Aspire's professional development workshop opportunities are aimed at helping professionals, parents and caregivers work effectively with students with ASD or related profiles. We provide trainings for professional staff including teachers, specialists, professors and clinicians, as well as to parents, aides, camp and after-school staff. Workshops and trainings range in length and time depending on the needs of the client. 

Workshops


Teaching Social Competency for Special Education Students             

This workshop will focus on teaching practices for small group settings and individual interventions to help students understand and demonstrate social competency. Topics will include cohort design, group structure, strengths-based curriculum and interventions, and prompting techniques through the lens of Social Attention Theory.          

 

Supporting Student Independence with Social Competency                

The Hidden Curriculum describes social expectations that exist in every setting (e.g. self-advocacy, group work, and perspective-taking) that can often be a frustrating barrier to student success. This interactive workshop will teach strategies educators can use to help all students be successful in understanding and demonstrating social competency with greater independence across a range of settings.           

 

Promoting Self-Awareness and Self-Advocacy

This workshop will provide neurodiversity-affirming recommendations for direct instruction to help build a student’s knowledge and insight of their own profile: strengths, areas of challenge, and most effective tools and strategies. Specifically, content will highlight how to educate and empower students in special education to articulate their own needs directly to peers and supporting staff.        

 

Executive Functioning: Spotting It and Supporting It   

This interactive workshop will breakdown the specific skills that make up Executive Functioning and introduce both whole classroom and individual strategies. Workshop goals are for educators to feel more confident and competent spotting EF skills, strengths and challenges in practical settings, and building and defining a menu of more specific EF-centered interventions to match the strategy to the situational challenge at hand.           

 

Disclosure: Process Not Product

This presentation will discuss a healthy, life-long, process-oriented approach to helping an individual understand who they are and language they or others might use to describe them (“labels” or diagnoses). We’ll review some recommended approaches to disclosure, with specific attention to age-appropriate developmental milestones and how to revisit the conversation as an individual grows. While research is limited, we will introduce some suggestions for how disclosure can benefit the individual (and their caregivers!).    

 

Special Education: Breaking Down Inclusion, Building up Students                

This workshop will translate the philosophical approach of inclusion into practical tips and tools. Participants will leave with action items to readily implement in their classrooms and schools that demonstrate a commitment to creating inclusive spaces that work for today’s students and are sustainable for educators.   

 

Anxiety: Beyond Behaviorism                                                                                                                                 

Anxiety- related behaviors can be some of the most complex and challenging to support in the classroom. This workshop will describe the relationship between anxiety and visible behavior and suggest some things to look for that can help you identify whether a behavior might be caused by anxiety. We’ll focus on specific, practical strategies to use with your students to help reduce negative behaviors associated with anxiety and promote greater independence in self-regulation.

                                                                                                                                                                       

Successful Stress and Anxiety Management in Students         

In this workshop, we’ll present an overview of Stress Theory/the Biology of Stress and recommendations for how to provide developmentally and therapeutically appropriate interventions to help students better manage their stress and anxiety. The emphasis will be on practical strategies accessible to all teachers including whole class and individual tools.   

 

Parent Communication: Balancing Efficacy with Empathy     

This workshop will focus on how to train and support staff to better initiate and respond to caregivers. We’ll discuss how to assess for caregiver needs and some key communication tips to maximize clarity and perspective-taking. Emphasis will be on practical strategies to identify strengths and needs in current caregiver/parent communication with recommendations for how to structure training and on-going feedback to build positive and productive working relationships with your caregiver community.                  

 

Teaching Writing for Reluctant and Resistant Writers

This workshop provides a brief overview of the cognitive, motor, and psychosocial factors that can impact a student’s experience with writing and how repeated failures over time can add up. The primary content of this workshop is to discuss a writing instruction structure that provides opportunities for students to process their historical relationship with writing as well as apply academic concepts to more successfully engage in the writing process and create product that captures their unique thoughts and comprehension.

 

The PEA-R Model      

The PEA-R Model, borrowed from Occupational Therapy, encourages staff to view a student’s visible behavior as a constellation of variables coming together: features of the Person, the Environment, the Activity, and the Relationship. In schools, this model facilitates a systematic approach for discussions around a student’s performance that promote highlighting student strengths as well as addressing unsustainable challenges.  Additionally, PEA-R can help create community-wide consistency in classroom management practices. The PEA-R model creates a more informed and effective staff approach to supporting student performance and building a truly inclusive, strengths-based program, starting with staff perspectives around behavior.

 

Neurodiversity in the Classroom

While there is so much more to a student than a diagnostic label, there is much value to staff having a fact-based understanding of what an individual’s diagnosis can tell us about how their brain and body work. This presentation will focus on the most common neurodivergent educational profiles that impact student learning (ADHD, OCD, ODD, ASD, and NVLD) with an overview of the diagnostic criteria required to receive these diagnoses, discussion around common presentations associated with these profiles, and strategies to support students with these profiles. We’ll discuss how knowledge of a student’ diagnosis is one tool that can allow staff to predict and apply an individual’s strengths and challenges to find greater success at school.         

 

Brain-Building Boredom      

Tolerating boredom is an important building block for core skills such as concentration, self- regulation, and working memory. And yet, today’s youth have widely variable exposure and support to understand the value of boredom. Technology allows our culture and educational models to be moving at the speed of light- a questionable pro for productivity and a recognized challenge for stress and anxiety management. This workshop will provide an overview of the research that supports the importance of being bored and will present practical tools to use in both group and individual settings to help children (and adults) experience and tolerate boredom successfully.