emotional Learning (SEL) across all curricula, while aligning to state standards, to create authentic learning experiences for students and provide them with opportunities to make connections and apply essential skills in everyday experiences. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions on strategies that consider the whole student as a learner while encouraging inquiry, analysis, research, and critical-thinking skills within a lesson.
Processing Complex Informational Text
Participants will explore some of Britannica’s Informational Texts to illustrate how educators can support K -12 learners in processing complex informational text and making connections to past figures, events, and time periods. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions on the application and importance of pairing practical strategies with text, images, audio, and video content to engage students in understanding complex text, critical thinking and inquiry.
Ready for Research: Increasing Engagement through Information Literacy
The very big, very real task of today’s educators is to ignite in students the desire to discover while also arming them with the judgment to wade through false and misleading information from questionable sources. Students must learn to understand and respect different perspectives, as well as develop the communication skills to express their own. Students who internalize these information-literacy abilities dramatically increase their potential for success in learning across the board. In these workshops, we will cover the student skill sets necessary to develop information literacy and provide targeted learning tasks for educators to empower students to uncover information needs and determine how to locate, evaluate, and use the information they find. Participants will receive a five-step guide to research that seamlessly teaches vital skills students will apply to research both in school now and in their college and career.
Early Learning
Early Learning and the Science of Reading
Integrating Nonfiction into Play
As children play and explore, they develop an understanding of the world around them. The early learning environment provides opportunities for children to engage in activities, explore materials and make connections through interactions with peers and adults. Building nonfiction reading and images into those experiences foster building critical thinking and information-gathering skills, vocabulary acquisition, and making real-world connections clear. In this workshop we’ll unpack how and when to incorporate nonfiction text and media into both child-initiated and teacher-initiated activities and explore how engaging in nonfiction will lead to active child-led investigations into the world around them.
Early Language Development through Purposeful Engagement with Vocabulary
Research shows that early vocabulary acquisition is directly linked to academic and reading success in elementary school. Young children acquire well-developed vocabulary from experiences with adults that involve meaningful exposure to a variety of words in context, over time. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the relationship between early vocabulary acquisition and life-long literacy and understand the best practices for encouraging language use and development across the day.
Ready for Research: Increase Student Engagement through Information Literacy
Culturally Responsive Instruction for Early Childhood*
This virtual professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in early childhood education. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
Play Matters: Exploring the Vital Role of Play in Development and Learning*
As children play and explore, they develop an understanding of the world around them. The early learning environment provides opportunities for children to engage in activities, explore materials and make connections through interactions with peers and adults. Building nonfiction reading and images into those experiences foster building critical thinking and information-gathering skills, vocabulary acquisition, and making real-world connections clear. In this workshop we’ll unpack how and when to incorporate nonfiction text and media into both child-initiated and teacher-initiated activities and explore how engaging in nonfiction will lead to active child-led investigations into the world around them.
Cultivating Curiosity and Inclusivity through Play
Nonfiction Storytime for Early Learners
Research shows that reading to young children is associated with differences in brain activity supporting early reading skills. Reading to children from birth also fosters early learning and creates connections in the brain that promote language development. In this workshop, we’ll unpack the neuroscience behind young children’s developing minds and provide key strategies to engage children in the reading process to make reading a nurturing and confidence-building learning experience, while building the foundations for language, social and emotional, and early literacy development through engaging nonfiction stories.
Inclusivity
Insight Out: A Trauma-Sensitive Guide to Leading All Kids*
Based on the best-selling book Reclaiming Our Students, this online video series puts principles into action for educators and change-makers around the world that want to create lasting change from the inside out!
Children are more anxious, aggressive, and shut down than ever. We were seeing these shifts before COVID 19 and now it is only intensified. Faced with this epidemic of emotional health crises and behavioral problems, working with kids has become more challenging than ever.
Cultivating Curiosity and Inclusivity through Play*
In this workshop, participants will learn how using a play-based approach to learning can encourage academic, social, and emotional growth. As children play and explore, they develop an understanding of the world around them. Cultivating an environment with a culture of play provides opportunities for children to engage in activities, explore materials, ask questions, and make connections through collaboration with peers and adults. We’ll explore how using real-world and imaginative play, paired with the opportunity to engage in rich, nonfiction text can motivate students to build curiosity and develop self-generated questions about topics of greatest interest to them.
Culturally Responsive Instruction Cohort*
This professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in the K-12 setting. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
Culturally Responsive Instruction 2-day workshop*
This professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in the K-12 setting. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
Culturally Responsive Instruction for Early Childhood*
This virtual professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in early childhood education. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
Culturally Responsive Instruction for Every Library*
This professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in the K-12 setting. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
Supporting ELL Through Rich Text and Media
Participants will explore how to successfully support ELL students by integrating rich resources and strategies into their curriculum. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions while navigating diverse multimedia resources to demonstrate how rich and authentic the teaching and learning experience can be for both students and educators.
Integrating SEL Across the Curriculum*
Participants will explore how to successfully integrate Social Emotional Learning (SEL) across all curricula, while aligning to state standards, to create authentic learning experiences for students and provide them with opportunities to make connections and apply essential skills in everyday experiences. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions on strategies that consider the whole student as a learner while encouraging inquiry, analysis, research, and critical-thinking skills within a lesson.
ENHANCE PRACTICE
These engaging workshops help develop competencies in specified areas to impact teaching and improve student outcomes.
Britannica’s Enhance Practice workshops are grounded in research and are developed and facilitated by a team of dedicated educators with real classroom experience.
Instructional Strategies K–12
Participants will explore how to successfully support ELL students by integrating rich resources and strategies into their curriculum. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions while navigating diverse multimedia resources to demonstrate how rich and authentic the teaching and learning experience can be for both students and educators.
Participants will explore how to successfully integrate Social Emotional Learning (SEL) across all curricula, while aligning to state standards, to create authentic learning experiences for students and provide them with opportunities to make connections and apply essential skills in everyday experiences. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions on strategies that consider the whole student as a learner while encouraging inquiry, analysis, research, and critical-thinking skills within a lesson.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
Participants will explore how to successfully support ELL students by integrating rich resources and strategies into their curriculum. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions while navigating diverse multimedia resources to demonstrate how rich and authentic the teaching and learning experience can be for both students and educators.
Participants will learn how high-quality digital content can be used to reach diverse learners through personalized learning in social studies and science. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions and will explore K-12 social studies topics through differentiated text, images, videos, and primary source documents – paired with target learning tasks to support students’ unique needs, preferences, learning styles, and goals.
The very big, very real task of today’s educators is to ignite in students the desire to discover while also arming them with the judgment to wade through false and misleading information from questionable sources. Students must learn to understand and respect different perspectives, as well as develop the communication skills to express their own. Students who internalize these information-literacy abilities dramatically increase their potential for success in learning across the board. In these workshops, we will cover the student skill sets necessary to develop information literacy and provide targeted learning tasks for educators to empower students to uncover information needs and determine how to locate, evaluate, and use the information they find. Participants will receive a five-step guide to research that seamlessly teaches vital skills students will apply to research both in school now and in their college and career.
Early Childhood
As children play and explore, they develop an understanding of the world around them. The early learning environment provides opportunities for children to engage in activities, explore materials and make connections through interactions with peers and adults. Building nonfiction reading and images into those experiences foster building critical thinking and information-gathering skills, vocabulary acquisition, and making real-world connections clear. In this workshop we’ll unpack how and when to incorporate nonfiction text and media into both child-initiated and teacher-initiated activities and explore how engaging in nonfiction will lead to active child-led investigations into the world around them.
Research shows that reading to young children is associated with differences in brain activity supporting early reading skills. Reading to children from birth also fosters early learning and creates connections in the brain that promote language development. In this workshop, we’ll unpack the neuroscience behind young children’s developing minds and provide key strategies to engage children in the reading process to make reading a nurturing and confidence-building learning experience, while building the foundations for language, social and emotional, and early literacy development through engaging nonfiction stories.
As children play and explore, they develop an understanding of the world around them. The early learning environment provides opportunities for children to engage in activities, explore materials and make connections through interactions with peers and adults. Building nonfiction reading and images into those experiences foster building critical thinking and information-gathering skills, vocabulary acquisition, and making real-world connections clear. In this workshop we’ll unpack how and when to incorporate nonfiction text and media into both child-initiated and teacher-initiated activities and explore how engaging in nonfiction will lead to active child-led investigations into the world around them.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
Research shows that early vocabulary acquisition is directly linked to academic and reading success in elementary school. Young children acquire well-developed vocabulary from experiences with adults that involve meaningful exposure to a variety of words in context, over time. In this workshop, we’ll dive into the relationship between early vocabulary acquisition and life-long literacy and understand the best practices for encouraging language use and development across the day.
This virtual professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in early childhood education. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
Inclusivity
Based on the best-selling book Reclaiming Our Students, this online video series puts principles into action for educators and change-makers around the world that want to create lasting change from the inside out!
Children are more anxious, aggressive, and shut down than ever. We were seeing these shifts before COVID 19 and now it is only intensified. Faced with this epidemic of emotional health crises and behavioral problems, working with kids has become more challenging than ever.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
In this workshop, participants will learn how using a play-based approach to learning can encourage academic, social, and emotional growth. As children play and explore, they develop an understanding of the world around them. Cultivating an environment with a culture of play provides opportunities for children to engage in activities, explore materials, ask questions, and make connections through collaboration with peers and adults. We’ll explore how using real-world and imaginative play, paired with the opportunity to engage in rich, nonfiction text can motivate students to build curiosity and develop self-generated questions about topics of greatest interest to them.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
This professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in the K-12 setting. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
This professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in the K-12 setting. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
This virtual professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in early childhood education. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
This professional learning cohort explores strategies and perspectives related to developing a culturally responsive pedagogy and framework in the K-12 setting. The goal is to support teachers and caregivers in creating and facilitating environments that embrace cultural responsiveness. This will be achieved by promoting teaching and learning that is equitable, engaging, and embraces a climate and culture of trust, understanding, curiosity, enrichment, and imagination.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
Participants will explore how to successfully support ELL students by integrating rich resources and strategies into their curriculum. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions while navigating diverse multimedia resources to demonstrate how rich and authentic the teaching and learning experience can be for both students and educators.
Participants will explore how to successfully integrate Social Emotional Learning (SEL) across all curricula, while aligning to state standards, to create authentic learning experiences for students and provide them with opportunities to make connections and apply essential skills in everyday experiences. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions on strategies that consider the whole student as a learner while encouraging inquiry, analysis, research, and critical-thinking skills within a lesson.
*Eligible for ESSER funding
Integrating ELA into Social Studies and Science
Participants will learn how high-quality digital content can be used to reach diverse learners through personalized learning in intermediate and secondary social studies and science. The workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to engage in meaningful, collaborative discussions. Together in the session, the participants will explore social studies and science topics in grades 6-12 through differentiated text, images, videos, and primary source documents. These topics will be paired with targeted learning tasks to support students’ unique needs, preferences, learning styles, and goals.