Bite of Tools Workshops

What is Bite of Tools?

These individual workshops were developed in response to the critical challenges of early childhood education programs and designed to build educators’ knowledge of self-regulation development. Each workshop includes six hours of professional development and can be delivered onsite or virtually. Educators will leave the session with actionable strategies they can immediately implement in their classrooms.

What is Tools of the Mind?

We are a nonprofit organization with 30 years of experience researching and applying theory and neuroscience to build young children’s self-regulation development. We offer comprehensive preschool and kindergarten curricula and one-day Bite of Tools workshops. Our goal is to empower educators to use our research-based strategies in a wide variety of school environments. We believe:

Self-regulation development is a proven leading indicator of future academic success.
Teaching children how to learn is a critical component of early childhood education, and the benefits pay off exponentially throughout the child's academic journey and life.
Educators deserve support when trying out new strategies in their classrooms, so we offer ongoing professional development and personalized coaching.

Why is this important?

What is self-regulation? It’s a set of cognitive abilities like focusing attention, persisting at challenging tasks, learning how to learn, managing emotions, and taking turns with peers. In other words, these are the skills children will need for success in both school and life. Our comprehensive curriculum integrates self-regulation development into all content areas, and our Bite of Tools workshops offer targeted teaching practices, strategies, and supplemental activities that can be used with any curriculum.

Understanding Challenging Behaviors Through the Lens of Self-Regulation

This workshop will focus on challenging behaviors in the classroom. By helping preschool and kindergarten educators understand children's behavior through the lens of self-regulation, Tools provides an empowering perspective for responding to behaviors.

Educators will learn how to implement routines for managing challenging behaviors and construct a toolbox of powerful strategies to address these behaviors when they occur. Your team will discover how common behavior challenges can be reduced as greater self-regulation is gradually developed through concrete approaches.

Building a Regulated Classroom Culture

In this workshop, your preschool and kindergarten team will discover proven best practices for establishing a positive, collaborative classroom community where students thrive. Your team will also learn proven techniques for building an strong, regulated culture where children enthusiastically engage in learning, embrace mistakes, and actively support each other.

Your session will focus on specific practices designed to cultivate a self-regulated classroom. By enabling students to offer and receive peer support, your team will gain valuable time to provide individualized attention and instruction to all learners. We will delve into effective strategies for addressing challenging behaviors in the classroom. Participants will learn how to empower children to manage their emotions and behaviors while supporting the development of crucial social skills, enhancing their learning experience, and improving child outcomes.

The Playful Path to Self-Regulation

In this workshop, preschool and kindergarten educators will learn to harness knowledge of neuroscience research and developmental theory to pump up their classroom’s play game. They will develop a deep understanding of how much brain development happens in children during intentional play. The focus of this workshop is to empower participants to develop children’s self-regulation through play.

Your educators will learn to differentiate the kind of play that builds self-regulation from the kind that doesn’t and facilitate age-appropriate high-level make-believe play (preschool) or dramatization (kindergarten). Also, they will discover how to scaffold every child’s development of self-regulation and create play themes that build children’s shared background knowledge with scaffolded play theme development.