Professional Development Courses

We are excited to announce that we will launch our newly designed website on September 3, 2020. Students will be able to access our website using the same URL pdc.laverne.edu. As a leader in the field of online distance education for over 20 years, we look forward to continuing to bring you graduate, non-degree semester credit courses that are cutting-edge and immediately applicable to your classroom! The new website will be available soon!

New Course! EDUC 718S Mindful Teachers; Mindful Students This course offers many options for learning and teaching mindfulness techniques to their students in the classroom. For teachers and students alike, mindfulness practices set the tone for the day, ease transitions from subject to subject, and provides a safe and predictable pattern that helps students concentrate. The course explores ways that mindfulness practices might be adopted schoolwide. Throughout the course, re...search is present on the effectiveness of mindfulness practices. Enroll Today! https://www.pdcourses.net/course.php?pid=317 This course is also part of the Motivation and Classroom Management Certificate. Click the link below to learn more! https://www.pdcourses.net/certificate.php?cert_id=3

A classroom management plan is an all-encompassing written outline of strategies, expectations, and teaching philosophies that serve as the bedrock for a successful year of teaching. This important collection of documents includes procedural breakdowns for classroom functions, including seating arrangements, disciplinary plans, and classroom protocols to shape instruction and classroom culture. An expansive and thorough classroom management plan empowers educators to teach to each student’s potential and maintain an enriching course of study for all students. https://www.pdcourses.net/pdc-news.php

The Summer Semester open enrollment continues until August 31st. Students may enroll in up to 15 credits at any time during this semester, and they may take up to one full year to complete coursework. Hurry! ... https://www.pdcourses.net/index.php

What should teachers know about reading? Experts discuss how explicit phonics instruction is the necessary foundation. Check out this article to learn more about the science of reading. https://blogs.edweek.org//what_teachers_should_know_about_

Reading is THE essential academic skill. Yet in every literate culture it is a difficult skill to acquire. Research in Cognitive Neuroscience addresses this problem: the brain is well prepared for understanding speech, but is poorly prepared for understanding writing. This course integrates research on the teaching of reading from brain science, psychology, education, linguistics, and other fields. It suggests best practices from very early childhood through preschool, kinder...garten, and all grades through high school. It is with this background information on early childhood reading development that helps shape understanding and teaching methods across all grade levels. Specific instructional methods are described while keeping focused on comprehension, motivation, decoding, and ways to individualize. Reading problems, ranging from social and cultural through biological, are described and followed by ways of overcoming them. The position of this course is that there is no obvious transition from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" as both processes continue indefinitely. Enroll Today! https://www.pdcourses.net/course.php?pid=295