Teacher Workshops

Receive practical tools to incorporate nature into your daily lesson plans. Enroll in our teacher workshops led by Arboretum expert educators. All workshops count toward CPDUs.

Upcoming workshops:

Gymnosperm Workshop

• This course is a professional development workshop designed to help educators expand their students' knowledge of evolution and biodiversity beyond the classroom and into the natural world.  We will focus on the living and extinct diversity of gymnosperm and the evolutionary and ecological events from their history that help to explain the geographic distribution of this diverse, ancient, and useful group of plants.  
• This workshop will include classroom lectures, paleobotanical lab techniques, and hands-on outdoor activities through which participants will get up close and personal with the gymnosperms in the Morton Arboretum collection.  

Many Faces of  a Prairie: An Interdisciplinary Look At Grasslands With A Special Focus On Science and the Humanities

• Prairies have many faces and humans respond to them in different ways. Scientists, prose writers and poets, historians, and artists all approach prairies in different ways. Prairies are special places to be explored and to enrich our lives and the school curriculum.
• This course will be aimed primarily at naturalists and teachers of grades 4-9, although teachers of other grade levels can easily modify and adapt the lessons for their students. The course is designed to expand the teachers’ experiences with prairies and to investigate ways to incorporate this content into the curriculum.

• After completing the course, teachers and naturalists will know more about the plants and animals living in prairies and their ecological addresses in the prairie. The course will address how to incorporate public school state standards at specific grade levels in selected subjects.