The program is not for the faint of heart. Participants will have to make a two-year commitment to complete it as part of a true partnership among your district, your teachers, and Project ACCESS. Here are a few important features worth mentioning:
  • The program leverages a flipped instructional model with alternating weekly sessions, one online, and the next in-person.
  • In-person sessions are dedicated to active learning of the kind that teachers love most: creating real products that they will be able to use in their classrooms right away.
  • Lessons are competency-based and include lessons for each of the evidence-based interventions in the Missouri Autism Guidelines Initiative. 
  • Since many of the interventions fall under the umbrella of Applied Behavior Analysis, completers will leave with a strong foundation in ABA skills.
  • Lessons will occur in your own schools (in a local cohort), in the evenings, so that travel is minimized and the educational day is not disrupted.
  • The level of commitment will be akin to taking a single graduate college course each semester for four semesters. Up to 12 hours of graduate credit is going to be available as an option, and at a reduced rate through Missouri State University!
  • Classroom coaching is perhaps the single most important feature of the training. The goal of coaching sessions is to instill each skill into the repertoire of each teacher’s ongoing professional practice.
  • Best of all, the training and coaching components are free. There will be a fee ($250 per teacher, per semester) to cover materials, and some participation in a few statewide meetings, but in our humble opinion, this will be the best bang for the buck you can experience in PD.