The Mission of Learning Alliances and Innovative Educational Programs is to significantly improve the quality of life for youth by expanding their educational, vocational, and employment opportunities under a unified collaboration with local school districts.

Conflict Resolution & Classroom Management

  • Provide coaching methods in order to improve the quality of interactions between students, teachers and other school personnel, through effective classroom and educational support systems.
  • Accommodate a variety of behavioral strategies and individualized learning styles, in order to maximize student learning in a safe and orderly climate.
  • Increase order and safety within the school by evaluating current discipline referral plan or by developing discipline referral plans.
  • Work with school staff to collect and review data in order to develop an effective discipline program to include strategies for handling persistent discipline problems.
  • Assist in the design of a discipline program to include preventative strategies and intervention techniques.

Curriculum Development

  • Help schools to develop effective and consistent high-quality instruction for all students, in alignment with state-adopted and national standards.
  • Enhance the staff’s understanding and use of diverse instructional strategies to accommodate varying learning styles such as: Differentiated instruction, small-group instruction, guided reading, skills-focused lessons, inquiry learning, tiering for readiness levels, interdisciplinary planning and creating rigorous learning stations in a multi-dimensional classroom.

Data-Driven Decision Making

  • Structure collaboration for student-oriented, progressive data analysis.
  • Engage teachers and administrative personnel in the data mining process as a means of differentiating instruction
  • Identify and eliminate barriers to constructive, regular use of student assessment / achievement data, and build faculty’s skill in interpreting data sensibly and in a timely manner.
  • Review student performance data in order to make recommendations to the schools’ leadership team.
  • Have data anchor classroom decisions, supervisory conversations, error analysis discussions and monitor school-based professional learning communities.

Leadership Capacity

  • Help schools develop leadership at multiple levels in order to sustain, renew and transform teaching and learning for all students. Increase leadership capacity over time as the most productive way to bring about improvements that can be sustained.
  • Create or enhance existing leadership teams that clearly understand, based on a specifically developed rubric, what their exact responsibilities and roles are in terms of enhancing instruction.
  • Develop and enhance leadership responsibilities by creating a rubric that builds on leading curriculum alignment, providing pertinent resources and quality professional development for staff on the use of alignment resources, align school observation forms with district priorities, monitor the effectiveness of the demonstrations of learning, and align and ensure strong articulation of standards and objectives among the grades in each school by providing vertical articulation.
  • Create an instructional feedback rubric that provides guidance to each administrator in clearly explaining the concept goals and rationale behind instructional feedback and focuses feedback on the key actions and the instructional behaviors each school values most, allowing each school administrator to tie the feedback process to meaningful and targeted professional staff development.
  • Support school-based Leadership Teams in leading the vertical alignment of decision making by powerful professional collaboration in problem-solving and planning groups.

Coaching and On-Site Technical Assistance

  • Professional Development sessions include follow up technical assistance through e-mail, webinars, teleconferences, podcasts, blogs, and wikis in order to support and enhance participants’ professional learning and the application and assessment of that learning. Participants take part in or use a discussion room or bulletin board to talk about the skills, review additional materials posted, and interface with the facilitator/coach on-line or face-to-face in implementing the newly learned skills or knowledge.

Promoting Social Emotional Development

All adults who spend significant time with young children have a responsibility to help them develop to their full potential. Children’s experiences in their earliest years affect how their brains work, the way they respond to stress, and their ability to form trusting relationships. In this workshop, we’ll define SEC, review the key components of effective Social Emotional Learning and the 5 key competencies of SEC, and teachers will develop insights on how to cultivate, nurture, and promote SEC in the learning environment, including the importance of self-reflection and collaborative, supportive relationships.

The Role of Resilience in Supporting Child Well-Being

Resilience helps young children cope with change and adversity. Resilience can be enhanced by the strengths of the family, the environments in which a child spends time, and within the child. These strengths are also referred to as protective factors and are closely linked to social-emotional well-being. This workshop will present teachers with practical ways to help build resilience in even the youngest of children.

Becoming a Responsive Caregiver

When adults change how they interact with a preschooler to match a child’s needs and development, they are practicing responsive caregiving. Responsive caregiving results in a stable, enduring, and secure relationship, which is critical for healthy social emotional development. Within the security of this relationship, an infant or toddler/preschooler feels safe, confident, and can explore their world with curiosity. In this workshop, we will explore the ten characteristics of responsiveness identified by Dunst and Kassow that support healthy student teacher relationships.

Managing Challenging Preschoolers– No, they’re not out to get you!

When a child behaves inappropriately, we either attempt to redirect the child, which is only half of the formula since there are times when you must intervene or we select punitive or aversive interventions that produce immediate relief, but have no long-term impact. The key is to uncover why the behavior is presenting itself, search for patterns or cues that alert you to the potential onset of the behavior and to create an environment that reduces the frequency of the behaviors. In this workshop, we’ll address some of the more common behavior challenges and how to create an environment to reduce the probability or frequency of the behaviors occurring.

The Role of Temperament on Behavior

Understanding a child’s temperament is crucial in the school situation. Temperamental traits affect both a child’s approach to a learning task and the way they interact with their teacher and classmates. If the school’s demands on them go against the grain of these traits, learning may be difficult indeed. Hence a teacher has a need to know not only a child’s capacities for learning but also their temperamental style. In this workshop we’ll review the 3 temperaments and nine characteristics of temperament, as well as how to manage the challenges each temperamental style presents for teachers and children.

Bonding and Attachment

This training addresses the process of human relationship building and the social-emotional development of infants and toddlers. The relationships young children have with adults and the skills that build effective relationships will be discussed.

Positive Discipline

Positive discipline involves both proactive and reactive interventions. This training will address what motivates children’s negative and positive behaviors. It is very helpful to understand the motivation and reasons behind certain behaviors. We will identify strategies educators can use that encourage appropriate behaviors in children.

The Art of Storytelling

Children these days are over-stimulated. Technology inundates their lives – personal DVD players, hand-held game systems, and children’s programming itself is the definition of over-stimulation. But what if we had the chance to capture their atten-tion long enough to get them to realize that the best kind of brain activity available to them is an exhilarating story time? This interactive workshop will engage participants while passing along strategies to engage children with something as sim-ple as Storytelling. This interactive workshop will address how to use dramatic play, intonation, voice and imagination to bring stories to life. The children in your class will learn to love reading before they can read. Storytime will turn into an adventure instead of a 20 minute period where you spend most of your time trying to keep all the children engaged.

A Head Start on Science

Science is a natural curriculum for early learners. This goal of this workshop is to increase staff members’ ability to create settings that encourage children to discover and explore the world around them. Concrete lesson plans in chemistry, biology, physics and environmental science will be shared through interactive science activities.

Engaging Families: Creating a Meaningful Family Engagement Plan

Children whose parents are involved in their education benefit academically and generally exhibit better behaviors. Positive experiences stimulate enthusiasm and curiosity in both parents and children. In this workshop teachers will develop a Family Engagement Plan to effectively communicate with families, manage their resources around family engagement, and design activities that encourage parental engagement.

Brain Development and Learning– What every caregiver should know

The human brain is built over time through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues through adulthood. The early years are critically important because a child’s early life experiences create the foundation for their lifelong learn-ing, behavior, and their physical and mental health. This workshop session presents basic easy-to-understand brain develop-ment information and offers opportunities for discovering new ways to foster healthy brain development in your program.

Literacy Development

Almost half of America’s fourth graders read below their grade level and 6.4 million children between kindergarten and third grade face an illiterate future. Early literacy intervention is critical. Teachers will learn strategies to support the skills critical for literacy learning and the role brain development plays.

Child Abuse and Neglect: Identification and Reporting

Early childhood educators are the first non-family members to regularly see children outside the home. This allows them to see children who may be victims of child abuse. This training addresses how to recognize abuse and what to do if suspected.