Professional Development In conjunction with school residencies our Teaching Artists offer workshops for classroom faculty and school arts specialists to become familiar with the theory and practice that support activities our teaching artists use to engage student creativity. We offer workshops for District Superintendent's Day, and at Teacher Centers for continuing education credit. We regularly present workshops at conferences such as Balanced Mind, National Dance Educators Organization and the Coalition for Advancement in Jewish Education. Professional Development participants learn to design units of study using dance, drama and storytelling as a learning tool. Kinesthetic Intelligence Plus is always ready to design a customized professional development seminar or workshop series for grade level, school wide or district wide professionals, Parent Teacher Organizations or for a special Family Education event. Five Popular Professional Development Workshops available: Teaching as Storytelling in the Classroom Dancing Verbs, Similes, Poetry and Me Your Move, My Move! Team Building and Trust Sticks and Stones, Words, Muscles and Bones Tell Me a Story, Dance Me a Dance for more information:  Contact@kintelplus.org "Thank you for your wonderful workshops! It was great to see my adult students so engaged and involved in creative movement and vocal expression. I enjoyed seeing another side to them that I hadn't seen before.  I thought the lessons were very relevant to their work as ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers."  Karen Ogulnick, Long Island University, Masters in Education faculty Your Move, My Move! Team Building and Trust School Faculty learn to use dance improvisation as a tool for building a sense of community and trust. They explore the power of non-verbal communication. They come to realize that all movement has meaning from the smallest gesture to the largest postural stance. Body postures and gestures can tell a story, facial expressions and body attitudes express emotion and points of view consciously or not. Importantly, experiencing the making of improvisational dances together supports the development of many essential life skills such as sharing, taking turns, accepting others ideas, knowing when to enter and when to leave. Sticks and Stones, Words, Muscles and Bones   You can tell a good story with dance movement. Using poems about kindness and being mean as the context, discover how to encourage students to use creative dance making, inquiry and reflection to investigate their feelings and ideas about bullying and friendship.  Creative dance offers students the opportunity to explore problems that feel important and then to express feelings and opinions about their dances with words and creative writing.    Come dressed in loose clothing and prepared to move.   Professional Development workshop for teachers using poetry appropriate for grade levels K-5.	Dancing Verbs, Similes, Poetry and Me Words can be used to make dances and dancing can be used to find words. Teachers learn to use concepts from creative movement pedagogy as a tool to build literacy skills with a focus on the movement potential inherent in verbs and adverbs. "Rising gently and spreading smoothly" are verb and adverb pairs that open up a world of imagery and become the doorway to the writing of similes and poetry: "Rising gently, spreading smoothly like flowers in the summer sun, the people opened their arms to welcome the music." This focus on kinesthetic learning as a resource for understanding the meanings of verbs and adverbs physically from the inside out, makes this work especially meaningful for ESL and Inclusion students while providing rich dance and literacy making experiences for all levels of learners.
	Teaching as Storytelling in the Classroom Children use the most dramatic and powerful concepts to make sense of things. How can classroom teachers use storytelling to teach "big ideas" to their students? This workshop guides participants in identifying what is most important about a topic, why it should matter to their students, and what is affectively engaging about it? Participants learn how to organize content into a story form that best articulates the topic, allows room for students to participate in the unfolding of the story, and offers students opportunities to help resolve dramatic conflicts built into the story. For example: In a story about justice, which examines the binary opposites of slavery vs. freedom, students might act out role plays that include a debate among members of a Quaker community determining whether they should participate in the Underground Railroad or not? Workshop participants develop tools for evaluating whether the topic has been understood, its importance grasped and the content learned.
	Tell Me a Story, Dance Me a Dance How are elements of a good literacy lesson integrated into a good dance lesson? Base the dance lesson on good literature. A dance can be built using the rich imagery found inside a wonderful storybook. One must look for the movement inherent in the story. You can tell a story with movement. Dance is a language too.  Bring your favorite storybook and come prepared to dance. Appropriate for teachers grades K-4.