Professional Development
The Lotus Centre Institute for Professional Development
The Institute is our online school, where we share the knowledge and tools we’ve developed at Lotus Centre with music educators.
Our courses provide the skills needed to equip teachers to help students of all abilities reach their full potential!
Visit the Institute home page here. On our home page, you will find more information about our programs, including our webinars, mini courses, and intensive courses. You can also register for upcoming events.
At Lotus Centre, we see professional development as an important part of improving access to music education for the special needs community.
The more teachers and other professionals equipped to work with special needs students, the greater the opportunities will be!
About our Professional Development programs:
University of Ottawa Partnership
Lotus Centre has partnered with the University of Ottawa to offer Canada’s first post-secondary program in special music education. Weekend workshop courses, seminar courses, and opportunities for graduate study are all possible through this collaboration. Many of the course offerings are available to continuing education students and distance learning students.
Half Day, Full Day, or Weekend Training Workshops
Lotus Centre offers customized training sessions for your arts organization (including for artists, administrators, and front house staff), school or studio. Topics can include developing sensory-friendly or adaptive music concerts, pedagogical adaptations for special needs music students, and more.
1:1 Consultation
We offer customized consultations to help educators or arts programming professionals adapt for the special needs community. Consultations can be offered at a distance.
Our Founder, Dr. Erin Parkes was interviewed on the Officials Music Teachers’ Podcast with Tim Topham.
On the episode, they discussed teaching strategies for students with exceptionalities, including empathy based approaches, the importance of tuning into students’ sensory needs, a strengths-based approach, and multi-modal teaching. Check out the interview here.
Featured Courses
Webinar: Multimodal Teaching Tools for Adaptive Music Education
Students with exceptionalities often require creative lesson planning on the part of music teachers. But where to start? In this webinar, you’ll add to your teaching toolkit by learning some activities that work with special learners by using a multimodal approach. Creative ideas for teaching the basic elements of music like rhythm, pitch, motor coordination, and more will be explored.
Activities for all ages and various learning profiles will be presented.
Mini Course: Empathy-Based Behaviour Support in the Music Studio
Supporting students with behavioural challenges in the music studio or classroom can be challenging.
Shifting our perspective from feeling like the student is causing us distress to seeing that the student is in distress, and then implementing tools to help manage that distress, can not only facilitate learning but can help us to create a strong relationship with our student and become a positive presence for them.
In this course, we’ll explore an empathy-based model for behaviour support. Skills developed will include identifying common triggers for behaviours and how to minimize those triggers, and strategies to manage challenging behaviours when they arise.