Richard Jenkins is a Master Teaching Artist and Kennedy Center Workshop Leader. Since 2000, he has been providing professional development training for educators and teaching artists across the country. His goal: to build their professional, pedagogical, cognitive, and creative capacities using his innovative and classroom-tested workshops.

Richard's workshops are carefully designed to meet teachers' needs. They cover a wide range of subjects, including arts integration, arts inclusion, arts & UDL (Universal Design for Learning), and arts-based learning assessment. All of his workshops are connected to State and National learning standards and come with detailed lesson plans and assessment tools. The workshops may also be augmented with classroom modeling sessions for the teachers to observe Richard teaching the activities to students.

Currently, Richard is providing the following workshops:

Comics In Your Curriculum: Cartooning & Story Creation
For General Classroom and Art Teachers of Grades 3-8
(6 hours)
Looking for ways to improve and deepen your students’ story writing experience? Use the popular comic strip art form to build your students’ character and story making potential. Comics provide educators with a rich entry point for teaching many Language Arts skills and concepts.

Comics’ unique image/text juxtaposition allows students to more fully comprehend story content and writing concepts, to more easily express their own ideas, and to more fully engage with their writing.

In this hands-on workshop teachers will learn how to create their own original stories using the comic book medium. They will learn skills and processes for generating:

• Original characters
• Character motivation
• Story structure and sequencing
• Character Dialog
• Complete original comic strips

Super Powered Stories: Character and Story Creation for Students with Disabilities
For General Classroom, Special Education, and Art Teachers of Grades 3-6
(6 hours)
In today's classrooms, teachers are faced with an ever-growing number of students with disabilities. The popular Super Hero genre provides an exciting tool to build students’ expressive and cognitive capacities while unlocking their character and story making potential. By combining simple lines, shapes, and patterns, learn how to generate vocabulary, assign character traits, and create story details by drawing Super Heroes and Super Villains. In this workshop teachers will learn how to create and draw original Super Heroes and Villains. They will also learn how to write original stories featuring these characters, with an emphasis on generating character traits, motivations, goals, obstacles, and outcomes.

In addition to drawing and story making skills, teachers will learn specific strategies to provide multiple options and entry points for students with:

• Learning Disabilities
• Cognitive Disabilities
• Emotional challenges
  
  
  

Tangles With Angles: Integrating Math, Geometry, and Visual Art
For General Classroom and Art Teachers of Grades 3-6
(6 hours)
Need a fun and “concrete” way to introduce and teach abstract mathematical concepts? Visual art provides a rich variety of ways to make connections to math and geometry. In this hands-on workshop, teachers will learn skills, concepts, and processes for drawing activities that focus on targeted mathematical and geometric concepts and vocabulary. They will create two art works focusing on:

• Points
• Lines: parallel, intersecting, converging, and diverging
• Shapes: geometric and organic
• Patterns, symmetry, and balance
• Angles: acute, obtuse, right
• Rays
  
  
  

 Introduction to UDL (Universal Design for Learning): Planning for and Teaching Diverse Learners
For General Classroom, Art, and Special Education Teachers, Teaching Artists, and Administrators
(3 hrs)
Facing students with varying degrees of cognitive, behavioral, or physical abilities; with divergent learning styles; with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds? UDL begins with the knowledge there is no one-size-fits-all solution and offers practical, brain-based means to design curriculum for a wide range of learners.  In this introductory workshop participants will examine Universal Design for Learning’s core precepts, its intersection with Differentiated Instruction and ways to incorporate UDL principles in their work. Then they will participate in a hands-on arts activity, and reflect on how UDL was applied to the design and execution of the lesson.

For more information or to book Richard for a workshop, click the Icon.

"The mind is not
a vessel to be filled, but
a fire to be lighted."
~ Plutarch

"Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”
­– Sir Ken Robinson