Sexuality Education Training Initiative

Answer has been helping educators and youth-serving professionals create meaningful classroom experiences about sexuality for more than twenty-five years through our Sexuality Education Training Initiative. Each year, this program provides more than 2,500 educators and youth-serving professionals with the tools they need to teach comprehensive sexuality education and effectively respond to students' questions. The program includes:


Open-Enrollment Workshops
In-Service Trainings
Training Institute in Sexual Health Education (TISHE)
Online Professional Development


Open-Enrollment Workshops. We offer more than 30 open-enrollment workshops a year for K-12 teachers and youth-serving professionals in New Jersey. Topics include puberty, love and relationships, oral sex, sexual orientation, self-esteem, sexual violence, abstinence, sexually transmitted diseases and information about sexuality targeted to a variety of grade levels.  The goal of open-enrollment workshops is to:

• Increase comfort, knowledge and skills in delivering comprehensive sexuality education to students in grades K-12
• Promote balanced, age-appropriate and culturally-inclusive curricula
• Provide professionals with effective teaching techniques, strategies and skills to engage young people in dynamic learning experiences.

In-Service Trainings. Our trainers travel to school districts and agencies across the country to facilitate these workshops, which are tailored to appropriate grade levels and specific needs. Our trainers also make presentations on adolescent sexual health issues at numerous national and regional conferences.

Training Institute in Sexual Health Education (TISHE). At this annual intensive summer institute, staff and participants live together for five days—creating an immediate and concentrated learning community—to address the depth and breadth of sexuality education. Attended by educators from across the United States, this intensive training experience combines informative programming and skills-building activities.

Online Professional Development. Answer's Online Professional Development (OPD) course provides educators and other professionals with the opportunity to participate in an active learning community online.  Research consistently shows that OPD can provide an educational experience comparable to—or better than—learning in the classroom.  Our first OPD course, “Sexuality ABCs: Abstinence, Birth Control and Condoms," launched in January 2008.  It uses podcasts, videos, threaded discussions and animation to help professionals who teach middle and high school students learn the latest on adolescent sexual behavior and contraception.

For more information about the Sexuality Education Training initiative, please contact Todd Slawsky, M.Ed., Answer's training coordinator, at 732-445-7929, ext. 237, or tslawsky@rci.rutgers.edu.