• Guided Independent Study courses are taken as a tutorial under the guidance of one of our Instructors and may earn 3 graduate credits or 4.5 CEU credits.

  
  

• Any class can be requested for your school or district by contacting us.

New! Creative Writing in the Classroom

This class is designed to give you daily activities to use with your students. The activities will be centered on building writing skills using subject, purpose and audience through the reading/writing connection. Included will be writing prompts, organizational tools and rubrics. These activities can be used with the Six Traits of Writing Program. You will share your activities with the other course participants through a private Google Groups site that is user friendly. Come join us as we creative, fun, motivating activities that increase student’s writing skills.

Since there will be no class meetings, this course is offered for CEUs only at the reduced rate of $550.

Open Enrollment

New! Experiencing New Children’s Literature with your Students (K-6)

This course is designed to give you the latest children’s literature to experience with your students. Participants will be provided with a children’s literature book list with books published within the last 2 years. Model activities and lessons will be provided to use with your students. You will be able to adapt and create your own lessons. At the end of each book unit, you and your students will rate the books. At the completion of the class, the ratings will be compiled and distributed so you and your students can see the most popular new books as decided by participating Maine classrooms. 4.5 CEU’S will be given for this class acceptable for Maine DOE recertification. Educational Technicians and other educators may adapt this class to meet their needs. Come join us as we experience and evaluate the newest in Children’s Literature!

Since there will be no class meetings, this course is offered for CEUs only at the reduced rate of $550.

Open Enrollment

Helping You Help the Young Learner (Pre K-2)

Here is the opportunity to learn several new games and easy-to-do learning activities for the young child. Increase your classroom repertoire with creative play and imaginative routines that are designed for the young learner. This course will also motivate you for your day in the early childhood classroom! A great amount of emphasis will be placed on practical ways to help you continue to be a successful teacher. When you feel comfortable and are enjoying your day in the classroom, so are your young students. This class will be a fun and lively way for you to work with your peers on teaching skills that help you help the young learner!

Since there will be no class meetings, this course is offered for CEUs only at the reduced rate of $550.

Open Enrollment

Successful Strategies in Today's Classroom for Education Technicians

This study begins with a one-day workshop and is completed by web-based distance learning for full course credit.

 

Some of the topics covered include:

• Roles and Responsibilities of Educational Technicians
• Organization and Management of the Classroom
• Developing Instructional Skills
• Effective Communication with Students, Teachers, and Other Professionals
• Ethical Issues for Educational Technicians

Auburn

May 6 4-7pm Orientation seminar for online course

Saco

April 22: 5-8 pm Orientation seminar for online course

Instructor: Stephen York

Supervising, Evaluating, and Training Educational Technicians

Educational Technicians play significant roles in supporting instruction and services in public schools. Their effectiveness is to a large part influenced by the quality of the training and supervision they receive. These duties are often largely the reponsibility of the teachers who work with these Educational Technicians. This training program helps prepare special educators, classroom teachers and school administrators to assign, train, supervise and evaluate these vital members of the classroom team.

The training program features five units of web-based independent study with various activities and on-line resources. Activities integrate the content of the self-study lessons with application to actual or simulated situations. The five units include the Role of Educational Technicians in the Classroom, along with a look at Training, Supervision, Evaluation, and Programs. The study includes a survey of the Professional and Ethical Issues in the Utilization of Educational Technicians. It will include reading and reviewing materials around best practices.

Instructor: Stephen York

"Away From It All"— Writers on the Wilderness of Maine

For centuries, the wilderness of Maine has captured the minds and imagination of writers—past and present. In 1864, Henry David Thoreau wrote the classic, The Maine Woods. It remains in print and read in the 21st Century. Louise Dickenson Rich wrote a bestseller about her experiences, We Took to the Woods. Aroostock County’s Dorothy Boone Kidney wrote three books specifically about the Allagash: Away From It All, A Home in the Wilderness, and Wilderness Journal. Recently, Baron Wormser, former Poet Laureate wrote about this life Maine in his memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid.

 

This course invites participants to explore the rich literature about the Maine wilderness, and the writers who have lived in and written about it. Further, we will also examine the thesis of Rick Louv’s seminal work, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, and consider its implications for the present and future generations of Mainers.

Beyond Words: Teachers as Critical Readers

Mortimer Adler believed that reading was a life-long art form that required continually practice like any other art forms like playing a musical instrument, painting, cooking, etc. Adler wrote in his classic, HOW TO READ A BOOK (1940), " . . . most of us do not regard reading as a complicated activity, involving many different steps in each of which we can acquire more and more skill through practice, as in the case of any other art. We may not even think that there is an art of reading. We tend to think of reading as if it were something as simple and natural to do as looking or walking. . . . . Knowing how to real well [is] like any other art or skill. There [are] rules to learn and to follow. Through practice good habits must be formed. There [are] no insurmountable difficulties about it. Only willingness to learn and patience in the process required."

This study offers the opportunity for teachers to improve their own skills in the "art of reading." Using Mortimer Adler's classics (1940) and (1972), we will practice our own art of becoming better readers and thereby better teachers of "reading across the curriculum," by examining Adler's work and then taking on the challenging analysis of teaching written by the late, notable Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire. Freire's work on Critical Pedagogy will offer teachers the opportunity to enhance their own practice of reading and to reflect on Freire's critical analysis of post-modern education.

Brave New World: Literary Perspectives on Reading and Democracy

The vital relationship of literacy, the freedom of the press, and democratic participation is considered through the lens of four classic novels: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Participants will reflect on the implications of these perspectives on their teaching practice in a media-driven culture that is growing in its resistance to reading.

Instructor: Dean Stephen York

Give Them "Roots and Wings" the Power of Story in Teaching and Learning for Teachers and Educational Technicians K-12

Stories are powerful tools for teaching children important Life lessons.  Indeed, storytelling provides an enriching experience for students:  to learn about the past, to affirm important values for today and to explore their future ambitions.  The sharing of stories ignites the imagination and increases the appreciation for learning about the people and places in the world around us.  And, most importantly, it provides young students with a unique opportunity to travel within themselves on a wonderful journey of self-discovery. This Independent Study will help educators:

• develop new, creative ways to present stories to young people

• build skills in reading and telling stories

• identify several, great story and storytelling resources

• deepen  their own understanding and appreciation for the “Power of Story”

Instructor: Dean Stephen York

Great American Writers: A Self-directed Study

New! How Did We Get Here From There?—Historical Perspectives on Contemporary Issues in Schools

New! "The Life You Save May Be Your Own": The Imaginative Literature of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was one of the most important writers from the Deep South in the mid-twentieth century. Though she had a short life (1925-1964), O’Connor’s influence is long-reaching. Several of her books were published after her death. In 1971, for example, O’Connor was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for Fiction for The Complete Stories. She was only the second twentieth-century writer (after William Faulkner) to have her work collected for the Library of America, the definitive edition of American authors.

Alfred Kazin wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “She was not just the best ‘woman writer’ of this time and place; she expressed something secret about America, called ‘the South’ with that transcendent gift for expressing the real spirit of a culture that is conveyed by those writers . . . who become nothing but what they see. Completeness is one word for it: relentlessness, unsparingness would be others. She was a genius.” In 1979, John Huston directed the film, Wise Blood, based on the Flannery O’Connor’s novel.

This Guided Independent Study (GIS) offers students the possibility to delve deeply in Flannery O’Connor’s “Deep South” and her perspective of the human experience. Students will read O’Connor’s novels, short stories, essays, and book of letters. Consideration will also be given to the rich biographical and literary resources regarding this seminal writer.

Teachers, and lovers of literature, will find rich resources for their students and for themselves.

Instructor: Dean Stephen York

Teaching: A Novel Approach

In a culture of unprecedented demands on teachers from federal and state mandates, systems issues and challenging pressures from a variety of stakeholders in schools, teachers need time to pause and reflect on their vocation. This course offers a "novel" opportunity for teachers to do so and to remember all of the good reasons why they entered the teaching profession in the first place.

Participants will select, read, and reflect on teaching through the lens of literature: the novel, memoir, biography. Throughout this venue, teachers will have the opportunity to explore the vast numbers of stories about teaching and to reflect on their own practice.

This course is also offered as an independent study.

Teaching in the Block: Strategies for Engaging Learners

New! Their Voices Were Not Silent—Women Writers from Maine

Whatever Happened to Childhood?—On Growing Up in Today’s World

“Children are the messages that we send out to a time that we will never see.” --Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood

 

In this course, postmodern childhood and adolescence will be considered in their historical, psychological, cultural, and developmental contexts. Throughout this study, students will read and reflect in a process journal on the writing and research of seminal thinkers such as: Neil Postman (The Disappearance of Childhood), David Elkind (The Hurried Child; All Grown Up and Nowhere to Go; Reinventing Childhood), Robert Coles (Children of Crisis—a 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning book), Carol Gilligan (In a Different Voice), and Lawrence Kohlberg (Approach to Moral Education), among others. Students will use an Individualized Learning Plan applying Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, to consider the complex challenges that children face, as they develop in a global village. The study concludes with a project-based learning experience and action/reflection paper.

This course may be taken for 4.5 CEU credit (acceptable to the Maine Department of Education for teacher recertification) or for 3 graduate credits (through arrangement between The American Institute for Creative Education (AICE) and Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.) An undergraduate degree is a prerequisite for graduate credit. It is offered as a Guided Independent Study (GIS) and will be offered in 2009 in weekend and summer intensive sessions.