Masters Degree Courses: Schedule

This course will include providing students with a framework for becoming culturally responsive teachers.  An assortment of topics that reflects cultural diversity in education, including a historical overview of programs for students from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds, contemporary multicultural and bilingual education, and education for social justice and equity are addressed. This course, through the use of varied literature, relating to issues of diversity will focus on strategies that will ensure all students are achieving their fullest potential. Gaining insights into the interconnection between the diversity of students and the process of teaching will be critical to your continued success as a teacher in the 21st-century classroom.

This course is designed to move our students from risk to resiliency by identifying and fostering the developmental competencies needed for students to succeed.  The course hinges on the belief that resilience is not something you do, but something you are and can become.  To that end, the course is designed to guide educators through a paradigm shift, away from the Deficit Model and toward the Strengths/Asset Model.  Drawing on research from Nan Henderson, Mike Milstein, Robert Brooks, and Bonnie Benard, the attributes seen in resilient students will be identified and specific strategies for fostering these traits in all students will be taught.

In this course, the philosophical bases and legal structures of educational policymaking are studied. Students, as educators, develop their own philosophies of education and examine the underlying philosophical assumptions of major educational policies and practices. The course also prepares teachers to understand the legal structures that determine educational policies and how issues of equity affect the implementation of those policies. This level of understanding is necessary in order for teachers to be knowledgeable and active decision-makers in their own classrooms, schools, and communities.

This course provides helpful, practical, and research-based techniques for the creation of a stimulating, effective classroom for all students at all levels.  Knowledge of the characteristics of students who learn at different paces and levels will be explored. Participants will study a variety of curriculum options, such as those of content, process, product, and learning styles, that further assists the implementation of differentiated lessons to optimize learning for all students, including ELD, special needs, and gifted students. 

This course is designed to help teachers develop students of character using classic pieces of literature, research in social and emotional learning, and character education. Through in-depth mental, emotional, physical, social and spiritual study, we will examine the pillars of character education and the great teachers of human history. We will practice and discuss the lessons the wisest of our ancestral scholars have to teach us today. We will read, experience and reflect on the writings (prose, poetry, plays) of some of the greatest hearts and minds of the past centuries. Participants will be asked to be self reflective and involved in all experiential learning.