K – 12 PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
INTRODUCTION: Leonardo's Teaching & Learning Workshop has twenty-five years of experience developing and designing educational curriculum materials and training opportunities for pre-service and professional practicing K – 12 educators and administrators. We have experience supporting educators who practice in public and private schools and serve diverse types of learners (eg. English Learners and Gifted and Talented Learners) from a range of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds.
Select schools include:
- Brunswick School (all boy’s school)_ Greenwich, CT
- Community Preparatory School (charter school), Providence, RI
- Convent of the Sacred Heart School (all girl’s school), Greenwich, CT
- Coventry Public Schools, Coventry, RI
- The Country School (private Pre-K – G 8 school), Madison, CT
- French American School of Rhode Island (private Pre-K – G 8 school), Providence, RI
- George Kevarian School (public middle school), Everett, MA
- Glen Urquhart School (private Pre-K – G 8 school), Beverly Farms, MA
- Madeline English School (public middle school), Everett, MA
- Moses Brown School (private Pre-K – 12 school), Providence, RI
- Sumner G. Whittier School (public middle school), Everett, MA
PROJECT-BASED CURRICULUM: We provide high-quality STEAM-infused learning opportunities, demonstrating hands-on projects that inspire inquiry, discovery, curiosity, and learning. Projects are created to help build valuable skills: collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking and making, design thinking, empathy for others, iteration, problem solving, and trans-literacy (multiple forms of literacy)
Unique STEAM curriculum developed:
- Learning from Leonardo Series
- Colossal Color Fields: Community Mural Project
- Color: Theories, Applications, and Meanings
- Launch: A Toy Design Challenge
- Very Visual Voyage: Exploring Nature’s Structures
- Innovating Minds and Hands: Fetching Design
- Seeing and Making Mathematical Paper Structures
- Nature-Inspired Innovation: Avian Engineered Architecture
- Poly Play: Designing with Polygons and Polyhedra
SUPPORTING LEARNERS: Applying principles of *Universal Design for Learning, Leonardo’s creates exciting projects give learners multiple ways a.) of acquiring information and knowledge, b.) to demonstrate their knowledge, and c.) through multiple types of interaction connect to learners’ interests while providing different levels of challenges and exciting curiosity and motivation for learning.
SUPPORTING EDUCATORS, ADMINISTRATORS, SCHOOLS, AND SCHOOL DISTRICTS: We are available to support your professional learning needs. Throughout the year, we provide a range of learning opportunities and are available to be booked for engagements.
Types of Learning Opportunities
- Worshops – .5 or 1 day of learning (typically 4 and 8 hours)
- Workshop Bundle Option: 3 days of learning over time (8:30 – 4:30)
- Mini-Institutes – 1.5 consecutive days of learning
- Summer Institutes – 3 – 5 consecutive days of learning (8:30 – 4:30)
Types of Engagements
- All-School Assemblies – talk about Leonardo's multidisciplinary ways of observing, thinking, experimenting, and iterating
- Artist or Designer in Residence – work with a master teaching artist/designer on a STEAM project
- Conference Content Provider – pre-conference and conference workshops on STEAM and Design Thinking
- Conference Speaker – keynote speaker or featured speaker
SAMPLE HALF DAY WORKSHOP: 3 HOURS
Title: Learning from Leonardo: STEAM Projects that Ignite Curiosity & Creativity
Summary: Educators, get ready to participate in an immersive adventure of multidisciplinary inquiry through projects that launch young hands and minds into exploration and discovery mode of thinking and doing multidisciplinary STEAM projects –– inspired by Renaissance period polymath Leonardo da Vinci.
Author, education and play designer, and RISD educator Amy Leidtke of Leonardo’s Teaching & Learning Workshop, will guide you through STEAM-infused projects that are developed to build a suite of valuable skills: collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking and making, empathy for others, problem solving, and trans-literacy.
Following Leonardo’s example, projects harness children’s innate curiosity to explore the foundational elements of art and principles of scienceand thetechnology, engineering and math behind them. After each concept is explained using science, history, and real-world examples, kids can experience the idea first-hand with step-by-step STEAM projects.
This type of hands-on curriculum –– in the spirit of a new Renaissance –– inspires inquiry, discovery, and curiosity through a child-friendly process of learning through play, collaboration, trial and failure, problem-solving, iteration, and mastery of skills, and showing others what they know.
Participating educators will experience:
- design-thinking methods that makes connections across the disciplines and will have students thinking like Leonardo
- through learn how there are multiple ways to support and evaluate student’s learning and knowledge (Universal Design for Learners)
- gain confidence in implementing project-based learning in the classroom
- discover what NGSS engineering skills and National Core Arts Standards look and feel like
- gain creative confidence it takes to make something
Who: **Elementary and Middle School Educators, Grades 3 – 8, and administrators
Trainer: Amy Leidtke, pronounced ‘light + key’; pronouns: she/her/hers). Leidtke is an education and play designer and education consultant who is specializes in making learning engaging and motivating. She is the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Leonardo’s Teaching & Learning Workshop, an education and play design consultancy. She is the author of Leonardo’s Art Workshop: Invent, Create, and Make STEAM Projects Like a Genius, available at amazon.com or wherever you like to buy books. She has more than thirty years of experience as an industrial designer and educator. She is faculty member in the Department of Industrial Design at RISD.
Includes: teacher-tested and kid- approved projects, project materials, resources, templates for the classroom, certificate of competition, and a chance to win a FREE copy of Leonardo’s Art Workshop: Invent, Create, and Make STEAM Projects Like a Genius.
Attire: Comfortable play clothes and sneakers (closed toe shoes)
* Universal Design for Learning (UDL), 1999, Center for Applied Technology (CAST)
This page will be regularly updated with a listing of professional development opportunities. Check back soon.
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