Workshops For Your School or Community!

Youth Engagement Workshops

Emma facilitating at a student leadership conference.

• Advanced Youth Leadership Training. Focused on engaging traditionally dis-engaged youth leaders. Youth and adults who are ready to change the world learn the skills, issues, and pathways communities, organizations, and individuals can take towards youth leadership, and different ways youth leadership can change the lives of youth, adults, and the world. 
• Equity, Not Equality: REAL Youth/Adult Partnerships. Focuses on relationships between young people and adults. Moving adults from seeing children and youth as the passive recipients of adult decision-making, this workshop teaches practical, concrete pathways to form partnerships between young people and adults at home, in schools, within communities, and throughout our society. 
• Intro to Youth Voice. Participants in this workshop learn that youth voice is any expression of any young person about any topic anywhere all the time. Youth and adults in this workshop learn how to harness the power of youth voice to create effective, sustainable change in the lives of young people and throughout our communities. 
• Moving Beyond Voice. This workshop is an advanced session for practitioners to study the Cycle of Engagement and how it can be used throughout their lives, programs, organizations, and communities. Participants examine assumptions, critically assess activities, and plan for future action. 
• How to Work with Youth. Training for youth workers, teachers, and other adults who support young people. This workshop maximizes decades of research and experience working with children and youth to support adults becoming allies with children and youth. Adult participants learn practical skills, important issues, and key considerations to successfully working with young people. Barriers are directly addressed, and resources are shared to ensure participant effectiveness in their own settings. 
• Learning through Service. This workshop shows how activism, organizing, community service, and social change are powerful ways to engage young people in learning practical classroom goals. This workshop engages teachers, youth workers, and youth in learning about service, reflection, meeting community needs, and building powerful agents for social change through learning and teaching. 
• New Roles for Young People Throughout Society. Participants explore the cultural shifts happening as young people access technology and personalized consumerism. The world they live in is changing, and because of that the institutions that serve them must change, too. Explore those expectations and identifies powerful, effective ways to engage young people. 
• Engaging Young People in Social Change. Draws on more than 100 years history of American youth activism. This workshop is a broad overview of effective, meaningful, and sustainable approaches to engaging young people in social change. Participants identify opportunities and challenges for that action. 
• An Intro to Youth-Led Action. This workshop explores different ways to engage young people in creative, sustainable, and effective social change. Includes concrete planning, recruitment, and evaluation activities. 

Student Engagement Workshops

Teddy and participants at a professional development.

• Intro to Meaningful Student Involvement. Explores Adam Fletcher’s internationally recognized Frameworks for Meaningful Student Involvement. This workshop teaches participants how to create powerful, purposeful approaches to engaging students as partners in schools. 
• Advanced Meaningful Student Involvement. A concrete series of exercises focused on integrating students as partners throughout education. Action planning, learning rubrics, evaluation activities, and student-adult partnerships will be explored in classroom teaching, school improvement, and throughout the education system. 
• Intro to Student Voice. Participants learn that student voice is any expression of learners focused on learning or schools. This training develops both students’ and educators’ understanding what student voice can do in school, including classrooms and school improvement activities. 
• Beyond Student Voice. This workshop helps educators and students understand that schools can become locations for passionate, effective action by all learners in all subject areas. Focused on practical tools to influence teaching and learning, this workshop provides the skills educators need to transform teaching in the 21st century. 
• Advanced Student Leadership Training. This workshop emphasizes applied leadership throughout schools. Students and educators to work together to engage students beyond planning dances. Participants explore how to engage traditional and nontraditional student leaders solving serious problems in their schools and transform student engagement for all learners. 
• Successful Student Involvement in Decision-Making. Highlights the roles of student voice in schools. Participants examine their organization’s culture and structure, identifying a multitude of ways to successfully involve students. This workshop focuses on implementing, evaluating, and sustaining student involvement. 
• Learning about Learning. Designed to teach students about learning, the school system, and school improvement. Topics covered include Evaluating Your Education, Intro to School Reform, Building Community in Schools, Learning through Service to Schools, and Student-led Organizing to Improve Schools. 
• Students as Partners in School Improvement. Engages participants in learning about engaging students as education researchers, planners, decision-makers, evaluators, teachers, and advocates. Practical opportunities are explored, and participants create plans including implementation and evaluation. 
• Engaging Nontraditional Student Leaders. Designed for educators who want to reach the quiet, inconvenient, or disregarded student leaders in their schools. This workshop focuses on developing new perspectives of their abilities. It provides concrete examples, and establishes clear opportunities in each educator’s setting for action. 
• Changing Classroom Climate. Focused on engaging all students as leaders, this workshop teaches educators how to establish group expectations, self-monitoring, and clear avenues to ensure student investment and ownership in climate-building activities. 

Personal Engagement Workshops

Participants at a CommonAction event.

• Get Engaged! How to Love the Life You Live Right Now. Participants move inward by learning practical tools and actions. Examine life, identify priorities, and discover new ways to see who you really are and what you really want to do. 
• Welcome to Heartspace. This workshop is a calm, open space for participants to explore what they’re engaged in and why it matters in their life. Using hands-on activities, you’ll learn how to enhance Heartspace throughout your life. 
• Intro to Personal Engagement. In this workshop participants explore what personal engagement is, how it happens, and how it can be used to improve the world around us. Especially for people who want to change the world, starting with themselves. 
• Living the Principle of Engagement. Exploring universal interdependence, participants in this workshop move from awareness to action through 5 simple stages that can change the world. 
• The Spiritual Side of Social Change. This non-religious workshop teaches how great social change leaders were spiritually grounded. After exploring the spiritual side of engagement through hands-on activities walk away invigorated and grounded in who you are and what you know. 
• Changing Our Communities On Purpose. Learn how social change requires personal and community engagement. Using practical tools identify what you are currently engaged in, and then explore when, where, how, and why interdependence matters. Leave knowing how to change your life and your community. 

Community Engagement Workshops 

• Intro to Community Engagement. Provides an overview of what community engagement is, where and how it happens, and why we need to be concerned about it. Gives a concrete overview of theory and practice, and focuses on real outcomes. 
• Leading Communities With Love. Focuses on the motivations of movements within themselves and how those affect social change. Use practical tools to uncover your beliefs and real case studies to move your action to the next level! 
• Connecting to Constituents. Participants learn hands-on tools for engagement. They study different approaches to making a difference, and identify new opportunities for deeper impact. 
• Engaging Government as Allies, Not Enemies. Explores specific circumstances of reaching across the aisles at work to build alliances, establish collaborations, and deepen relationships in order to promote social change. Concrete examples and real experience are used to highlight research-driven tools that can be used in any setting. 
• Moving From Apathy to Solidarity. Participants in this workshop explore different perceptions service providers, funders, educators, and others have of the people they serve. They then explore different ways to transform those perceptions, and what to do when transformation does not happen. 

Specialty Workshops

• Group Facilitation Skills. Effective for groups of all sizes. 
• “Get Things Done” in Effective Meetings. Efficient meetings ensure decisions get made and tasks get done. 
• Consensus Decision Making. Powerful tool for action. 
• Community Leadership. Strategies supporting motion. 
• Ethical Leadership. Align actions with core values. 
• 5 BOLD STEPS. Define core values, set goals, and more. 
• Being an Effective Ally. Learning across differences. 
• Situational Leadership. Actions for life, work and more. 
• Real Reflection. Powerful measures through online tools. 
• Them Where They’re At. Differentiated instruction and technology to challenge every learner. 
• Learning Mastery. Practical steps to engage students 
• Formative Assessment. Technology for small teams. 
• Stop-Drop-Assess. Online tools for formative assessment. 
• STAMP. Aligning assessments through frameworks. 
• Portfolios. Using blogs in classrooms and youth programs. 
• Intrinsic Motivation, Learning and Technology. Teachers Provides The What Students Provide The How 
• Collaborative Learning with Youth. Wikis for classrooms and youth programs 
• Building Personal Learning Community – Twitter and Social Media in the Classroom 
• Taming the Internet with Social Bookmarks 
• Top 10 Social Media Tools for Education That Make a Difference 
• Brain Rules! – Better Understanding Brain Research to Better Connect with Kids 
• Stop Your Presentation Before It Kills Again – How To Present Better, Simpler 
• Have the Internet Come to You with Google Reader 
• See Your Learning Clearly with Mind Maps 
• Create a Social Media Contract 
• Get To Know Your Students – Multiple Intelligences and Learning Styles 
• UBD and ATOM Lesson Planning for Project-based Learning 
• Copyright and The Creative Commons – How to Share Legally 

Skill-Building Workshops 

• Intro to Engagement 
• Becoming an Effective Facilitator 
• How to Work with Children 
• How to Work with Youth 
• How to Work with Parents 
• How to Work with Government Workers 
• How to Work with Nonprofits 
• How to Work with Schools 
• Ready for Social Change 
• Breaking Stereotypes 
• Examining Media Bias 
• Be Who You Are 
• Words as Weapons and Tools 
• Short Listening Activities 
• Feedback Techniques 
• Jargon Flags 
• Power, Trust, and Respect 
• Facilitation skills 
• Consensus Decision Making 
• Meeting Management
• Being an Effective Ally 
• Ethical Leadership 
• Goal Setting for Your Future 
• Situational Leadership 
• Ground Rules 
• Group Strengths and Weaknesses 
• The Silent Circle 
• Group Appreciations 
• It’s in the Bag 
• Problem Solving 101 
• Planning For Roadblocks 
• Letting Go & Taking Charge 
• Ideal Partners 
• Creating Roles for Community Members 
• Teambuilding 
• Introduction to Service Learning 
• Introduction to Community Involvement
• Introduction to Social Change