Teachers need personal professional development. In today’s episode, we’re sharing five real-world examples of teachers who used their summer to improve their classroom and earn professional development credit. From combatting student anxiety, helping special needs students, rewriting a physics curriculum, building student relationships, and reducing stress school-wide -- these teachers use their learning to improve real-world problems. The post and podcast episode are sponsored by Advancement Courses. This episode includes advertorial content as I am interviewing the sponsor of the show. This happens one episode a year during the week of ISTE.   www.coolcatteacher.com/e519    5 Examples of Positive, Personal PD for Powerful Teacher Learning - Transcript Vicki: Today we're doing a special episode with Krysia Lazarewicz from Advancement Courses. Now, those of you who have been listening to my podcast for a while, you know, what I think about Advancement Courses, and they have so many incredible offerings, but today we want to talk about five examples of transformative PD. You know, in the summertime, sometimes we teachers have a difficult time figuring out, okay, what am I going to learn, and sometimes the stuff we learn, we feel like, is not relevant to what we're doing in the classroom. So, Krysia, you have some examples for us of relevant, impactful, learning. What's your first one?   PD Example #1: Combatting Student Anxiety with a Class in Mindfulness Krysia: Sure, so our first one actually has to do with something that many of our educators are identifying as a big problem, which is student anxiety, and it may not be surprising to any of you, but our students are dealing with so many challenges these days: from safety drills, to weather drills, bomb threats, active shooter lockdowns, things that students don't always know how to process, and so we have a lot of educators who come to us saying: 'What can I do to make this better?' So, this particular story is about a 2nd-grade teacher, who decided that she was going to turn her summer PD into a productive use of time in her classroom and teach herself and her students to use specific mindfulness techniques that could then her students actually turn that anxiety into productive moments of resilience. Course mentioned in example #1: Staying Present: Mindfulness for Better Teaching and Learning (3 Grad Credits) Use the code COOLCAT to get a 20% discount. So, to do this, she created her own five-minute activity that refocuses students. So, thinking about: How do they reset their bodies? How do they focus on mindfulness rather than fear? How do they think about different ways that they can bring attention to what's happening internally, rather than focus on the fear and anxiety that happens outside? The other really cool thing that she did, is she brought parents into this. So, she welcomed parents into the classrooms to help students learn some of these new techniques, to bring some of those ideas home. She presented at Parents' Nights, she presented to other teachers in her building, to then, help spread some of these skills to other students, and what she found was that through doing this, her students were actually better able to manage those drills, but they were also better equipped to make it through other stressful factors like testing week, or in-class assessments, or many of the other social conflicts that we know kids experience on a day-to-day basis. So, this is a great story because it showed how one teacher can really turn some of these disruptive classroom moments into events for learning. Vicki: So, if teachers are struggling with, you know, helping kids calm or the stress, then mindfulness may be a great option? Krysia: Absolutely. Vicki: Okay, so you've given us one example of transformative PD: helping our kids with anxiety and us with anxiety by mindfulness. What's another example?   PD Example #2: A PD Care Team for Special Needs Students Krysia: So,