Virtual Learning Communities
What if you could bring back more than just good intentions from professional learning experiences?
Our Virtual Learning Communities are different than most online courses in that each VLC has a facilitator who guides the course, provides valuable feedback, and fosters a community of learners. At EdQuiddity, we believe professional learning should:
- Model innovative practices
- Provide new learning
- Have participants design materials to use in school immediately
We now offer an option beyond our in-person professional learning! Online engagement, 25 hours of self-paced engagement, in addition to continual feedback and assistance, and video conference sessions. Work at times convenient for you and have fun challenging your pedagogical thinking.
Open Enrollment!! Offering open enrollment periods so you can begin, and complete, your course at a pace that works with your schedule.
Only $595 per seat or $4,950 for a 10-pack of seats.
Click the images below for course descriptions.
“…so different from the other ‘virtual’ courses…”
Danielle Crenny, Kindergarten Teacher
“…a wonderful job of providing teachers great resources”
Bryan Horn, HS English Teacher
“…extremely informative…”
Victoria Barthel, 8th Grade Mathematics Teacher
“…many takeaways from this course…”
Kristina Pace, 7th Grade Math Teacher
“…numerous resources, strategies, videos, and articles that I will use…”
Sarah Collins, Teacher
“…so excited to implement many of the strategies and techniques…”
Leslie Thompson, Resource Teacher
“…opened my eyes to different strategies in the classroom…”
“My VLC facilitator was amazing!”
“…absolutely loving this class…”
Available VLC Schedule
In this course, participants will engage with the “Ten Mindsets for Transformational Leadership” from Students Taking Charge: Implementation Guide for Leaders by Dr. Nancy Sulla, Julie Marks, and Tanya Bosco. Participants will gain insights, tools, and strategies for leading schools and districts in ways that transform practice and mindsets. They will design action plans to inspire the adaptive change at the core of schools focused on improving student achievement and experience through engagement, empowerment, and efficacy. They will engage in a variety of virtual settings over the course of each month and will engage in collaborative learning with other school and district leaders seeking the same transformational outcomes.
Syllabus
- Engage with Ten Mindsets across multiple activity lists throughout the course
- Gain insights, tools and resources for use in faculty meetings, observation conferencing, PLCs, learning walks, book clubs and more…
- View the Mindsets through a systems-based approach, making connections to key components of school and district goals, mission and vision
- Collaborate and engage with the authors and other school leaders across schools and districts
- Explore scenarios and develop actionable steps to take each month to move from engagement to empowerment to efficacy
Participants in this course will use Students Taking Charge: Implementation Guide for Leaders by Dr. Nancy Sulla, Julie Marks and Tanya Bosco as a resource. The assigned book must be purchased in advance. Access to MyQPortal is included for all participants while enrolled in the VLC. 25 contact hours.
Executive function is critical to all students’ academic achievement, and we now know it can be developed and accelerated. Enhance your academic lesson plans by fostering the six key aspects of executive function, intentionally building critical achievement prerequisites in students.
Syllabus
- Understanding how executive function is inextricably linked to the academic achievement of students at all developmental levels through the lens of six levels of increasingly complex life skills
- Understanding how executive function develops and how growth can be accelerated
- Understanding the difference between learning and practice activities, and the importance of purposeful “grappling” with content
- Developing learning and practice activities aimed at building executive function across the seven key components: working memory, cognitive flexibility, planning, reasoning, problem-solving, and self-regulation
- Creating a plan to implement structures that build executive function in the learning environment
- Learning to facilitate instruction by asking questions that lead to the development of greater executive function
Watch Dr. Nancy Sulla’s YouTube videos “Executive Function: The Missing Link to Student Achievement” and “All Students Can Learn with Executive Function“.
This course will use Dr. Nancy Sulla’s book, Building Executive Function: The Missing Link to Student Achievement as a resource. The assigned book must be purchased in advance. Access to MyQPortal is included for all participants while enrolled in the VLC. 25 contact hours.
Co-teaching classrooms can be powerful learning environments that maximize the effectiveness of two teachers to ensure that each and every student advances academically at accelerated levels. In a student-focused co-teaching classroom, both teachers have the flexibility to intensively help struggling students and see them make significant strides while challenging advanced students to new heights, bridging the achievement gap. This workshop is great for either teacher or both teachers in a partnership to attend.
Syllabus
- Build a stronger communication/collaboration partnership by understanding individual preferences for engagement in a partnership
- Explore the four core modalities of co-teaching; group & guide, dual-focus facilitation, balanced benchmark, and individualized inspiration
- Design co-teaching lessons that maximize the effectiveness of both teachers
- Learn to leverage formative assessment grids and questions so that both teachers work seamlessly with students
- Develop guidelines for students to participate successfully in a co-teaching classroom
Participants in this course will use It’s Not What You Teach But How by Dr. Nancy Sulla as a resource. The assigned book must be purchased in advance. Access to MyQPortal is included for all participants while enrolled in the VLC. 25 credit hours.
Deepen your knowledge of the power of problem-based learning in the classroom with a focus on implementation strategies. Design differentiated activity lists with multiple ways for students to learn, develop content facilitation grids and questions to support student-driven learning, and implement four types of formative assessments throughout the PBL unit. Note: Participants will apply course content to a previously created Problem-Based task and rubric.
Syllabus
- Designing activity lists that offer students required activities, choice activities (offering more than one way to build a concept or skill), and optional activities (offering extension opportunities to those who are advanced) from a brainstormed scaffold for learning
- Developing facilitation grids, laying out skills and concepts to assess student learning as the teacher facilitates instruction.
- Designing facilitation questions to move students to higher-order thinking.
- Understanding the role of the Four Types of Formative Assessment to support progress monitoring and growth.
- Creating a transfer task as a venue for students to apply, or “transfer,” their learning from an authentic PBL unit to a new real-world context
Watch IDE Corp.’s YouTube video “What’s the difference between project-based learning and problem-based learning?“.
This course will use your choice of Dr. Nancy Sulla’s books, Students Taking Charge In Grades K-5 or Students Taking Charge In Grades 6-12 as a resource. Only one is required. The assigned book must be purchased in advance. Access to MyQPortal is included for all participants while enrolled in the VLC. 25 contact hours.
Equitable and culturally responsive teaching practices raise the level of rigor and maximize potential for all learners. In this course you will explore the role of teacher as curator to reflect on your learning environment that accepts, appreciates, and advocates for cultural differences and social justice. Participants will explore and brainstorm problems focused on instructional and social equity. They will navigate and design culturally responsive resources, structures, and teaching practices to address bias in and beyond the classroom. This course will position participants to leverage students’ culture, language, and life experiences into rigorous academic achievement.
Syllabus
- Establish working definitions of equity, bias, and social justice in the classroom
- Develop strategies and structures for prioritizing a culturally responsive classroom through needs-identification, resource-access, and tuned-facilitation
- Develop learning activities through a culturally relevant lens to meet cognitive levels and learning styles
- Design opportunities for students to learn in an environment that promotes executive function through structures and facilitation
- Explore facilitation strategies to build and maintain relationships and trust with students
- Brainstorm problems to address social justice and equitable access and opportunity issues within the students’ neighborhood
Access to MyQPortal is included for all participants while enrolled in the VLC. 25 contact hours.
Participants in this course will use Reinventing the Classroom Experience by Dr. Nancy Sulla as a resource. The assigned book must be 
Explore a variety of classroom structures and strategies you can employ to help students take greater responsibility for their own learning, including self-assessment, goal-setting, self-regulation, learning choices, and reporting. Design a student responsibility plan that will work in your classroom.
As more schools honor brain research on learning by offering students longer class periods and fewer courses per day, teachers are challenged to rethink the use of time for teaching and learning. This workshop will explore two models for teaching in the block and offer participants opportunities to design units and lessons to use in the classroom. Whether you envision students fluidly moving through activities of their own choosing or a more structured beginning-middle-end approach, this workshop will position you to enhance learning in a block-scheduling situation.
The engineering design process is a set of steps for creating that which does not yet exist. Help your students develop thoughtful solutions to open-ended problems, no matter what the subject area. Design authentic, open-ended problems for your students to solve using IDE Corp.’s Design Process.
We’re all familiar with STE(A)M courses and STE(A)M hours; but what about a classroom or school that exudes a culture of STE(A)M thinking? How can we position students to use design thinking, exemplify the use of math practice standards, and experience the cross-cutting concepts of the Next Generation Science Standards throughout the day? This course will focus on designing instruction to reflect a STE(A)M culture across all activities of the day. Participants will design lesson plans and structures to use with their students.
“Students don’t know what they don’t know.” (Sulla 2015) How do you get a clear sense that all students are learning? In this course, you will explore strategies to become a masterful facilitator of learning, becoming a guide in the learning process. While the standards drive the “what” of classroom instruction, teachers have power of the “how”. Keeping the end goal in mind helps to select and design appropriate instructional activities for student mastery. Become a facilitator of instruction to meet the demands of standards-based curriculum and actively engage with students during their thinking process.
This course will use your choice of Dr. Nancy Sulla’s books, Students Taking Charge In Grades K-5 or Students Taking Charge In Grades 6-12 as a resource. Only one is required. The assigned book must be 
How will schools catch up with the curriculum after the spring closing of schools? How can teachers make the most of their time with students to cover a lot of curriculum. It all comes down to Power-Standards: those standards that drive the mastery of other standards. It’s all about starting with the end in mind, which is typically application of learning, building a “felt need” for students to learn, and then providing differentiated learning activities toward achievement.
Explore the structures and strategies you can use to gather formative assessment data to drive instruction that is targeted for increased student achievement. Design formative assessments for use with your students.
Explore how executive function supports the critical life skills of conscious control, engagement, collaboration, empowerment, efficacy, and leadership. Develop activities and strategies for classroom use, as well as targeted facilitation to improve students’ executive function.
This course will use Dr. Nancy Sulla’s book, Building Executive Function: The Missing Link to Student Achievement as a resource. The assigned book must be 
In this course, participants will leverage choice and technology to provide students with the ultimate differentiated learning environment. They will develop differentiated digital activity lists rooted in rigorous instruction that offer multiple ways to learn and apply content. Participants will explore autonomy, purpose, and mastery as motivators in all learning environments. They will design differentiated activity lists to put students in charge of their own learning, creating a structure that allows students to make decisions within a structured framework. Making informed decisions is an essential life skill that teachers can support with intentional classroom practices.