EXPERIENCE THE KAGAN DIFFERENCE!
If you’re looking for the HOW of teaching, you’ve found it!
Kagan's Professional Learning and Development process has been meticulously developed over a number of years, utilising the most current and effective adult-learning research.
Our process involves a range of techniques, such as:
Face-to-face situational learning
Real-time coaching
In-class support - modelling, team formation, problem-solving…
Professional Learning Groups (PLGs) and
Lead Teacher development
Planning sessions
Leadership training
Specialised resources tailored to our unique approach.
NZ Trainings and Workshops
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Do you want to increase student engagement, foster positive relationships, and create a safe and inclusive learning environment in your classroom? Join our Kagan Cooperative Learning workshop!
Kagan Cooperative Learning is an evidence-based teaching approach that has been shown to improve student achievement and reduce behaviour issues. This approach emphasises the importance of collaborative learning, social and communication skills development, and relationship building.
At our workshop, you'll learn a variety of cooperative learning structures and strategies that can be easily implemented in your classroom.
Our experienced instructors will provide you with hands-on training, practical tips, and helpful resources that will help you create a dynamic and engaging learning environment for your students.
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Kagan cooperative learning structures are an incredible tool that can revolutionise the early years of a student's education! These structures are designed to promote teamwork, communication, and engagement amongst students, and they're the perfect way to ensure that every student has a chance to shine. Imagine your classroom as a hive of activity, with students working together to solve problems, complete tasks, and achieve academic success. With Kagan Cooperative Learning structures, you can create an environment that fosters creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration, setting your students up for a lifetime of success!
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Discover evidence-based strategies to cultivate a positive classroom community that promotes academic and social-emotional learning (SEL) in this interactive workshop. By implementing effective practices, educators can create a safe, inclusive, and welcoming environment where students feel valued, respected, and supported.
In this workshop, participants will explore dynamic techniques to build relationships, engage students, and foster a sense of community within the classroom. Energising class builders and team builders are just a few of the strategies that will be explored to encourage students to collaborate, celebrate diversity, and feel a sense of belonging.
This workshop will provide educators with practical tools and resources to help students blossom both academically and socially, while avoiding disengagement and discipline problems. With a focus on creating a positive and nurturing classroom environment, this workshop will support educators in their efforts to promote students' academic success and social-emotional well-being.
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What are the most effective strategies for addressing the educational needs of English Language Learners (ELLs) in contemporary classrooms? How can we facilitate the acquisition of crucial reading, writing, and speaking skills required for academic success across different subjects among students with limited or no proficiency in English? Kagan Structures, which employ cooperative and communicative teaching methodologies, are valuable tools for enhancing English fluency while imparting academic knowledge.
Furthermore, it is crucial to provide ELL students with a supportive and inclusive learning environment that respects their cultural background and linguistic diversity. Educators should strive to develop a curriculum that reflects the students' cultural heritage and promotes multiculturalism, fostering a sense of pride and belonging among ELL students. Additionally, offering supplementary resources and support services, such as tutoring, language coaching, and mentoring, can help ELL students overcome language barriers and succeed academically. Ultimately, a holistic approach that combines language instruction, cultural awareness, and support services is key to meeting the needs of today's diverse ELL population.
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Our 90-minute "Discover Kagan" introductory session is an optimal choice to involve your staff or leadership team who possess little or no prior knowledge of Kagan. This session offers hands-on experience of at least three Kagan structures and equips teachers with new skills and ideas they can implement in their classrooms from the very next day.
We prioritise interactive and collaborative learning, encouraging discussions and activities, and provide experienced facilitators to guide staff through the program. By participating, staff can enhance their teaching practices and create a more dynamic and engaging learning environment for students.
Additionally, a fishbowl session can be requested, wherein we can model structures with one of your classes.
It is to be noted that there is a cost for this workshop.
Cooperative Learning
Behaviour & The Brain
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Brain science and research has direct applications to classroom teaching and learning. We ignore the research at the peril of our own success as well as at the success of our students. Teaching with methods that don't respect brain science is like swimming against the current: teaching is more exhausting, students learn less, and students like class and content less.
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Join this workshop to learn effective strategies for teaching in high-risk environments. Our programme combines the best practices from Cooperative Learning, Brain-Friendly Teaching, and WinWin Discipline to help you overcome the unique challenges presented by poverty, homelessness, behavioural issues, learning disabilities, learning English, or incarceration.
You'll leave with practical tools and procedures to implement Kagan Structures in your classroom and transform the school experience for your hardest-to-reach students. This workshop is ideal for individual teachers, but even more powerful when implemented by an entire school or school team. Sign up today and take the first step towards teaching success!
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Create discipline solutions where you win and your students win. Gain a new perspective on discipline problems and come away with tools that really work. Convert every disruption into a learning opportunity. Go beyond ending disruptions—teach responsible behaviours and life skills.
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Students with a growth mindset believe that their abilities and intelligence can be developed with effort, persistence, and learning from mistakes. Encouraging such a mindset can have a significant impact on students' academic achievement, social and emotional development, and overall life success.
By implementing effective pedagogical methods such as Kagan Structures and other proven strategies, we can initiate a change in students' attitudes and behaviours, leading to higher levels of achievement, greater optimism, and overall success in life.
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Make your classroom more emotion-friendly! The emotion-friendly classroom is a far more effective approach for reaching the five goals of Social-Emotional Learning. Instead of learning about positive social and emotional behaviours, students acquire these skills as part of every lesson.
With emotion-friendly teaching, students have a greater understanding of their own emotions, become more skilled controlling their impulses, are better at motivating themselves, become more empathetic, and improve their social skills and relations as they interact over the regular academic curriculum—no separate lessons are required.
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Prepare your students for the information explosion with simple structures for categorizing, brainstorming, deducing, inducing, summarizing, shifting perspective, calculating, symbolizing, problem solving, predicting, synthesizing, and more. Adopt simple structures to develop each of these skills with no time away from your academic curriculum! Learn how to embed the thinking skills into how you teach, so every lesson becomes a thinking skills lesson.
Leadership
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Transform your staff meetings into cooperative meetings. Make them engaging, inspiring, and educational. Experience why Michael Fullan states, “Cooperative Meetings is a treasure chest of ideas, resources, and activities for staff developers and others wishing to engage in dynamic learning experiences. No other resource exists that contains such a comprehensive set of strategies to enhance learning for all.”
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The demands of leadership are more challenging in this era than at any time in our past. Today's leaders are still expected to fulfil traditional job responsibilities (e.g., managing facilities, overseeing budgets, dealing with the public). However, new pressures now face instructional leaders as they strive to close the achievement gap that exists in schools across the country.
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Today’s standards demand students think more deeply about more complex texts and support their thinking with evidence from the text. Consequently, students are expected to deal with and understand authors’ ideas, not just the information stated directly in the text. This workshop provides you with simple, concrete activities and engaging structures that guide students to develop metacognition skills to think about how they make inferences daily.
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Twenty-first century educational standards and high-stakes tests call for students to effectively comprehend informational texts. Today’s students tend to be technologically literate and can locate information quickly on web sites. However, they frequently are not informationally literate—they lack the skills of evaluating and using information effectively.
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Give your students the verbal advantage. Increasing our students’ vocabularies impacts nearly all academic subjects. Come update your vocabulary instructional practices for indirect language expansion and for independent word learning to meet today’s standards. You will learn engaging, easy-to-implement, classroom-ready structures to expand and refine your students’ academic vocabularies, while deepening your own understanding of how the English language evolves.
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Would you like to see your students have passion for writing? Would you like to boost writing scores? Eliminate writer's block? Acquire editing skills? Create supportive peer response groups? This is the workshop for you. This practical, hands-on writing workshop demonstrates ways to use interactive Kagan Structures to enhance each stage of the writing process. Prewriting experiences crank up motivation to write. Positive peer response groups motivate students to edit and re-write.
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Add zing to your daily math lessons! Boost attention and retention with highly-engaging structures for math instruction. Instead of working independently on drill and kill worksheets, your students will be totally engaged with structures such as Jigsaw Problem Solving. You don’t have to change what you’re teaching at all.
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You can be the best maths teacher your students will ever have, without having to work harder. We’ll explore how to multiply mathematics mastery! With revolutionary Kagan Structures, activities, and ready-made worksheets, your students become more engaged, challenged, and excited about maths.
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Under redevelopment to include the NZ Histories Curriculum. Whether you teach New Zealand or World History, Geography, Civics, Economics, Sociology, Anthropology, or Psychology, you will increase engagement in your classes when you start using powerful Kagan Structures. Foster participation, excitement, and accountability. Learn different ways to organize your classroom, and a dozen management tips!
Today’s students crave a high level of stimulation, and Kagan Structures are the solution. With the structures in place, you tap students’ intrinsic motivation to explore their world.
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Be that unforgettable English teacher that students remember as the one who gave them skills for a lifetime! It's easy and fun with Kagan Structures for secondary English and language arts. Make each stage of the writing process more engaging and effective with interactive learning strategies. Generate passion for reading while enhancing comprehension.
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f you teach Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science, or Physical Science, this is your dream workshop. Infuse your everyday curriculum with meaning and excitement. Amplify student learning with Kagan Structures. The day of the lone scientist is over! Align your science instruction with the future: teach with successful teamwork. Avoid the pitfalls of group work—implement true research-based, proven cooperative learning. Make your science classes hands-on, minds-on, active learning explorations.
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In many foreign language classrooms, students learn about a foreign language, but they don’t actually acquire it. Fluency develops when students have multiple opportunities to use the language in meaningful ways. In this eye-opening workshop, you learn practical teaching tools to dramatically increase both language production and meaningful language input. You create full language engagement in a cooperative, communicative, and supportive context.
Kagan Structures allow a safe context for language learning, multiply opportunities for language production, and increase the amount of comprehensible input. Within this context, your students show remarkable acceleration of receptive and productive language skills.
Curriculum
After the training…
Coaching &/or modelling
Support your teachers as they implement Kagan Structures in their own classrooms. Through working with thousands of teachers, Kagan has developed a revolutionary coaching method that transforms the implementation of Cooperative Learning Structures and boosts student outcomes. Rather than giving feedback out of context after a lesson, Kagan Coaching offers specific and immediate feedback as teachers teach.
Boost teacher accountability and the fidelity of implementation with this safe and supportive approach to coaching.
Often the first coaching session becomes a modelling session, which is absolutely fine. We would rather teachers felt supported and comfortable versus unsafe and anxious. Please discuss which option you’d like with your trainer.
Kagan PLG - Structure a Month Club
By emphasising one structure each month, leaders can increase student engagement in the classroom. In SAM Clubs, teachers experience the structures in novel ways, generate content ideas for how the structures can be used with students, and review critical information related to successful implementation. These brief monthly staff development sessions add a powerful instructional strategy to every teacher’s repertoire, every month - a multiplying effect creating fluency.
These sessions can replace one of the PLGs. Initially the SAM Club is facilitated by a Kagan trainer, with a lead teacher eventually leading these sessions. We can work with your high flyers to facilitate this and offer ongoing support.
Planning Sessions
Often the hardest part with implementation is knowing when to use which structure. If you’ve only attended Day 1, then it would pay to attend Day 2 as we cover a lot more about the functions on that day.
However, we are more than happy to attend team planning sessions and set you up for success. Our trainers have extensive practical knowledge of using Kagan across the curriculum and in many different contexts. We are finding that more and more teachers are struggling with content knowledge and when you combine that with trying to incorporate a new way to deliver the curriculum, it makes for a double-whammy. Use us! Please x
Kagan is effective in enhancing learning outcomes across all curriculum areas and learning levels, and is truly a powerful, dynamic, dialogic and relational pedagogical approach.
International franchisees and trainers with Spencer and Laurie Kagan (far left and far right)
Our development team is composed of distinguished experts and leaders in education from various schools throughout the United States and around the world. When you engage with Kagan, you are gaining access to a vast wealth and breadth of knowledge and experience.
At Kagan NZ, we have tailored our workshop content to suit the New Zealand educational landscape, ensuring that our trainings are both culturally responsive and reflective of best practices. We are committed to an ongoing process of refining our texts and handouts, with plans for further changes in 2023/24.
We are proud to share that Jennie is an MOE Accredited Facilitator (#109) and invite you to inquire about how other schools have accessed this funding.
You can also check out the FAQs section.
Invite Us In!
Kagan is better experienced than explained, so book us in!
Options include:
Senior Leadership Team meeting
Staff meeting Culturebuilding session plus Q & A time
Fishbowl session where we model Kagan Structures with both Juniors and Seniors
A mix of the above
All sessions are free.
“In the classroom it is the teacher who ultimately makes the choice of how much students feel included or excluded. When we choose not to make concerted efforts to make our classrooms more inclusive, we have still made a choice. It is a choice to default to traditional individualistic and competitive learning that results in many students feeling disconnected.”
— Miguel Kagan, Kagan USA