thinkLaw partners with schools, departments, networks, and districts in 42+ states to provide professional development that helps teachers to transform Tier 1 instruction using the critical thinking instructional strategies embedded in our curriculum. Curriculum partners who are interested in digging deeper can learn more below about our range of professional learning experiences for teachers, leaders, families, and students.
When teachers come back for convocation in August, armed with fresh bulletin boards and a shiny new planner, they aren’t all that difficult to fire up. But what does it take to launch a real movement that lasts through the school year, long after the copy paper dwindles and the gravity of our systemic challenges settles in? Teachers and leaders need fuel for the hard work and heart work that is education, and they need to know that a transformational educational movement can be both powerful and PRACTICAL.
Colin Seale, thinkLaw Founder & CEO, delivers keynote convocations and all-staff events to help you launch a school year, or reinvigorate your staff throughout the year, by grounding our need for tangible equity (equity = reducing the predictive power that demographics have on outcomes) by obsessing over practical teacher moves that don’t feel like “one more thing”.
Learn more about bringing Colin Seale to your school or district here.
School systems have formed their equity committees, written their equity plans, trained educators in implicit bias workshops, and conducted lots of book studies. But what does educational equity look like on Tuesday morning for a 4th grade general education teacher? For HS chemistry teachers? How can educators prioritize the need to think with an equity lens with the pressures of ensuring academic success? Why do some educators deeply believe in the promise of educational equity still struggle with inequitable academic and disciplinary outcomes in their own classrooms? This interactive session by Colin Seale, Founder and CEO of thinkLaw and author of Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Framework for Teaching Critical Thinking for All Students, will break down powerful, but practical strategies to make equity real at the classroom level.
Brilliance is distributed equally, but opportunity is not. For almost a decade, Colin Seale and the thinkLaw team have used this framing as an impetus for obsessing over opportunity-creation and helping educators create systems where critical thinking is no longer a luxury good. But the tools to unlock brilliance and unleash critical thinking are meaningless when our students (and sometimes our adults) lack the psychological safety to be brilliant. In this session, Colin Seale will make the equity case for prioritizing psychological safety as a pre-requisite to learning and share powerful, but practical strategies to integrate psychological safety into instructional practices.
What do we stand to lose when we finally give up on “those kids”, when we think of discipline only as a series of escalating consequences and punishments, and security as a system that eliminates the freedom and psychological safety to be brilliant? We are often told: “Achieving equity is a marathon, not a sprint”, but so many of us are tired of running marathons with no end in sight. It’s tempting to get overwhelmed by the big picture, to believe that the system is irreparably broken and call it a day. But we are the system and we, as educators, have real power to engineer conditions at the human level that have the potential to create tangible change for our “hardest to reach” kids. If we could, minute by minute, begin to make practical choices that foster a learning environment that works for the “toughest cases”, each and every student could begin to thrive, to feel joy, and to learn. We start this work by acknowledging the pain that we all have felt and still feel, and then we imagine what a better school day might look like tomorrow.
thinkLaw partners with schools, departments, and districts for wrap-around professional development that helps teachers embed powerful, practical critical thinking instructional strategies into their existing curriculum, because rigorous, on-or-above-grade-level instruction IS an equity issue.
thinkLaw works with your PD programming, PLC structure, and existing curricular adoptions to build a training series that obsesses over practical, immediate application in ways that don’t feel like “one more thing”.
All PD partnerships are designed to be delivered in conjunction with teacher access to thinkLaw’s supplementary critical thinking curriculum, which provides a powerful, easy-to-implement model of higher order questioning skills that teachers can practice right away.
The standards are an important part of preparing each student to read, write, and perform math tasks on grade level, but the standards alone are not enough to truly prepare students for the world they will face when they leave school. They are necessary, but not sufficient. Students need to approach material in more broad, deep, and complex ways in order to truly master critical thinking across academic disciplines. Learning strategies for asking and answering better questions in class can be a simple, but powerfully transformative tool to unlock learning potential and make the “basics” more interesting and engaging. In this workshop series, educators and instructional leaders will learn to strengthen Tier 1 instruction for all students by embedding culturally responsive critical thinking strategies into their existing curriculum and instructional model that will engage students in the highest level of thinking critically. Students will learn how to analyze content from multiple perspectives, shifting from asking “what” and “how” to asking “why” and “what if.”
Brilliance is distributed equally. But too often, opportunity is not. The COVID-19 pandemic has given us the strongest possible case for prioritizing critical thinking instruction, but we still treat critical thinking as a luxury good. Equity requires educators to remove the systemic barriers far too many students face to unleashing their critical thinking potential. This workshop outlines powerful but practical tools educators can apply immediately to close the critical thinking gap using easy-to-integrate, curriculum-agnostic “Thinking Like a Lawyer” strategies that help students transition from asking “what” and “how to” to asking “why” and “what if.
Critical thinking is the most important 21st century skill, yet too often high-quality critical thinking instruction is reserved for the top students at elite schools. Denying access to rigorous learning opportunities because students are “too low” is unacceptable. Open the door to increased access to critical thinking in underrepresented populations by leveraging gifted and talented strategies with all students. Teach to the top 10 percent every day AND provide success for all students with practical strategies in this interactive workshop. Participants will leave equipped with content and grade-agnostic tools to raise the bar for students with sustainable differentiation strategies.
Students are often motivated most by issues of fairness and justice. But in a time when adults struggle to engage in civil discussion, how can educators ensure that they can discuss controversial topics in school without it going so sideways that they become the controversy? This thinkLaw workshop covers practical tools and strategies, including:
