Courses > Courses for Teaching Professionals

Click any title below to view a complete course description including a syllabus, instructor biography, prerequisites, and requirements.

Speed Spanish
Instructor: Dan Mikels

This powerful course teaches six easy recipes you can use to glue Spanish words together into sentences. With the powerful methods taught in this course, you'll be able to engage in conversational Spanish in no time. ¡Qué Bueno!

Creating Web Pages
Instructor: Craig Power

Learn how to design, create, and post your very own site on the Internet's World Wide Web. Discover low-cost marketing techniques and search engine strategies.

Get Assertive!
Instructor: Vivian Harte

Are you tired of being intimidated and treated badly by others? Get the assertiveness training you need in order to be more confident and powerful with family members, friends, bosses, co-workers, professionals, service people, and even total strangers. Discover how you lose your power when you talk and what you can do to get it back. Learn how to deal with anger and criticism effectively. It's your turn to speak out!

Leadership
Instructor: Lynne Morton

Leadership skills can help you gain the respect and admiration of others, while also allowing you to enjoy success in your career and more control over your destiny. Contrary to popular belief, leadership skills can be learned and developed. Even if you don't hold a leadership position, this course will teach you how to use the principles of great leaders to achieve success in almost every aspect of your daily life.

A to Z Grant Writing
Instructor: Linda Vallejo

A to Z Grant Writing is an invigorating and informative course that will equip you with the skills and tools you need to enter the exciting field of grant writing! You'll learn how to raise needed funds by discovering how and where to look for potential funders who are a good match for your organization. You'll also learn how to network and develop true partnerships with a variety of funders, how to organize a successful grant writing campaign, and how to put together a complete proposal package.

Solving Classroom Discipline Problems II
Instructor: James Thompson

In this professional development course, you'll get the teacher training you need to deal effectively with serious discipline problems and help even the most challenging students you're teaching make more responsible choices. You'll learn how to use a new research-based six-step approach to solve severe and chronic discipline problems such as bullying, fighting, using abusive language, stealing, and refusing to work. We'll look at numerous real-life examples set in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms so you can see how to put the ideas into action in your own teaching situation.

Creating the Inclusive Classroom: Strategies for Success
Instructor: Ellen Arnold

In this professional development course for teachers, you'll get the training you need to reach the diverse mix of students you face every day—learning proven strategies that turn diversity into opportunity. With students who have learning disabilities, neurobiological disorders, and physical challenges, the modern classroom requires an efficient and effective teacher who can prioritize under tight deadlines and be creative on demand. Learn how to be the kind of super teacher who can guide every student toward academic success.

Singapore Math Strategies: Model Drawing for Grades 1-6
Instructor: Anni Stipek

In this professional development course for teachers, you'll get the training you need to start teaching model drawing, the powerful Singapore Math strategy that gives word problems a visual context. As a teacher, you know that many students groan when it's time to solve word problems. Why is that? Are the problems too difficult? Do students get lost trying to decipher the wording or figure out the computation? Do they simply not know which strategy to use? Actually, it's a combination of all these issues. Luckily, model drawing, a Singapore Math strategy for working word problems, will help your students start to enjoy math in a way they may never have before.

Teaching Writing: Grades 4-6
Instructor: Melanie Park

In this teacher-training course, you'll learn from an experienced educator how to motivate and assist developing writers. You'll master strategies for teaching the writing process and find out how to develop engaging lessons for different writing applications. We'll explore the benefits of writing across the curriculum, examine ways to organize your writing instruction, and uncover the secrets of effective assessment.

Teaching Students With Autism: Strategies for Success
Instructor: Ellen Arnold

Just 20 years ago, we didn't see students with autism in our classrooms. But today, we teach children with high-functioning autism and Asperger's Syndrome right alongside their neurotypical peers. Reaching and teaching these students requires a delicate balancing act: understanding how their brains are wired, helping them turn challenges into opportunities, and learning to enjoy the rich perspective they bring to the classroom.

Response to Intervention: Reading Strategies That Work
Instructor: Wendell Christensen

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could be proactive in helping our struggling readers? Well, we can! In this six-week course, you'll learn response to intervention (RTI) strategies that ensure the struggling readers in your classroom get the help and education they need. RTI gives us a strategic plan to bring tiered interventions to our students, at their reading level and with their unique challenges in mind. Helping them with phonics, fluency, vocabulary mastery, comprehension, and writing, these intervention strategies tackle the toughest literacy problems with flexibility and creativity.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 in the Classroom
Instructor: Tracy Loffer

In this course for teachers, you'll learn how to motivate students and enrich lessons by bringing Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 into your classroom. You'll master a variety of uses for this MS Office program and come away able to develop lessons and presentations filled with text, graphics, sound, and video. You'll be able to use PowerPoint templates or create your own dynamic presentations that will increase interest in any subject you teach!

Creating a Classroom Web Site
Instructor: Robin Sellers

Learn how to create a classroom Web site in this fun, easy-to-understand course for teachers. In no time, you'll build a site with text, images, animations, tables, links, and more. Then you'll create a WebQuest and a blog to add to your site. You'll do all this and more as you discover how simple creating a classroom Web site can be and how having one can make you a more effective and dynamic teacher.

Easy Classroom Podcasting
Instructor: Lori Elliott

Have you ever felt like you just can't reach your students? They speak the language of technology while you speak the language of, well, teachers. But what if there was a bridge between the two? In this professional training course for teachers, you'll learn how to make a podcast that creates a memorable learning experience for your students. You'll find their interest reignited when you start using their favorite formats: audio, images, and video. You won't even need an iPod or a big budget to harness the power of podcasting in your classroom.

Practical Ideas for the Adult ESL/EFL Classroom
Instructor: Rob Jenkins

Learn ESL teaching strategies that will set your adult ESL/EFL students up for success! Over the next six weeks, you'll discover ways to teach ESL that create a meaningful and positive learning environment for your students. You'll get to know what motivates them and how you can tailor your ESL teaching methods to their needs. You'll also explore a wealth of activities you can use to help your students become more confident listeners, speakers, readers, and writers of English. By the end of this course, you'll be teaching ESL in a way that helps your students move skillfully from the classroom to the real world!

Teaching ESL/EFL Reading
Instructor: Neil Anderson

Did you realize that reading is one of the most important skills you can teach? It's truly at the core of the other language skills—listening, speaking, writing, and grammar. In this course, you'll learn how to show your students the value of reading and really motivate them to become strong readers. You'll also get to explore the ins and outs of intensive reading, extensive reading, reading comprehension, reading rate, and much more. The skill of reading not only gives your students what they need to be successful learners, but it also makes them more self-confident and eager to learn their whole life long.

Spanish in the Classroom
Instructor: Tara Williams

Learn the essential Spanish for teachers so you can bridge the communication gap with your Spanish-speaking students and parents! Rest assured that that this course won't be your typical high school Spanish course. We've tossed out long vocabulary lists and complex grammar rules and replaced them with games and stories to make learning easy, painless, and even fun. In addition to basic greetings and general Spanish vocabulary, you'll master words and phrases that directly relate to the classroom, such as classroom objects, front-office receptions, action verbs and commands, study skills, registration, course names, school rules and discipline, and parent-teacher conference vocabulary. By the end of this course, you'll be well on your way to being a Spanish speaker and communicating effectively with the Spanish-speakers all around you. ¡Vamos! (Let's go!)

Singapore Math: Number Sense and Computational Strategies
Instructor: Anni Stipek

Do your students cringe when it's time to pull out their math books? For many students, basic math is a struggle. But for students and teachers in Singapore, math is much more intuitive. And Singaporean students have been top mathematics performers for over a decade! Using a layered curriculum founded on solid number sense and concrete, pictorial, and abstract computational strategies, Singaporean teachers make math purposeful, interesting, and relevant. In this teacher training course, you'll learn their secrets and come away knowing how to have meaningful math lessons in your classroom.

Praxis I Preparation
Instructor: Nicole Taylor-Buckner

Are you a prospective teacher who needs to pass the Praxis I Exam? If so, this is the course for you! You'll develop all the skills you need as we review and prepare for everything the test includes. You'll improve your reading, writing, and math skills so that you'll be ready to pass all three parts of the Praxis I. You'll learn useful test-taking strategies and get plenty of practice test questions. You'll even have the opportunity to take full-length practice tests.

Teaching ESL/EFL Grammar
Instructor: Diane Larsen-Freeman

Do you feel confident enough with your knowledge of English grammar to teach grammar to ESL/EFL students? In this course, you'll learn about the importance of teaching grammar to EFL and ESL students and develop a greater appreciation for the rules of grammar. Get ready to discover new teaching methods that will both engage and challenge your students!

Web 2.0: Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts
Instructor: Robin Sellers

In this course, you'll learn how to create your own blog, wiki, and audio and video podcast. Through hands-on activities in each lesson, you'll practice working with free Web 2.0 tools like Blogger, Wikispaces, and YouTube, and you'll explore opportunities to use tools like these for personal, business, educational, and political projects. You'll also learn tricks for promoting your Web 2.0 content and for driving visitors to your brand-new sites.

Teaching ESL/EFL Vocabulary
Instructor: Paul Nation

Do you know what the different types of vocabulary are and which ones your students most need to learn when you're teaching ESL? In this course, you'll discover how to determine what kinds of vocabulary to have your students focus on and how to help them learn it in the most effective ways. Teaching vocabulary across the four strands of meaning-focused input (listening and reading), meaning-focused output (speaking and writing), deliberate learning strategies, and fluency development is essential. You'll also explore how you can work with vocabulary in content-based instruction and see how to monitor your students' learning. By the end of this course, you'll understand what makes a well-balanced vocabulary course and how to plan one.