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    your schedule
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• We've helped educators at more than 15,000 schools

  • "This is how I'm going to get my continuing education credits from now on."

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  • "This course lives up to its promise. It is real and easy to implement. It's made a big difference in my teaching!"

    - Frank Martin, Principal, The Stevens School

  • "I absolutely love the class I am taking. I am taking it to improve my leadership skills. It's been great!"

    - Connie Cullip, Special Education Supervisor, Rudyard, MI EUPISD




• • "The Coursework is convenient and interesting! I definitely recommend the program."

    - Jennifer Desloges, 7th Grade English Teacher Plymouth Elementary, Plymouth, NH

  • "I am through about 4 lectures and am loving the ease and simplicity of how it all works! Everything is so easy to navigate."

    - LuAnn Funk, 2nd Grade Teacher, Case Avenue Elementary

• • "I took this course with some reservation, but it proved to be very helpful. Some of the simple things that I learned made a huge impact on the amount of energy my students put into learning"

    
    

    "It was easy to do. I got to work at my own pace, explore all the websites and absorb the materials As a 28 year veteran I do believe you can teach old dogs new tricks."

    - Joseph Fusco, Physics Teacher Lodi High School, NJ

Course 1070

Keeping the Focus: Increase Concentration and Attention Spans in the Classroom

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Apply this towards your professional development requirements

Tuition: $575 for all 3 modules complete

Whether your students struggle or excel, you probably fight a constant battle – how do you keep students focused on the lessons and activities that you’ve painstakingly built into your lesson plans? With the techniques and strategies provided in this course, you’ll be able to identify students' strengths, weaknesses and interests, so that each and every activity caters to their personal needs. You’ll also encounter strategies for teaching students that suffer from diagnosed attention disorders like ADD and ADHD – a condition affecting 1 in every 10 students.

What You'll Learn

Comprehension and reading skills are essential components in the foundation of learning. When students struggle at reading and comprehension, they face an uphill battle in all classroom activities and lessons. With special attention and focus, strengths can be identified in these students and their difficulties can be overcome. By addressing individual strengths and weaknesses, educators can support all of their students without fear of leaving struggling readers behind.

In this module, you will learn how to identify struggling readers and apply strategies that will engage every student in reading activities. You will discover:

• The steps and process of reading comprehension
• Howard Gardner’s 8 Multiple Intelligences
• The natural strengths of each of your students
• Strategies that focus on students’ strengths and interests
• Classroom activities that incorporate various strengths and intelligences

Highlights

The Comprehension Process

• Recognize the common characteristics of poor readers
• Understand the steps of comprehension
• Identify the reason that a student struggles with comprehension

Multiple Intelligences – Your "Smart Parts"

• Explore Howard Gardner’s 8 Multiple Intelligences
• Recognize common characteristics of each intelligence
• Identify students’ strongest intelligence

Strategies for Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary

• Identify strategies for each Multiple Intelligence
• Pinpoint students’ interests by understanding their strengths and intelligences
• Use strategies that focus on each students’ strengths and interests
• Incorporate classroom activities that incorporate all intelligences

What You'll Learn

Keeping the focus of an entire classroom is easier said than done. There are many reasons why students have attention problems, including depression, language deficits and delays in maturation. There are proven strategies for educators to get to the core of these issues to enhance the learning of their students. This module will help you:

• Understand why your students are struggling with attention span
• Create a classroom environment that caters to different learning experiences
• Hold students accountable for their behavior in the classroom without punishing them

Highlights

5 Key Steps to Improving Your Students’ Attention in Any Classroom

• 3 self-evaluations students can use to reflect on their behavior
• Simple quiz to test how well you are doing at recognizing and accommodating your students’ deficits
• How to positively motivate students by using positive reinforcement

Creating Student "Buy-In" through Goal-Setting

• How to make them see you as a mentor or coach to help them reach their goals
• Powerful worksheets that will make goal-setting easy
• Proven techniques to get them to keep on target

Holding a 7-Step Meeting with Students to Create a Positive Change

• How to create intrinsic reinforcers for long-lasting behavioral effects
• 3 Self-management strategies students can use to stay under control
• Comprehensive behavioral contract to help students understand what is expected of them

What You'll Learn

Did you know that nearly 10% of your students may suffer from some sort of attention disorder? Sadly, this number will continue to grow in the years to come. The successful educators of tomorrow must learn how to adapt and respond to this growing challenge. In this module, you’ll discover the most effective and up-to-date strategies for teaching students with diagnosed attention disorders.

Led by Ellen Arnold, Ed.D, a noted expert on attention-deficit disorders, this module will equip you with the tools and techniques to help you reach students with ADD/ADHD. You’ll learn how to eliminate boredom in your classroom and cultivate an environment that gets the most out of students who struggle with attention disorders.

In this module, you will:

• Improve your understanding of ADD/ADHD
• Expand your toolbox of strategies for working with students with ADD/ADHD
• Develop strategies to personalize instruction for students with attention disabilities
• Encounter dozens of proven strategies for preventing boredom

Highlights

Proven Strategies

• What works vs. what doesn’t
• Dispelling the commonly-held myths regarding ADD/ADHD
• Classroom rules that help engage distractible students
• Putting the ball in your students’ court

Effective Classroom Management Techniques

• Successful motivational theories
• Keeping your class running smoothly and efficiently
• Properly understanding the disability
• Preventing boredom by increasing creativity in students

Tools You Can Use Tomorrow

• Providing students with self-assessment tools
• Helping students discover their expertise
• Cultivating an environment of self-motivation
• Tapping into students’ individual strengths

The Virtual Teachers Lounge™

Check in with your peers and get answers to your questions – any time, 24/7. Taking this course will give you exclusive access to the thoughts, insights and experience of other educators and K-12 experts discussing your topics and giving you solutions and ideas for whatever is on your mind. In the Teachers' lounge, you can:

• Learn new, working strategies and solutions from other educators – live!
• Get answers to your toughest questions from top K-12 experts
• Discuss course topics with your peers and benefit from their experiences
• Share your success stories and best practices to benefit other teachers and administrators
• Get new perspectives, fresh ideas and guidance – whenever you need it.
• You can log whenever is most convenient for you, 24/7

All you have to do is sign up for this course, and you're in!

Connect with, hear from and get help from you peers.

Materials & Assessment

Lectures	Your lectures, delivered by one of the nation's leading, recognized experts on this topic, are presented in multiple parts to make listening and tracking your progress easier. You can listen to each as often as you like by playing it on your computer, downloading it to your iPod or other MP3 player, even burning it to CD. Listen wherever it is most convenient for you: at home, in your car; at the park; and whenever you like: before or after work, at night or on weekends. Many educators can complete a module in only a week.
Text Resources	Virtual text resources are downloadable and expand on the material covered in your lectures. They may include articles, web links to related materials and web sites, definitions of important terms and concepts, and a bibliography. All materials can be viewed on your computer or downloaded and printed.
Assessment	To receive your Certificate of Completion or Certificate of Attendance and earn Professional Development/Continuing Education units/credits/hours, you will need to complete all assessments and submit all final projects.
Virtual Teachers Lounge	To gain Professional Development credits or hours for any of these three modules, you must participate in the Virtual teachers Lounge discussion for that module. If you are not seeking credits or hours, participation in the Lounge is not mandatory, but you are still welcome to connect with and share your thoughts, questions, insights and experience with your peers at any time.