General Education PLA Courses
Assessing Student Learning: Participants will understand balanced assessment and develop tools and skills for assessing students in a more meaningful way. Topics include authentic assessment, questioning, formative assessments, aligned assessments, quality assessment practices, and more.
Building Vocabulary: Educators will learn how to promote students’ vocabulary development.
Early Childhood Pre-K: Effective Interactions and Meaningful Conversations: This course provides information and resources for effective teacher-child interactions that support early childhood learning & development. This course introduces MDE’s new Pre-K and early childhood center’s evaluation tool: Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS). Participants will receive specific support in using meaningful conversations within the classroom to enhance students’ early language and literacy development.
Effectively Managing the Classroom: This Classroom Management course is designed to provide teachers a pathway to increase student achievement by creating an environment conducive to learning.
Engaging Students in the Classroom: The Engaging Students in the Classroom course is designed to help teachers increase student achievement by creating a classroom culture where engagement is the standard.
Formative Assessments: Purpose, design and use: This class begins by taking the learner through an explanation of what formative assessments are and are not. Learners will have a clear understanding of the purpose of formative assessment. There are many ways to conduct formative assessment and learners will be exposed to many different methods, beyond the typical exit tickets. Finally, learners will be shown how to extract data from a given formative assessment and how to use the data to drive and improve instruction in their classroom.
Grant Writing for Educators: Interested in gaining more resources for your classroom? This class is designed for beginning grant writers and covers locating grant opportunities for teachers through writing and submitting proposals.
Motivating Students to Learn: The Motivating Student to Learn Professional Learning Academy (PLA) is designed to provide teachers with numerous invaluable tools to become great motivator and create a positive learning experience for students.
Motivation: Teaching With Pizzazz!: Motivation is a force used within the educational system to encourage student learning and increase content understanding. Participants will learn how intrinsic and extrinsic motivations affect successful student learning.
Organized Classroom Chaos: Are you looking for new and creative ways to engage and motivate your students? Each week we will look at different areas and how we can use these areas to help keep students excited about learning. Differentiation, STEAM, excitement/motivation, teacher communities, and building relationships will all be explored during this class to help you take your classroom to next level of engagement! Teachers of all levels of learning will be able to use these ideas and adjust them easily to best fit their classroom.
Response to Intervention (RTI): Effective Instruction for All Students: Participants will use strategies for successful implementation of RTI, which will help to ensure that all students graduate from high school ready for college or a skilled career.
The Inclusion Classroom: An Explanation of Inclusion and Review of Inclusive Practices: In this course, participants will review the concepts of inclusion and, upon completion of the course, be able to implement a variety of strategies that promote inclusive practices. With inclusion being such a widely used practice, it is important that educators understand this concept and how to promote inclusive practices in their school.
Transforming Your Classroom with a Growth Mindset: Growth Mindset is more than a buzzword; it’s a lifestyle. Growth mindset applies to academics, behavior, and overall wellness. It also applies to students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Creating a classroom environment based on a growth mindset can increase productivity, promote learning, encourage risk taking, and transform personal interactions.
Using Music to Enhance Classroom Instruction: Is there value to using music in the classroom? Participants will research music’s benefits, as well as learn how to use rhythm, rhymes, and music in the regular classroom - from games that can be used as assessments to using recorded music as writing prompts. This course is geared primarily for elementary teachers, but those who teach secondary can learn strategies to be adapted for older students.
What is Brain-Based Learning? : In young children the brain is highly adaptable. But as we age, the brain has to work harder to master new tasks. That’s why many scientists believe it is important to keep challenging your brain to learn new things. Applying these brain-based strategies will make learning much more interesting for people of all ages.
Professional Learning Academy Application