Teacher Professional Learning
Looking to grow as an educator? Queens Botanical Garden is committed to supporting you! We offer a variety of professional learning options ranging from introductions to inquiry to school gardening.
Our programs are aligned with the New York State Learning Standards. Programs are aimed at helping equip teachers with the skills and content to enliven their classrooms and engage their students in science learning. QBG’s Teacher Professional Learning Program is an approved CTLE sponsor.
New teacher workshops will be posted in the upcoming months!
For more information, please contact [email protected] or 718.886.3800 ext. 371.
Stay in touch!
Sign up for our Teacher Professional Learning email list for the latest announcements.
Workshops for Groups of Teachers
Making Sense of Place: Young Learners and Community
August 10 to August 15, 2026
9 am to 5:30 pm
Course is eligible for: 45 CTLE Hours & 3 P-Credits or A+ Credits
Using the Garden as our classroom, participants will explore place-based learning and how to use storytelling to nurture identity, justice, and connections in our school communities. We will reflect on the stories rooted in our local landscapes and consider how these narratives can shape our teaching practice. We’ll question whose stories are prioritized, and whose are excluded. Through this lens, we’ll examine the relationships between Indigenous and ancestral agricultural practices and modern food systems, making connections to food justice, environmental justice, and climate change. Participants will engage in activities that highlight the many ways plants connect us as sources of nourishment, medicine, care, and cultural meaning. Our learning will be interdependent and exploratory by creating a classroom community that is reflective of its members. We’ll center classroom connections by creating resources for each other that reflect our takeaways and reflections. The culminating project will be a lesson plan that brings what we learned together into our own communities.
To request a workshop for eight or more teachers, please CLICK HERE.
If you are an individual teacher looking for a workshop, please email [email protected].
Our educators provide custom programs for your educators’ needs. Sample topics include:
Half-Day or Full-Day Workshops
• Easy and Exciting Classroom Gardening
• Trees
• Observations with Plants—How Do Scientists Think?
• Exploring Botany and Ecology
• The Waste Stream
• Using the Garden to Teach Math and ELA (day or multiple sessions)
Multiple Session Workshops
• Ecology in the Urban Environment—from microbes to macrobes
• Sustainability in the Community
• Urban School Gardening
Photo Credit: Anne Tan-Detchkov, QBG Staff