The Orchid Life

Professional Development

Professional Development and Speaking Engagements

The Orchid Life is available for your next professional development or speaker series. The Orchid Life is available for in-person or virtual speaking engagements.on a variety of topics as well as custom professional development. We support the diverse learning needs of administrative teams, teachers, para professionals and parents.

Topics include:

Gifted Education 101
Twice Exceptional Students
How to Support the Social and Emotional Needs of Learners
Moving students from dependent to independent learners
Creating safe, inclusive learning environments
Biases Known and Unknown; Understanding conscious and unconscious bias
Creating teacher-student partnerships for learning
The Brain & Learning; Leveraging how students process information
Developing a growth mindset with your students
Bring on the Rigor; Building effective learning communities
Building teacher leadership capacity
Creating a Positive Culture to Enhance Achievement
Looking at Curriculum through a DEI lens

Thank you for visiting The Orchid Life.

This blog is written for gifted children, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, counselors, and anyone else who supports gifted children.

The Orchid Life focuses on the social emotional and educational needs of gifted and high performing children, educational equity and all things education.

When I think about the Orchid flower I think of its

Genuine beauty

Delicate and unique petals

Fragility

Requires TLC

Delicate balance between sun and shade

Fertilizer and nourishment

For me, gifted children are Orchids. They are beautiful, delicate, require TLC and with the right environment and balance of love, structure, affirmation, belonging and appropriate challenge, our gifted children can bloom into exotic flowers.

Some people may think that when we call someone "gifted" we are bragging, being elitist or consider the person to be "superior". I do not subscribe to these beliefs. Giftedness is on the other end of the spectrum of the human intellectual bell curve. Both ends of the spectrum need and deserve accommodations to meet their needs socially, emotionally and academically. Periodt!

Those of you who support a gifted child or are gifted yourself understand what I mean, if not, I encourage you to keep reading.

Through this blog, I will share my experiences as a teacher of gifted children, stories of my former students, concerns that parents have shared as well as address questions from my followers.

Please subscribe to my blog to receive the latest stories and information on all things education! And as always, please feel free to leave a question or comment.

I look forward to hearing from you.

The Orchid Life

Supporting Children Socially, Emotionally and Educationally

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Professional Development and Speaking Engagements

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