Full Catalog of Upcoming Events

Level: Tier Two

Topic: Bullying. This session focuses on the inclusion of bully-proofing within your classroom and your universal level. Several free programs will be discussed.

Time: 12 hours (four hours of video and 8 hours of implementation)

Topic: Classroom Management for Disruptive Behaviors. This presentation goes through many of the disruptive behaviors that can derail learning in the classroom and shares evidence-based interventions you can use.

This presentation will focus on the variety of behaviors that show up in the classroom when teaching 12-18-year-old students. Secondary teachers frequently point to escaping work and gaining attention as the reasons behind behaviors. This presentation will show participants how to ameliorate the typical behaviors by instituting proactive solutions. Dr. Riffel will share examples from real students she has worked with over the years and the solutions that made the behaviors disappear. So often, participants in a seminar will say, “What do you do about a student who has (xyz) behavior?”  The truth is there is no one answer for the “xyz” behavior question. The answer lies in understanding the function of the behavior and putting proactive strategies in place to restructure the environment, replace the behavior, and reframe our response.

This class is limited to participants from Heart of Georgia RESA member systems.

Audience: Admin, All Educators, Ancillary, Bus, Cafeteria, Counselor, Psychologist, SPED

Age Level: Pre-K through Twelfth Grade

Level: Tier two

Topic: Classroom Management:  The surgeon general shared in 2022 that there had been a 50% increase in anxiety and depression in the 3-17-year-old population. This has affected the way children react to stress and changes in the classroom.  This presentation will give information about the brain and how it reacts to stress and what teachers can do to ameliorate those behaviors.

Time: Five Hours

Everyone has been focused on the adults and sort of assumed the children would be resilient and bounce back from this better than before.  We feel teachers should be prepared for what is likely going to be behaviors they have not witnessed before.

Session 1:  What the pandemic left behind- anxious children

Session 2:  What might this anxiety look like in the classroom?

Session 3:  Revise the environment of your classroom

Session 4:  Replacement behaviors to teach to students

Session 5:  Reframing of your response to behaviors

There will be an out of the HGRESA area fee of $50.

Audience: Admin, All, Ancillary, Counselor, Psychologist, SPED

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Self-Regulation:  Helping students learn to understand the amygdala and how to self-regulate when the amygdala begins the hijack of the brain. This presentation will share with you different techniques you can use to teach students how to calm themselves and then share the emotion and trigger with their adults and problem-solve.

Time: Six Hours

Audience: All and SPED

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Behavior Support: We see a lot of cookie cutter behavior support plans. This presentation will focus on how to take the information you are using from your functional behavior assessment and turn it into a data-based behavioral intervention plan.

Time: Five Hours

This class is for members of Heart of Georgia RESA only.

Audience: SPED and General Education

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: Life Skills: Dr. Riffel lived with an adult with autism, bipolar condition, obsessive compulsive disorder, intellectual disabilities, and mild cerebral palsy.  She also has followed the success of students she housed in her clinic. What we know from these adults with disabilities is that they need a dignified life. A dignified life is one where the person has a home they feel safe in, a job that is meaningful, friends that are true, and leisure activities they enjoy.  This presentation will share with you what can be done throughout their school career to help them have these things after they graduate.

Time: Five Hours

Audience: ALL

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: Climate/ Relationships: This presentation will give you tried and true ways to build relationships with students. The ideas are from Marzano, Dufour, Wong and many others who have researched the topic. We will share what our schools have done to help build relationships between peers to peers and peers to adults.

Time: Two Hours

This class is for members of Heart of Georgia RESA only.

Audience: Ancillary Staff

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: Relationships/ Climate: This is for staff members who only see students for a short time (specials, counselors, psychologists, etc.) and need to build relationships with those students. This presentation focuses on what you can do in a short amount of time to help build relationships with those students.

Time: Three Hours

This presentation focuses on administrative steps to lead your staff through the following:

• Student-to-Student Bullying
• How to deal with the bullies
• How to deal with the victims
• How to train your students to be upstanders and not bystanders
• Developing a mantra for your anti-bullying platform.
• Developing expectations to define your mantra
• Threat Assessments
• Reporting Systems
• Flex Labs for Reteaching
• Professional Learning Communities
• Other Bullying
• teacher to teacher
• administrator to teacher
• parent to teacher
• student to teacher
• teacher to student
• Building Relationships between students, family members, educators, and community members

There is a $50 out of area fee for participants outside the Heart of Georgia RESA systems.

Topic: Classroom Management: This presentation is a shorter version of the tried-and-true methods which will help take control of the classroom using evidence-based interventions. We cover things like disruptions, non-compliance, blurting, and other behaviors that can derail your classroom.

This is the short version of the classroom management tier two strategies with interventions for classroom teachers to deal with the following behaviors:

• Ten Rules that Govern Behavior.
• Blurting or disruptive behavior
• Reinforcing Replacement Behavior

Dr. Riffel will show you how to determine the summary statement to behavioral issues:

Trigger-Target-impacT; then she will show you how to build an effective intervention plan for Blurting or Disruptive Behaviors using:

• Revision of the Environment
• Replacement of the Behavior
• Reframing of the Response

This class is for members of Heart of Georgia RESA only.

Audience: All

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two

Topic: Classroom Management: This presentation is a longer version of the tried-and-true methods which will help take control of the classroom using evidence-based interventions. We cover things like disruptions, non-compliance, blurting, and other behaviors that can derail your classroom. This adds behavior strategies for some of the more disruptive behaviors we see in the classroom.

Time: 8 hours

This class is for members of Heart of Georgia RESA only.

Audience: All

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two

Topic: Classroom Management: This is a two-day version of strategies to implement in the classroom. One person who attended this training told us, “I thought when I heard we were going to be talking about behavior for two days there was no way it would be interesting. Boy was I wrong. I learned so much.”  We focus on a myriad of behaviors and interventions that we know to work for things like physical aggression, class clown, and so much more.

Time: Ten hours

This class is for members of Heart of Georgia RESA only.

Topic: After reading numerous headlines in the media about adults using duct tape to control the behavior of students, we decided to develop a seminar on interventions to deal with the most difficult behaviors that will not end up on the six o’clock news. This is a two-day course and stems from two different books we wrote on the topic merged into one two-day seminar. Sprinkled along the way, we have some legal ways you can use duct tape in the classroom because it is a very useful organizational tool.

Time: 12 hours

This presentation on classroom management strategies has a crazy title.  Why on earth would I call a training this?  Unfortunately, the illegal use of duct tape in the classroom has been in the news a lot more than you might realize. When educators are not prepared, they make reactive mistakes.  This training will focus on helping you be prepared so you can make proactive decisions.  We will cover:

Chapter One: Classroom Set-up Strategies  

Chapter Two: Ambiance

Chapter Three: The First Week of School 

Chapter Four: Academic Strategies to Begin the Year 

Chapter Five: Contingencies and Rewards

Chapter Six: Secondary or Targeted Group Interventions

Chapter Eight: Odds and Ends

There will be an out of the HGRESA area fee of $50.

 Audience: Admin, Pre-K through 2nd-grade teachers, Ancillary Staff, Counselors, Psychologists, SPED

Age Level: Pre-K through Second Grade

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: This was specifically designed for HGRESA to coincide with the Department of Education Guidelines for Students with Dyslexia.

Participants will learn:

• Specific charges from the Georgia Department of Education on Dyslexia:

• Evidence-Based Reading Practice in the MTSS process
• Screening for all students
• Evaluation for students suspected of having Dyslexia
• Scientifically based Interventions for helping students with dyslexia

Audience: Admin, Third- Sixth grade teachers, Ancillary Staff, Counselors, Psychologists, SPED

Age Level: Third through Sixth Grade

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: This was specifically designed for HGRESA to coincide with the Department of Education Guidelines for Students with Dyslexia.

Time: 7 hours

Participants will learn:

• Specific charges from the Georgia Department of Education on Dyslexia:

• Evidence-Based Reading Practice in the MTSS process
• Screening for all students
• Evaluation for students suspected of having Dyslexia
• Scientifically based Interventions for helping students with dyslexia

Audience: Admin, Secondary Teachers, Ancillary Staff, Counselors, Psychologists, SPED

Age Level: Middle and High School

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: This was specifically designed for HGRESA to coincide with the Department of Education Guidelines for Students with Dyslexia.

Time: 7 hours

Participants will learn:

• Specific charges from the Georgia Department of Education on Dyslexia:

• Evidence-Based Reading Practice in the MTSS process
• Screening for all students
• Evaluation for students suspected of having Dyslexia
• Scientifically based Interventions for helping students with dyslexia
• Specific strategies and examples will be shared at the secondary level of how to incorporate reading instruction in core classes like history, English, social studies, and more.

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Three

Topic: This presentation is written using the Georgia Department of Education Guidelines for Dyslexia specifically for HGRESA to assist family members in supporting their children who have dyslexia.

This is a two-hour video and handout for family members. It will focus on preschool through high school strategies that parents can employ to help their children be successful in school and life.

Seeing many referrals for students who become dysregulated and lose control in the classroom? This presentation will focus on teaching students the emotions they are feeling and most importantly, how to use their words when they have these feelings.

Audience: Administrators, All Educators, Ancillary Staff, Counselors, Psychologists, Special Education Educators

Age Level: All

Level: Universal

Topic: Self-Regulation and Using Words is the main topic.  This is based on research conducted in the southeast in a town with a high population of children born to opioid addicted mothers. The children were showing signs of emotional instability upon entering school and were disrupting the learning environment for all. We observed triggers and impacts of this behavior and developed a strategy to help the students be successful in the classrooms.

Time: Two Hours

This class is for members of Heart of Georgia RESA only.

Audience: All

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two

Topic: Classroom Management. When attending university at the pre-service level, most of the training focuses on teaching the specific academic topics we will be teaching; however, very few courses focused on the actual techniques needed to gain attention and garner enthusiasm from students in actually learning those topics.  This course focuses on techniques that are evidence-based and highly effective.

Time: 9 hours

Audience: Administrators, All General and Special Education Teachers, Ancillary Staff, Counselors, and Psychologists

Age Level: All

Level: Tier Two and Tier Three

Topic: Interventions based on Dr. Simonson’s work on what qualifies as an evidence-based intervention with real classroom applications and videos to show how to implement some of the strategies.

Time: 7 hours

Audience: Administrators, All Staff

Age Level: All

Level: Universal in that everyone should be using this technique for their tier two and tier three students who have trouble regulating their emotions.

Topic: This is a proactive strategy taught to all students within the school because at any moment any of us can lose our sense of control and need strategies to stay cool, calm, and collected. As adults, most of us have perfected that. We need to teach our students the words to use and the technique to use to calm themselves down before they lose composure.

Time: 5 hours

Audience: Family Members

Age Level: Primary and Elementary

Level: All three tiers

Topic: This is specifically designed for a school to purchase and use as a family night training possibly broken into two sessions. It will help family members use the same language as the school when working to give children the words they need to convey their emotions and learn to solve their own problems.

Time: Four hours

Audience: Administrators, All Elementary and Primary Staff Members

Age Level: Primary and Elementary

Level: Universal

Topic: Teaching children how to self-regulate. When our children graduate and enter the world as employees, they will not lose their jobs because they do not know how to read, write, or do math.  They will lose their jobs because they do not know how to cooperatively work with others, solve problems, manage their emotions, or ask for help in a meaningful way. This presentation will help staff members teach proactively the strategies their students will need  now and in the future.

Time: Five Hours

Audience: Administrators, All Elementary Staff at the Third-Sixth Grade Level

Age Level: Third-Sixth Grade

Level: Universal

Topic: Teaching children how to self-regulate. When our children graduate and enter the world as employees, they will not lose their jobs because they do not know how to read, write, or do math.  They will lose their jobs because they do not know how to cooperatively work with others, solve problems, manage their emotions, or ask for help in a meaningful way. This presentation will help staff members teach proactively the strategies their students will need  now and in the future.

Time: 5 hours