At our Summer Institute, along with our normal K – 12 track, because of our long-standing work with Head Start of Phoenix, we are featuring workshops on an Early Childhood Track.  Some may be pre-recorded so that you can watch them anytime between June 17 and July 6.

To learn more about our Summer Training Institute and to register, click https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2025/.  To register groups of 5 or more, please contact Dakota Hoyt, our Managing Director, at info@gurianinstitute.com.  Now here’s more about our Early Childhood Track.

Early Childhood Track.  Bringing Families into the Frame:  Parent, Family, and Community Engagement in Early Childhood Environments, with Lauren Paiva, Education Director, Booker T. Washington Early Childhood Center, and Gurian Certified Trainer.  Parent engagement and outreach has become perhaps more important for our schools than ever before as our children and families come back from pandemic isolation.  Children come to school with behavioral patterns that are problematic and schools need parental help with those.  Parents, too, need the help of schools in guiding their children.  In this workshop, Lauren will share practical strategies and anecdotes from years of work in the Phoenix community – a how-to of what works and what does not work with engaging busy and distracted parents, parents whose native language is not English.

Early Childhood Track.  Teaching a Love of Words:  Best Practices for Literacy Learning in Preschool Classrooms with Dr. Ariana Lopez, Gurian Certified Trainer.  As Education Director at the Greater Phoenix Urban League, Ariana leads educational innovations in early childhood literacy learning.  She has worked with diverse populations, including ESL learners, for more than two decades.  In the Greater Phoenix Urban League – Gurian Institute Pilots in Phoenix, Arizona, Ariana has made sure that literacy is a major classroom focus.  In this workshop, Ariana will share and model programs and strategies that have worked to augment and improve early literacy at the Cartwright Child Care Center, a Gurian Model School.  She will also discuss the differences in how boys and girls come to literacy and share strategies from coed and single gender classes.

Early Childhood Track.   Essential Early Childhood:  Boys and Girls Learn Differently Strategies for Our Youngest Children, with Dr. Ariana Lopez Gurian Certified Trainer.   This workshop grows from the Gurian Institute Pilot programs in the Head Start and the Greater Phoenix Urban League (GPUL) classrooms in the Cartwright School District, including at Cartwright Child Care Center, a Gurian Model School. Ariana is Education Coordinator with GPUL.  Her session will feature more than a dozen strategies, including single sex groupings, that they have used successfully in early childhood environments for meeting the cognitive, social, and emotional needs of boys and girls.  The chosen strategies successfully integrate into Teaching Strategies Gold, Creative Curriculum for Preschool, and CLASS. 

To learn more about our Summer Training and to register, click https://gurianinstitute.com/events/gurian-summer-institute-2025/.  To register groups of 5 or more, please contact Dakota Hoyt, our Managing Director, at info@gurianinstitute.com.

To explore becoming a Gurian Certified Trainer, click the Trainer Certification tile on the Trainer page of www.gurianinstitute.com.  If that information looks good to you, email Dakota to start the process.

We hope to see everyone on Zoom this June!