PD Online

ASCD PD Online courses make it easy and practical for educators to continue professional learning anytime and anywhere. The award-winning online courses are developed by noted experts and practitioners and address the most relevant topics facing educators today. Using a blend of learning media, the courses include opportunities to tailor content to your learning needs and collaborate with colleagues.

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The following courses are available:

Classroom Management: Building Effective Relationships

In this PD Online course, you'll investigate the various facets of classroom management. You will examine some common approaches to classroom management to find the best one for you, laying the foundation for your classroom management plan. You will then examine the student-teacher relationship and uncover the strategies that will support your approach to classroom management. Finally, you will learn how all of these pieces fit together to create a cohesive schoolwide model.

Classroom Management: Managing Challenging Behavior

Even the most experienced of teachers will struggle when students present behaviors that are disruptive, disrespectful, and potentially dangerous. These behaviors manifest themselves differently from student to student, and can often leave a teacher and other students anxiously looking for answers for how to restore order to the classroom and make it a productive, safe learning environment. In PD Online course Classroom Management: Managing Challenging Behavior, you’ll investigate the various characteristics of effective classroom management, classroom management models and tools, challenging behaviors, how to build positive relationships with students that’ll have an effect on their behavior, and how to prepare students to become sufficient 21st century learners.

Total Participation Techniques

This course will introduce participants to practical techniques for cognitively engaging students during lessons. These include the uses of on-the-spot techniques, hold-ups, total participation techniques (TPTs) that involve movement, and TPTs for guiding and supporting students in their note taking. Participants will explore essential elements in building a TPT-conducive classroom, where students feel free to share with minimal risks. Finally, participants will analyze the cognitive engagement that is present in a classroom lesson as they apply their new understandings to their own teaching or through peer observations.

STEM For All

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) based careers are a growing segment in the U.S. job market. However, the United States currently lacks the talent to fill a portion of these positions. Integrating STEM into the K-12 curriculum is imperative if the United States is to cultivate this talent from within. This course outlines the value of integrating STEM into the curriculum at each grade level and offers examples of ways that STEM has been integrated into the classroom and through cocurricular opportunities.

Technology in Schools: A Balanced Perspective

In this course, you will learn about the challenges and benefits of incorporating technology into instruction. You will discover engaging and meaningful ways to encourage proper technology integration in schools and work toward increasing access for all students. You will also examine the importance of helping students and their families think critically about the role technology plays in their daily live.

Special Education: From Goals to Growth

This course will help general and special education teachers better understand their roles for supporting students with special needs. Learners will also gain valuable insight for meeting both the letter and spirit of the law to ensure the success of special education students in the general education curriculum. Educators will understand how to create a culture of inclusion, implement multi-tiered systems of support, differentiate between accommodations and modifications, establish curriculum based goals for students, design growth plans, and apply various models of co-teaching.

The Art and Science of Teaching

In this course, Robert Marzano leads you on an exploration of the research behind effective classroom instruction as well as practical ways to put the research to work in the classroom. Using the strategies presented in the course, you'll be better equipped to meet the diverse needs of your students.

Blended Learning: An Introduction

This course will introduce you to the various blended learning models used throughout the country. It will explore the implications of a blended learning model and will guide you through online community building exercises that must happen in order for students to have successful online experiences.

Turning High-Poverty Schools into High-Performing Schools

In this course, you will gain new understandings of families living in poverty and the concrete steps that high-poverty, high-performing (HP/HP) schools have taken to improve outcomes for all students. You will also have opportunities to read research, case studies, and anecdotal reports of how schools have welcomed students and families living in poverty to transition from wherever they are into high-performing schools.

Building Teachers' Capacity for Success: Instructional Coaching Essentials

You will have the opportunity to deepen your knowledge and hone your instructional coaching skills. Whether your role is an instructional coach, department chair, team leader, curriculum specialist, teacher-mentor, or any other role designed to support classroom teachers' growth and development, this course is for you.

Fostering Resilient Learners

Each year, schools are encountering more and more students who are entering the classroom burdened by the overwhelming stress of trauma or psychological scars of neglect and abuse. After taking this course, learners will understand the ways that trauma affect the brain, learning, as well as tips and techniques on how to create a trauma sensitive classroom. Through self-reflection, application activities, readings, and videos, learners will come away with a sense of self, grace, and instructional strategies to foster resilient learners.

Enhancing Teaching With Technology

In this digital age, teachers and students alike are using mobile devices and other technology to teach and to learn. This course is designed for the classroom teacher who is looking for an introduction to the technology available to enhance teaching.

Grading Smarter, Not Harder

This course is based on the ASCD book Grading Smarter, Not Harder: Assessment Strategies That Motivate Kids and Help Them Learn (2014) by Myron Dueck. There are many reasons for educators to consider taking this course. Some districts have taken on grading and assessment changes and this course could help you with specific tools, resources, and research to substantiate and incorporate new methods. Perhaps you want to embark on standards-based grading and need some assistance separating academics and behavior. For others, these learning opportunities may be part of a quest to jump from being a good teacher to a great educator, and this can be a daunting task for anyone.

The Brain: Developing Lifelong Learning Habits

In The Brain: Developing Habits for Lifelong Learning, you will learn about the thinking and learning skills that today’s students should be cultivating in order to become successful adults in the dynamic, rapidly changing, and “flattened” world in to which they will graduate. You will be introduced to the idea of “habits of mind,” survey 16 distinct ways of seeing, understanding, and interacting with the world, and learn instructional strategies to help your students develop each of these thinking and learning “habits.” In Modules 3-6, you will also be provided with activity suggestions and materials that can be downloaded and used in the elementary or secondary classroom.

The Brain: Memory and Learning Strategies

In The Brain: Memory and Learning Strategies, you will learn about the physical structures of the human brain that create and retain memories—and how to use this information to improve your classroom teaching practice. The more you understand about how people form and retain memories, the more you will be able to help your students learn and use the academic content you are teaching them

Assessment: Designing Performance Assessments

This course makes connections between student motivation and types of assessment used in the classroom. It also covers how to unpack learning standards and benchmarks, so that all assessment yields information about student progress and mastery of instructional goals. Performance assessment can be designed in a multitude of ways, in which both students and teachers can work together to determine the best product or performance to exemplify student understanding, knowledge, and ability to use what they’ve learned.