Educator Resources

Each month, TR@TC's Induction Coordinator curates a list of educational resources and opportunities for alums. These resources include the following:

Curriculum Planning Tools,
Employment Opportunities,
Professional Learning and Other Opportunities,
UFT Corner.

The following are ongoing Professional Development Opportunities:

NYC DOE Teacher Page -- A Resource for Teachers: This lists various professional development opportunities that the NYCDOE has identified. This site also details P credits and general career advancement within the DOE.

Materials for the Arts: Offers a wide variety of workshops and programs for teachers to help think about differentiating instruction in new and engaging ways. The organization also offers seasonal P-Credit courses for the NYCDOE.

Bureau of Education and Research: BER offers various professional development opportunities focusing on practical strategies and techniques you can immediately implement in the classroom. Many of the scheduled BER workshops focus on effectively incorporating common core standards in the classroom.

New York Open Center: The New York Open Center, now in its 30th year, is dedicated to offering holistic educational programs and cultural events that expand the mind, heal the body and nurture the spirit. They offer workshops, lectures, conferences, and professional training, led by teachers of wisdom, passion, and skill. The programs offered to fit into five disciplines: spirituality and world religions, health and wellness, psychology and self-development, society, ecology and culture, creativity, and the arts.

Facing History and Ourselves: Offers a wide variety of professional development courses on-site and in webinar form. These courses focus on various topics geared toward developing pedagogical skills and strategies to support students as they think deeply and critically about difficult topics.

American Museum of Natural History: Offers many workshops geared toward supporting teachers in thinking about how to develop hands-on and museum-based learning opportunities. AMNH offers workshops throughout the year, particularly in the summer months.

Youcubed: Youcubed is a nonprofit organization that provides free and affordable K-12 mathematics resources and professional development for educators and parents. This website offers online professional development meant to support you as you continue to think about effective mathematics education in the classroom.

Teachers College, Columbia University TC Academy: TC Academy offers non-credit programs that take both a practical and innovative approach to professional development and learning. Choose from a wide variety of offerings delivered in-person, online, and hybrid.

Bank Street College of Education Continuing Professional Studies: Bank Street offers various workshops during the summer and school year. Check out this website to learn more about professional development opportunities.

Maysles Documentary Center: The Maysles Documentary Center offers diverse, year-round documentary educational programming for people of all ages throughout Harlem, Northern Manhattan, and South Bronx communities. They offer on-site programs as well as school partnerships.

NPR education: National Public Radio offers a variety of news-related programming that you can find on their website.

TIME for Kids: Time magazine's site for children offers news-related stories at a simplified reading level.

The Learning Network - The New York Times: The New York Times Learning Network provides an educational service for grade 6-12 teachers, students, and parents. The site has lesson plans that help integrate daily news articles into the classroom curriculum, quizzes, links, features, and an On This Day section.

Scholastic News: Daily news and current events for kids.

Student New Daily: Daily news with critical thinking questions, background information, videos, and more.

CNN 10: CNN 10 is a daily news show for students over 13 and other viewers who want to learn about current events and global issues in 10 minutes or less.

PBS NewsHour Classroom: News for Students and Teacher Resources for Grades 6-12.

Jumpstart Financial Smarts for Students: This site provides helpful links to resources meant to support teachers in designing instruction that will help students to become financially literate.

Banzai: This free resource offers teachers and students lessons in financial planning using real-life scenarios. These hands-on activities develop an understanding for students in grades seven through twelve as they face the challenges of planning for life’s expenses.

Practical Money Skills for Life: This site offers a variety of free materials that can be used as resources, including free comic books, DVDs, games, and more for teaching students about financial literacy.

BizKid$: BizKid$ is a contemporary, fast-paced series on most PBS stations nationwide aimed at children and young adults. This site offers video clips from the series based on essential financial literacy and economic concepts. It also offers a curriculum in English and Spanish to accompany some of the clips.

InCharge Debt Solutions: The teaching curriculum consists of fourteen lesson plans designed to augment a semester course in life skills, consumer awareness, and financial management.

Council for Economic Education: This site offers a variety of economic-related resources for teachers and students, including lesson plans and interactive activities.

FDIC’s Money Smart- A Financial Education Program: The FFDIC’sMoney Smart for Young Adults curriculum helps youth ages 12-20 learn the basics of handling their money and finances, including creating positive relationships with financial institutions.

Edutopia: Explore resources and downloads for educators seeking to help students learn financial concepts, practice money management, and build strong financial decision-making and economic-reasoning skills.

Teaching Tolerance: This site provides both free online and hard copy resources, including film kits, on a variety of historically related topics that focus on diversity, equal opportunity, and respect for differences in society.

Brave New Films: They produce multiple documentaries that bring critical issues that focus on social justice issues to the forefront. The organization also offers an educational program, Brave New Educators, that uses documentaries to start a dialogue with students by using a model of media, education, and grassroots volunteer involvement.

Global Citizens Initiative: Their mission is to empower young global citizens from all sectors of society to be lifelong leaders of positive change.

Independent Lens: A primetime documentary series that airs independent documentary films. PBS also offers a collaborating website, and community classroom, that provides a variety of lesson plans and other resources you can use in connection with the films.

Brotherhood and Sister Sol: This NYC non-profit’s Rites of Passage Program empowers youth through discovery and discussion of history, culture, social problems, and the political forces surrounding them.

Roots of Empathy: This non-profit organization focuses on building students’ capacity to become responsible and responsive citizens by raising levels of empathy resulting in more respectful and caring relationships and reduced bullying and aggression.

What’s your calling?: This PBS-sponsored site was inspired by the documentary series The Calling and is designed for young adults who are in the process of defining who they are, making important life decisions, and determining how to achieve their hopes and dreams.

Lenape - Social Studies Curriculum: New resources developed with the Lenape Center in collaboration with TC’s Rachel Talbert and students aim to help unsettle PK-12 social studies curriculum by combating the erasure of the Lenape

NYC civil rights history: This project was inspired by New York City high school student activists who wanted to understand the history of their city and their schools.

Teach to Lead: Teach to Lead envisions a world in which teachers are valued as the foremost experts in instruction, and as such, are leaders of informing, developing, and implementing education policy and practice to steer systematic improvements to benefit student learning.

School Ambassador Fellowship Program: The School Ambassador Fellowship is a professional learning community designed to improve educational outcomes for students by leveraging the expertise of school-based practitioners in the creation, evaluation, and dissemination of information around national education initiatives.

TR@TC alums who are part of our Induction program can invite Teaching Artists or other experts to visit their classrooms and either teach a class or share a resource. This comes from the professional development (PD) fund all recent alumni receive. The funds can also be used to cover educational trips connected to units of study.

Examples of what some alums/teachers have done in the past:

Having the school spend the day with the Bronx River Alliance
Bringing Peace Poets to work with students
Bringing a chef into the classroom to talk about nutrition (if you -teach health/physed/science)
Inviting writers, directors, etc... to speak to students about a topic/issue/piece connected to a unit of study
Take students to a movie screening connected to the unit they are teaching.
Organizing a trip to the Bronx Music Heritage Center to learn from someone who makes documentaries to support a writing unit.

How to access:

Alums can coordinate with their Induction Mentor to access the PD fund and confirm approval. Induction Mentors will then coordinate the reservation and payment. If alums are using their PD fund for a field trip that cannot be pre-paid, then the Induction Mentor will submit approval and manage payment on behalf of TR@TC.