Summer Learning with Green Hills AEA!

Check out all summer course offerings here!

1. Fierce Accountability
1. June 18th in Red Oak - Course #168537
2. Accountability is the single most powerful, most desired, yet least understood characteristic of a successful organizational culture. Consider how much time and energy is spent covering up problems and creating excuses for why things did or did not happen. Accountability enables individuals and teams to shift the focus away from excuses and on to overcoming obstacles, learning from mistakes, and achieving goals. Holding people accountable generates anxiety. Inspiring ownership grows leaders. Fierce Accountability is an instructor-led workshop that explores the cost of blaming, protecting, defending, and playing it safe. Develop a new context about accountability—one in which you and your team welcome responsibility, and deliver agreed-upon results, despite obstacles.
2. Cass Co. School to Garden 
1. June 18th -19th in Atlantic -  Course #154163
2. A 2-day class and independent teamwork time to help school staff gain the skills needed to plan, create, and maintain a garden. Groups of 3 staff (teachers, food service, administrators) (PK-5) who will tie garden learning to the classroom, and food to the cafeteria. Sessions will focus on a particular garden subject and provide time to meet with school teams to plan a garden
3. **Prerequisite:  A 1 hour CE class to help school staff gain the skills needed to plan, create, and maintain a garden tying garden learning to the classroom core standards
3. Special Education for Administrators
1. June 18th and June 26th, location TBD - Course #160466
2. The course will focus on what school administrators need to know about special education. Principals will understand:
1. Core special education legal foundations (regulations, rules, and procedures) and entitlements as well as hear about current special education litigation across the United States.
2. How special education is not a program or a place, but a set of services tailored to the needs of individual students.
3.  Techniques for ensuring both compliance and quality of special education services and the AEA’s responsibility for General Supervision.
4. Important stuff about the web IEP system.
5. Special education teacher licensure, with particular attention to requirements for alternate assessment.
4. Mentor "ReBoot" Camp
1. June 17th in Red Oak- Course #180056 or June 24th-25th in Avoca -Course #180057
2. June 17th -Trained Mentors will refresh skills and strategies used when consulting, collaborating and coaching beginning teachers. We will take another look at the importance of relationship building and understanding differences between generations. Participants will also receive new conversation frameworks and have an opportunity to practice
3. June 24th and 25th- Need to refresh your learning from previous Mentor Training?  Join us as we dive back into the Mentor roles of Consultant, Collaborator and Coach.  How much time should you spend in each role?  What are the skills and strategies that empower you to be a growth agent to your Mentee? How can you effectively build a relationship of trust with your Mentee?  Participants will review previously learned skills such as active listening and effective questioning techniques.  They will also leave with some new conversation templates and frameworks under their belt.  And we will have fun doing it!
5. The Nurtured Heart Approach
1. July 29th, 30th, 31st or August 1st in Council Bluffs OR August 8th or 9th in Red Oak -Course #180133
2. The Nurtured Heart Approach (NHA) is social-emotional curriculum for embedding relationships within the classroom content created by Howard Glasser, NYU - educated psychotherapist. NHA focuses on making a positive impact on children with behavior management. The Nurtured Heart Approach will teach students the 3 Stands, that when committed to, become a powerful means of transforming children. Students will learn how to recognize and energize others by using active recognition, experiential recognition, and proactive recognition. In addition, the students will develop clear expectations of appropriate behavior and learn how to consistently enforce rules and provide immediate consequences through resetting with reteaching of expectations.
6. High Impact Strategies
1. July 30th and 31st in Red Oak - Course #180174
2. This course will provide an overview of the Gradual Release of Responsibility instructional framework. The Gradual Release of Responsibility framework provides teachers with common language to describe critical instructional moves, enhancing the collaborative capacity of a PLC or entire building.  Participants will explore all phases of Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey’s classroom model, and learn about specific, high impact instructional strategies that align with the framework. During the two day workshop, participants will examine instructional strategies to use during Focused Instruction, Guided Instruction, Student Collaboration, and Independent Practice. All strategies highlighted will have a high effect size, according to John Hattie’s meta analysis work.  Participants will also explore and experience ways to create student centered classrooms and enhance teacher student relationships. Establishing these conditions ensures a whole child approach to instruction and has a high effect size on student learning.
3. **Note - Materials Needed!  This course will be using the book The Teacher Clarity Playbook, A Hands on Guide to Creating Learning Intentions and Success Criteria for Organized, Effective Instruction. 
7. Connections Matter - Early Childhood
1. August 1st in Avoca - Course #160583
2. This professional learning opportunity will provide teachers with information about how adverse childhood experiences or childhood trauma may affect the growing brain and contribute to a child’s behavior. Participants will discuss what it looks like to be trauma sensitive in early childhood settings and how resiliency can be learned through relationships.
8. Mindful Games-How to Make Learning Mindfulness in the Classroom Fun and Engaging 
1. August 8th and 9th in Council Bluffs - Course #180108
2. The course, Mindful Games:  How to make learning mindfulness in the classroom fun and engaging educators will follow through power point explanations of what mindfulness is and how it can help children socially, cognitively and behaviorally.  The educators will also explore practices of mindfulness such as breathing, guided meditation, sensory work, and body movement. Through the text required for the class,  “Mindful Games:  Sharing mindfulness and meditation with kids, families and teens.”  “Mindfulness Activity Cards: 55 ways to share mindfulness and meditation with kids, families and teens.” , participants will further explore activities and games of how to make mindfulness and meditation fun and engaging in their own classrooms. Teachers will document the process of adapting these techniques to their classrooms through the use of  “Mindfulness Moments Daily Journal.” by Molly Schreiber..