Learning Forward Conference

Measuring the quality, effectiveness, and impact of professional learning requires thoughtful planning and implementation of an evaluation process. Explore an eight-step process for evaluating professional learning. See how to assess the evaluability of a program, formulate evaluation questions, and construct an evaluation framework that includes data sources, data collection methods, and data analysis. Learn to apply the process to create a plan for evaluating your own professional learning programs. Participants will receive a copy of Assessing Impact: Evaluating Professional Learning (Corwin/Learning Forward, 2018, 3rd ed.).

Gain step-by-step guidance in using collaborative learning time for teachers to solve specific student learning challenges. Examine a process for using student data to craft student and educator learning goals leading to learning plans, implementation steps, and progress monitoring. Focus on the role of learning teams in implementing high-quality instructional materials and what that means for student and educator learning goals and agendas. Participants will receive a copy of Becoming a Learning Team (Learning Forward, 2018, 2nd ed.).

Leverage the science of learning through a culturally responsive lens. Identify instructional practices that accelerate students’ ability to complete unfinished learning. Examine the teacher moves to become a stronger cognitive mediator and support productive struggle that grows student brainpower. Connect equity goals to improving the instructional core, and understand the role of instructional coaches in ensuring instruction leads to more equitable outcomes.

Examine the essential characteristics of effective building-level instructional coaching programs, using a coaching framework to examine all aspects of the program. Explore ways to move coaching from a focus on teacher behaviors to a focus on student results. Leave with examples and practical tools from a variety of districts, including protocols for building relationships with teachers and principals, ways to assess the impact of coaching, sample documents defining the roles of coaches and the role of the coach champion, and more.

Dive into a framework for compassionate coaching that helps coaches avoid the distractions, obstacles, and detours that can take educators off course. Examine the components of the three-phase coaching cycle tailored to each individual and understand the conditions for implementing them. Identify barriers that educators face and explore techniques to address them. Get ready to reimagine instructional coaching with compassion, with strategies to adjust coaching moves to meet educator needs.

Examine your beliefs and experiences about written feedback, and use an Innovation Configuration map to assess your own feedback skills. Learn how to create an evaluation process that helps teachers see their practice clearly and develop a personalized plan for growth.

Learn how to shift from traditional professional learning to curriculum-based professional learning. Examine a set of research-based actions, approaches, and enabling conditions that effective schools and systems have put in place to reinforce and amplify the power of high-quality curriculum and skillful teaching. Consider strategies for applying them to your plans for professional learning.

Learn about the antiracist professional learning series offered to principals in the Austin Independent School District at the height of the global health crisis and racial violence in the U.S. Engage with a community of learners to reflect on your personal influence as an educator. Create a plan of action to build personal and collective capacity to disrupt systemic inequity in your school and district.

Explore the seven factors that lead to successful instructional coaching, based on 25 years of research. Learn coaching skills that can be used in professional practice immediately. Engage with other coaches to gain multiple perspectives and create an implementation plan to take back to your school or district. Leave with tools and forms you can use to ensure that coaching flourishes in your organization.

Explore an approach to school improvement and innovation that works from the inside out, unleashing not only student curiosity, but teacher curiosity as well by creating a culture of collaborative inquiry. Discover the power of peer-to-peer coaching in triads for school improvement and identify next steps for implementing them in your school. Use evidence-based pathways to improvement to identify your school’s next step toward innovation and improvement and focus for your professional learning.

Explore strategies for developing high-performing learning systems that build trusting relationships, raise expectations for students and staff, and engage all in a cycle of continuous improvement. Examine ways to design learning that best meets the needs of adults and deepens student learning. Learn how to remove barriers that often prevent students from having meaningful learning experiences. Leave with tools that will strengthen your leadership.

Explore steps to improve teacher leadership in your school or district using A Systemic Approach to Elevating Teacher Leadership (Killion et al., 2016) as a guide. Learn how teacher leadership promotes collaborative cultures, equitable learning environments, teacher agency and credibility, improved decision-making, and a dynamic teaching force. Plan how to monitor and evaluate teacher leadership and apply what you’ve learned in your school or district.

Develop knowledge, insights, and skills related to the well-being needs of students, staff, and yourself in a volatile world. Reimagine how to engage with practical well-being strategies not usually considered in social and emotional learning practices, such as learning outdoors, developing ethical guidelines for technology use, and addressing controversial issues through the curriculum. Leave with an ability to lead deep educator reflection about issues such as how well-being is part of learning and how emotions like anger and disgust shouldn’t just be managed but reimagined in terms of their positive value for changing the world.

Reimagine a style of leadership designed to address resistance to change while simultaneously supporting staff members. Explore ways to assemble a collective leadership approach that addresses both logical and illogical forms of resistance to change. Learn to use transformational leadership approaches that support staff and hold them accountable to change.

Explore factors that contribute to the effectiveness of professional learning and the levels of evidence most crucial to planning, implementation, and evaluation. Learn how to design and implement more effective professional learning experiences using these levels, how to gather quantitative and qualitative evidence on effects, and how to present that evidence in meaningful ways.

Gain an understanding of why it can be so difficult for adults to change their behavior. Explore techniques that result in sustained changes in adult behavior. Plan your next professional learning experience using an original template provided and incorporating some of the 20 brain-based strategies that take advantage of the ways all adult and student brains learn best.

Dig deep into the 2022 edition of Standards for Professional Learning, focusing on how the standards support high-quality professional learning. Use tools and resources to examine standards concepts such as guiding assumptions, equity, curriculum, assessment, instruction, and professional expertise. Engage in collaborative learning to apply these concepts to your role, responsibilities, and professional context.

Learn how to develop yourself as an educator and as a human being so that you can become a bigger and better version of yourself as a team member and a leader. Explore five ways to stretch at your learning edges to develop yourself to be an even more effective collaborative team member committed to educator effectiveness and continuous improvement. Leave with strategies and tools to bring back to your teams to develop your professional learning culture.

Identify the components of teacher clarity, which requires that teachers understand what students need to learn, communicate learning intentions to students, develop with students an understanding of success criteria, deliver lessons in relevant and engaging ways, and ensure that assessment drives instruction. Examine methods for promoting teacher clarity, assessing student knowledge, and fostering ownership in learning. Understand how high expectations are infused in every instructional decision. 

Jessyca Mathews is a language arts teacher at Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Michigan, and a racial, environmental justice, and institutional racism activist. In 2017, Mathews was a finalist for NEA’s Social Justice Activist of the Year for her work on the Flint water crisis. Mathews was named Michigan’s Region 5 Teacher of the Year in 2019-20. In 2018, she was named Secondary English Teacher of the Year by the Michigan Council of Teachers of English and received the Samford Award for Most Inspirational Teacher of Michigan. Mathews has a voice in multiple areas of needed change in education. She has been interviewed by USA Today, Time magazine, and MSNBC, participated in protests and community action to speak on behalf of those affected by the Flint water crisis, and written for McSweeney’s and The Washington Post.

Learn how leaders in the Memphis-Shelby County Public Schools in Tennessee implemented a universal screening process to identify a more diverse student talent pool for the gifted and talented program. Examine the project, the outcomes, and best practices based on research. Consider how to implement a universal screening protocol in your district.

Explore and interact with an innovative approach to paraeducator professional learning that has a direct impact on student achievement through the effective engagement of a school’s instructional paraeducator team. Examine how your school or organization can maximize workforce engagement to benefit students within special populations. Develop a vision and action plan for your school.

Reimagine the integration of scaffolds in curriculum reading and writing strategies for English learner students through professional learning. Create assignments that meet the needs of all English learner students without compromising the rigor or the content knowledge necessary to achieve mastery of the class objectives and maintain high-quality instruction. Learn how to disseminate these strategies to colleagues using activities founded in professional learning principles. 

Learn how Broward County Public Schools builds the capacity of teacher leaders to drive changes in instructional practice in its most academically fragile schools through professional learning that includes peer mentorship and components of a National Board Certified Teacher program. Leave with a sample plan for building the knowledge base of teacher leaders and leveraging their collective expertise to mentor teachers in urban turnaround schools.

Learn how the fifth-largest public school district in Michigan shifted from a one-size-fits-all system of professional development to a more personalized professional learning model by leveraging lessons learned over the past two years. Discover ways they supported instructional staff to develop professional learning resources by providing the tools, support, and space to share with one another. Walk away with practical examples of how you might shift your building or district to a more collaborative, job-embedded, and customized professional learning system.

Learn how social and emotional learning (SEL) can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities. Examine one district's steps to build capacity districtwide through implementation of a comprehensive and scaffolded professional learning plan to strengthen adult SEL. Follow the district's implementation of CASEL's focus area 2 (strengthen adult SEL competencies and capacity), which includes central office expertise, professional learning for all staff, adult SEL and cultural competence and alignment of initiatives, and staff trust, community, and efficacy.

Learn how one large school district reinvented meetings by creating a culture of collaboration. Experience how the intentional use of communication protocols can transform conversations and break through stalemates in both in-person and virtual settings. Learn strategies to provide more equitable participation that can foster greater buy-in for critical initiatives.

Explore how white-majority settings present unique challenges to professional learning on diversity, equity, and inclusion and how to mitigate limitations that exist in these settings. Determine how to use constructivist learning theory to support deeper understanding about race and racism. Examine how emotive and narrative experiences build racial literacy.

Explore the framework for a dynamic leadership development program. Discover and experience how Cypress-Fairbanks ISD’s series of seven leadership institutes invites, develops, and supports its leaders to take on the next job role in the leadership pipeline. Walk away with ideas for designing content, creating syllabi, and advancing leadership development.

Learn how educators can stretch student thinking, promote deep learning, and provide just the right amount of challenge for all learners. Examine evidence-based practices to support teachers in fostering inquiry, deep conceptual understanding, and disciplinary literacy. Deepen your approach to curriculum-based coaching and learn specific scaffolds for supporting students from diverse backgrounds to improve equitable access to rigorous learning experiences.

Explore how Hillsborough County Public Schools re-envisioned teacher induction in response to limited resources and the impact of COVID. Learn about the decisions we made and the lessons we learned in creating methods and tools for inducting and onboarding new and new-to-district teachers, providing innovative access to both in-person and virtual resources and support, and designing a program that provides general mentoring and high-quality professional learning.

Explore how leaders and teachers build and maintain trust and psychological safety and how sometimes these ideals are inadvertently destroyed. Gain an understanding of the impact of psychological safety on the learning environment for adults and students. Engage in rich discussion and reflection based on a large body of 21st-century evidence. Focus on resilience and the ability to bounce back from physical and emotional injury.

Gain an understanding of the contradictions leadership and instructional coaches face in their work. Analyze the root causes by identifying the coach's and system's goals, purpose, mission, and vision. Explore ways coaches and system leaders can gain clarity and increase the effectiveness of the coaching program.

Discover how one literacy coach transformed instructional practices across the district, in all grade levels and content areas, to improve student achievement. Learn to build your coaching capacity to use data, facilitate teacher work, and lead literacy efforts in your school. Enhance your skillful use of protocols and data sources to lead teachers to greater understanding of students’ literacy needs.

Explore highlights of one division’s journey in moving K-8 schools from weak or nonexistent professional learning community (PLC) cultures to collaborative inquiry and reimagined practices. Learn about division goals and nonnegotiables that foster the systematic development of both leader and teacher collective efficacy for student benefit. Collaborate with others to assess your current PLC culture and determine an action plan for reigniting your schools to higher levels of teacher and student success.

Examine the research, professional learning, and strategies one district used to transform the instructional materials adoption process, reimagine the possibilities for students with highly aligned curriculum, and structure curriculum-based professional learning. Develop knowledge and resources to implement a rigorous, equitable materials review and selection process. Analyze your current system regarding possible obstacles or catalysts toward high-quality curriculum. 

Explore how school communities can align on what liberated learning looks like for students while unlocking the collective leadership potential of administrators, teachers, parents, and students. Learn how school leaders in Fort Worth and Tulsa have locked arms with their communities using liberatory design to rally around inspiring visions for the student experience. Come away with practical schemas to cultivate empowered leaders and community-wide vision alignment.

Explore how Miami Dade County Public Schools elevates recruitment efforts to amplify and diversify the education profession through Project REDI: Project Recruiting, Empowering and Developing Inclusive Male Teachers and Leaders to increase and build the men of color educator talent pool. Learn how this innovative initiative is a pipeline to building teacher and leadership capacity with men of color educators.

Explore how district and school leadership teams can provide enabling conditions to support implementation of high-quality instructional materials. Learn key steps, such as adopting an instructional framework, anchoring coaching and feedback in the curriculum, blending support for curriculum and instructional practices, and evaluating progress. Work in small groups to analyze how teachers and school leaders are supported to implement and effectively use curriculum in their school and districts. Develop next steps to strengthen the integration of curriculum and instructional support in your school and district.

Learn about the development and outcomes of online professional learning designed to prepare pre-K-3 teachers to integrate computational thinking into their classrooms through inquiry. Examine tools, processes, and implications of online professional learning to create innovative STEM+C classrooms in a large urban district. Engage in hands-on STEM+C learning and collaborate on implications for your context.

Learn about a coaching and professional learning process that increases teacher effectiveness through formative assessment aligned with research-based instructional practices and curriculum standards. Identify the understandings, skills, and mind frames teachers must have to see the impact of their teaching actions on student learning and consider ways of growing these critical teaching proficiencies. Plan for implementation of this lab approach to empower teachers and students as learners and mathematicians and improve mathematics achievement in your own setting.

Explore processes to prepare candidates to step into school leadership roles. Learn the essential components of a sound principal pipeline. See a model for how a principal pipeline was built for an urban school district, and brainstorm with others to apply these ideas to your own school district.

Learn how engaged leaders create engaged schools by building powerful relationships that connect students, caregivers, and community in the collective responsibility of influencing a school’s success. Explore continuous improvement processes that help educators learn to adapt during challenges, disruptions, and rapid change. Gain an understanding of the ways schools can build powerful collective efficacy through improvement routines, collaborative opportunities, and listening.

Learn to create a sustainable approach to schoolwide social and emotional learning (SEL) with clear goals and an aligned plan to measure and reflect on impact. Hear from practitioners who collect and reflect on SEL data in partnership with students and families. Experience a simulated SEL team meeting, shape an SEL goal and aligned evaluation plan, and leave with tools to facilitate discussions about SEL data.

Finding inspiration and guidance from Tom Schimmer's book Grading From the Inside Out and Kotter's change process, learn about one district's two-year journey to change teacher mindset from traditional grading practices to standards-based. Learn how the work has resulted in strategically implemented changes in grading practices to increase feedback and more accurately reflect a measure of student learning, not student behavior. Leave with a sample work log sequencing the work and links to resources for each step along the journey.

Explore ways to invest in the professional capital of teacher leaders, who do the work of moving learning teams to a place where the focus is on the success of students as well as ways to increase the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of the members of the team. Develop a deeper understanding of the importance of building the capacity of school-based learning team facilitators. Explore a variety of tools and protocols to help your facilitators plan and execute effective team meetings.

Explore innovative ways to captivate adults in the learning process and how to customize professional learning that supports best practices in a blended classroom. Learn how to curate resources that provide just-in-time, self-paced professional learning to an entire district in a few clicks.

Unleash the power of teacher teams to maximize the impact of formative assessment on student achievement, engagement, and equity.  Apply a four-step Formative Assessment for Results cycle, where teachers: clarify learning targets and success criteria; infuse formative assessment throughout instruction; analyze student work frequently and in-depth; and provide timely, targeted feedback, reteaching, and extension. Travel around the FAR cycle and experience activities that build teachers' expertise in these high-impact steps.

Explore equity coaching, a leadership stance that supports the idea that practice is what changes behaviors and behaviors are what change systems. Consider how improving educators’ coaching skills can help them lead others to embrace change and replace current reproductive practices with new relational approaches. Learn about listening as the central skill in coaching and creating culturally responsive communities. Delve into the topics of race, culture, and schema to contextualize cultural responsiveness and imagine new ways for adults and students to be in community with one another.

Reimagine professional development with students at the center by designing collaborative adult learning that ignites curiosity and shared responsibility and accelerates student achievement. Experience a new approach to professional learning using Lead by Learning’s playbook. Reflect on your current vision for adult learning and walk away with concrete practices to implement tomorrow.

Learn how to meet the physical, social, and emotional needs of your students while also maintaining a quality personal life. Identify the factors that contribute to teacher burnout. Explore how to determine purpose and restore your passion for teaching. Consider 12 specific ways to support your physical and mental well-being.

Explore how principals are redesigning their leadership based on the new Standards for Professional Learning and the roles they play in leading learning of adults and students. Examine the new standards from the role of the principal and leave with a plan of action to move forward with authentic implementation in our schools.

Explore ways to integrate knowledge and skills into any evaluation system to bring a growth-producing dimension often missing from traditional evaluation. Enhance your listening skills as well as your knowledge of how to support thinking during the evaluation process. Learn how to support growth in others through an evaluation conversation. Identify and practice the skills of authentic paraphrasing and posing thoughtful questions.

Learn about the latest & greatest digital tools that can be used to enhance participants' Professional Learning experience. We will share tools to use for engagement during presentations, organization of PD sessions, conferences, newsletters, curating of professional learning resources for educators, and more! Engage in and discuss how these tools can positively impact professional learning opportunities.  Apply new digital tool knowledge to an upcoming professional learning you are planning for your own setting.  

Deep dive into practical strategies that stimulate dopamine release and win back students. Explore the research and brain science behind distracted students. Investigate different strategies you can use in numerous learning settings to increase engagement. Plan action steps to implement these strategies.

Surface the nonverbal and verbal patterns you might consider using to open a meeting or professional learning when you know resistance is in the way. Explore a series of moves intended to surface the emotions, the values driving the emotions, and then decrease their intensity so that oxygen returns to participants' brains and they can think and be present.

Imagine students reading, writing, and speaking in all contents with deep understanding in discipline-specific ways. Learn how to meld literacy and content to help students become apprentices in all disciplines while impacting and increasing student engagement. Partake in high expectations and structured routines that support students in taking charge of their own learning. Leave with equitable, research-based instructional practices, connections with colleagues, and an action plan to grow your disciplinary literacy communities.

Learn about the transformative professional learning practices taking place in Lexington School District One, which is taking a "show, don't tell" approach and leveraging model classrooms, lab sites, learning walks, and professional learning clinics. Leave with ideas of how to revitalize professional learning in your district so the professional learning results in shifts in instructional practice.

Learn how district and school-based administrators partner to implement a successful student-centered instructional coaching program. Understand how using varied lenses provides support to instructional coaches. Develop a plan of action to bolster a culture that thrives on coaching.

Learn how districts can overcome the challenge of providing just-in-time support for students who have fallen behind mathematically. Experience how Lenoir City Schools is capturing additional opportunities during the school day to provide support by highly effective teachers, well-trained tutors, and the use of high-quality materials. Leave with a sample of a clearly defined program structure, including a protocol for the selection of students, tutors, and materials.

Explore how building administrators and instructional coaches can build teacher capacity and raise student achievement through a comprehensive, collaborative approach to professional learning. Examine a district’s grassroots efforts to positively impact professional learning by starting with building-level leadership and instructional coaches at the elementary level. Learn about the Learning Forward Academy and how it has changed the way this Midwest district approaches professional learning for all at the elementary level.

Examine current barriers to educator wellness and resilience. Explore ways to alleviate educator stress and guide teachers off the path to burnout. Discover the tools you need to help teachers on their own wellness journey, providing strategies and resources to cultivate resilience in our schools. Collaborate with your peers to develop a resilience coaching plan.

Explore how being a coach can allow today's leader to combine evaluation, management, and being an instructional leader. Gain an understanding of higher levels of effectiveness and the principles of instructional coaching to support school improvement. Develop a foundational understanding of student-centered coaching and the critical role it plays in instructional leadership. Learn how to lead with a coach's hat and use data to drive instruction. Engage in self-assessment that can drive changes in leadership practice.

Learn how a collective, unified approach to instructional coaching leads to high levels of teaching and learning. Explore how Virginia Beach Schools developed a comprehensive instructional coaching model to build teacher capacity for high-impact instructional practice. Practice coaching conversations using tools that build a common language and leave with a sample coaching model that focuses on research-based competencies instructional coaches may use to yield teacher growth and student achievement.

Learn how Hayward Unified School District and WestEd co-designed and facilitated the work of an equity oversight committee tasked with providing feedback and policy recommendations to the school board. Explore the core processes and tools that guided the work as well as the core tools and strategies used to build the capacity of the equity oversight committee. Experience activities and gain insights to set the stage for leading equity-centered work.

Explore how collaborative teacher teams, when leading student-focused inquiry cycles, have the potential to reimagine and improve student experience. Engage with the story of teacher leaders who integrate student voice as they guide grade-level teams to determine an instructional problem to solve and how to solve it, then analyze its impact. Analyze your own inquiry-based teamwork in light of artifacts from the field, student interview protocols, and a research-based inquiry tool.

Engage in a collaborative session to explore the process of a full curriculum audit to examine resources through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of a robust continuous improvement cycle. Connect with global colleagues to synthesize new learning and refresh current practices. Walk away with a toolbox of look-fors and processes to examine your own curriculum resources.

Learn how leaders and educators shift power and participation to students through maximizing their voices in their classrooms, schools, and broader communities. Understand how to center student voices in service of creating learning environments that are inclusive of and responsive to students’ needs. Leave equipped to take action steps to strengthen student voices in their learning, about their learning, and for change.

Explore the user-centered design component of Dr. Bryk's improvement science. Experience open-source tools to analyze curriculum for vertical and horizontal standards coherence and alignment. Identify effective formative data measurement. Apply improvement science concepts and resources to your own problem of practice. Leave with practical open education resources tools that integrate professional learning, curriculum, and assessment.

Learn how to design a system of professional learning that supports an entire district or state. Examine ways to identify and frame state or district needs and leverage a theory of change to arrive at a strong program design. Explore implementation science and design principles of program evaluation to successfully implement and determine the effectiveness of programs at a large scale.

Develop an actionable understanding of how to design professional learning to foster equitable instruction and drive continuous improvement in learning. View professional learning and system design through three lenses: a review of the common components of the world’s highest-performing education systems; a real-world discussion with a district actively implementing professional learning lessons gleaned from this research; and a self-analysis of a district as it relates to these principles.

Learn about the equity-driven social-emotional learning competencies of the My Brother’s Keeper Scholars Program in central Texas. Review the student self-report and observation tool to understand how each can provide information to students, staff, and teachers to nurture student growth. Explore identity, thinking, and action themes to begin a personal understanding of the competencies and what use might look, sound, and feel like in your local context.

Learn how the body of research called the science of learning impacts how we design and facilitate professional learning. Engage with the latest research on how adults learn and what we know from professional learning to consider attributes and mechanisms for deeply engaging educators in making instructional shifts. Consider your own context and leave with a research-based outline for enacting the science of learning with your team.

Learn about research-based systems and structures to implement in a school or district to drive continuous improvement cycles through learning acceleration strategies. Explore how strategic implementation of learning acceleration leads to long-term impactful results. Curate a unique, tailored checklist for yourself that will guide assessing readiness and ability to address and successfully implement learning acceleration strategies in your home school or district. 

Evaluate what research says about the importance of using high-quality instructional resources and understand where teacher choice exists in teaching and learning. Understand the impact of using high-quality instructional resources on student achievement and equity. Prepare a plan to be able to implement and lead a high-quality materials focus in your own district or campus.

Learn how one district provides teachers with embedded professional learning and equitable practice during the teacher workday. Explore how Washoe County School District’s implementation of district common assessments impacts classroom, school, and district learning communities. Discover the learning committee’s use of common assessments to study instructional practice, evaluate program efficacy, deepen understanding of content standards, gain exposure to assessment literacy, and, above all, identify professional learning needs.

Explore why teachers of color leave schools based on evidence collected by a team of researchers and teacher leaders. Consider school- and district-focused solutions for better supporting and retaining teachers of color, and learn how a cohort of district teams are taking a learning sciences approach to addressing teacher diversity. Engage in small-group discussions with other participants on what their schools and districts are doing and could be doing to better support teachers of color. Develop action plans for better recruiting, supporting, growing, and retaining teachers of color.

Create a culture that can transform your school. Learn about and analyze key elements of schools that honor the worth of each person and experience high levels of student learning and success. Explore strategies that have made school transformation possible at the deepest levels through the development of school leaders and professional learning. Develop an action plan to address both culture and promising initiatives.

Learn how complex, urban districts with multiple departments and instructional coaches come together to norm around research-based coaching practices that lead to improved teacher pedagogy and student achievement. Explore how Metro Nashville Public Schools, serving 82,000+ students and 159 schools, tackled differences in coaching practices by co-constructing a coaching handbook, professional learning, and data collection systems. Leave with practical ideas for how to refocus efforts on productive coaching activities and bringing together different stakeholders.

Dive into the resources that support implementation of Standards for Professional Learning. Learn how to translate the standards -- which describe the content, processes, and conditions for professional learning that lead to high-quality leading, teaching, and learning -- into the daily work of educators in various roles and with varying responsibilities, from state education leaders to classroom teachers.

Explore strategies for principal leadership in pre-K to 3rd grade. Gain an understanding of developmentally appropriate practice and identify ways to enhance instructional leadership capacity to align pre-K programs or early childhood education with K-3 learning.

Explore ways that each individual within a learning organization can build individual and organizational resilience in the wake of trauma. Identify ideas, insights, and experiences that have ensured that members of our school communities feel safe, calm, empowered, connected, and instilled with hope. Share your expertise and leave with tools and tactics to try at home.

Engage with leaders of two neighboring districts as they share ways they leveraged opportunities for building a culture of professional learning through the challenges of COVID. Learn how these two districts used this disrupted environment to strengthen a districtwide culture of ongoing learning and continual improvement in key areas. Interact with fellow conference participants to share effective strategies for moving important work in times of crisis.

Learn how to develop effective professional learning that gives teachers time to enhance their roles and responsibilities without making them feel their to-do list is growing. Explore ways to give flexibility, encourage curiosity, and offer meaningful learning through choice boards, coaching menus, and goal setting. Leave with resources you can implement immediately.

Explore how teachers can create coherent, phenomenon-based inquiry. Learn how the Institute for Quality Science Teaching at the Museum of Science and Industry develops and facilitates teacher professional learning that models the coherent teaching of science content based on the Next Generation Science Standards. Examine the structures the museum uses to support teachers’ understanding of coherence, as well as observations from teachers who experienced the courses. Identify opportunities to apply this model in your own context.

Engage with three regional professional learning providers in Alabama to discuss lessons learned from past and present practices and how regional support can be reimagined for the future. Explore the role data collection plays in the development of professional learning that meets teachers' needs. Identify ways to assess the impact of high-quality professional learning in a regional support network.

Learn how one district improved student learning by creating the essential conditions for effective family engagement, using online tools to develop a needs assessment and monitor progress. Examine how district and school family engagement teams implemented processes, strategies, and aligned practices that promote improved focus on learning, communication, relationships, and advocacy. Analyze your own school or district using a self-assessment tool.

Explore the TIC TAC (Technology Integration Cycle: Transforming Academic Curriculum) model of personalized professional learning that includes a five-phase cycle to engage teachers in goal setting, lesson planning, and reflection activities. Learn how to select the best technology tool to create meaningful and engaging learning opportunities for students. Bring your device and join us for this interactive session as we share our resources and experiences with this model.

Confront and challenge the assumption that the randomized control trial is the gold standard in large-scale quantitative studies by examining the strengths and limitations of these methods. Come away with a framework for evaluating what forms of evidence are right for your own work.

Explore professional learning designed to take a human-centered approach that blends the science and art of teaching to advance equity and accelerate educator effectiveness. Identify the components that make up a strong professional learning program and apply them to your own context.

Learn about a model for school-university partnerships that can lead to school improvement and change. Hear how a K-8 district reached out to the local university to partner on an ambitious project to transform learning for students and teachers through professional learning communities (PLCs) and coaching. Apply the strategies as you develop a plan for your own school or district.

Learn about your implicit bias as we discuss how to assist your school in providing equity and social justice for LGBTQ students. Examine the research behind the important five areas that create a welcoming climate, and use rubrics to help you determine your school's scores for ensuring a safe climate for LGBTQ students.

Examine how equity work faces resistance in politically conservative communities. Consider your local experience as you strategize with colleagues about how to increase the positive impact of equitable learning environments in the context of the political climate. Identify ways to navigate difficult conversations and actions to plan for and respond to pushback.

Explore professional learning funded by the state of Tennessee to help educators understand high-quality instructional materials, attend to standards and goals, foster effortful thinking, and support all learners in the elementary math classroom. Reflect on the impact that high-quality instructional materials have in providing equitable learning outcomes for elementary mathematics students. Engage in activities designed to identify and implement high-quality instructional materials.

Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa teaches Neuroscience of Learning: An Introduction to Mind, Brain, Health and Education at the Harvard University Extension School and is an associate editor of npj Science of Learning. She is the co-founder of Connections: The Learning Sciences Platform (www.thelearningsciences.com), which provides evidence-based support for teachers in over 40 countries. Her most recent books are Bringing the Neuroscience of Learning to Online Teaching: An Educator’s Handbook (2021); Neuromyths: Debunking False Ideas About the Brain (2019); and The Five Pillars of the Mind: Redesigning Education to Suit the Brain (2019). She has authored articles for UNESCO and was a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development expert panel to redefine teachers’ new pedagogical knowledge.

 Experience how the School District of Clayton has redefined bias training to equity professional learning with an emphasis on humanization and expanding one’s moral community. Leave with a new equity vocabulary and language that entices buy-in from even the most stubborn resistors to equity professional learning.

Learn how to develop and ultimately enable a budget that will provide funding and support in an equitable manner by optimizing internal and external stakeholder collaboration. Identify areas of inequity within a school or district. Explore ways to manage multiple stakeholder groups with diverse interests. Determine how to measure success.

Learn how Fairfax County Public Schools developed a vision for instructional coaching and established systems to support the growth and development of the program over the past 17 years. Examine how a large school system reimagined the pipeline for future instructional coaches  to continue to expand the program with highly qualified candidates. Explore ways to provide differentiated professional learning for new and experienced coaches and measure the impact of a coach's work.

Acknowledge the trauma of the pandemic and begin the process of healing by engaging in activities that support deep rest. Explore integrative leadership development, which empowers educational leaders to thrive and centers wellness for teachers and students. Learn how this professional learning increases the effectiveness of educators and demonstrates the connection between social-emotional wellness and Standards for Professional Learning.

Learn how one organization created collaborative and sustained professional learning to provide leadership teams with the knowledge, skills, and resources to systemically respond to and take action on issues of equity through the exploration of a unique problem of practice. Develop socio-political awareness and critical consciousness by acknowledging and exploring the current reality within your educational environment. Identify a reasonable problem of practice and receive critical peer feedback on possible solutions to create a theory of change and an action plan to resolve issues.

Examine how a large, urban school district reimagined its approach to new teacher induction to provide a more equitable onboarding experience for all new hires regardless of their entry point into the district or profession. Learn concrete, practical strategies to lead to deeper new teacher engagement and investment in key district priorities. Apply research-based techniques to assess and refine current induction practices in your school or district.

Learn how Hoffman Estates High School, based on research and educator self-reflection, facilitates leadership development during the first four years of a new educator’s tenure at the school. Leave with an action plan to implement this program, feeling confident in expressing the importance in building this capacity in all new educators.

Learn how districts support the changing demands and decreasing prior experience levels of new administrators. Examine how Frederick County Public Schools created a bidirectional leadership coaching program to address the district’s needs for onboarding new leaders. Leave with a road map that will help you develop your own leadership coaching program using your current human capital.

Learn how two large school districts in Texas are rebuilding teachers' confidence, respect, creativity, passion, and hope as a means to address teacher morale, teacher retention, and the post-pandemic teacher shortage. Explore responsive strategies to address teacher needs that provide a stable foundation for improved job satisfaction, effectiveness, healing, and hope among teachers and teacher leaders.

Learn how a medium-sized urban district has reimagined what professional learning can look and feel like for educators by focusing on just-in-time learning aligned to their individual needs. Identify ways to move your learning organization's culture from a compliance mindset to a learning mindset. Leave with timelines, templates, and resources for communicating to various audiences about the shift to just-in-time learning.

Hear how Alaskan educators have collaborated to bring professional learning to a new level. See our responsive and coherent statewide system of professional learning for all educators. Explore how a variety of organizations can develop a statewide professional learning calendar, quarterly professional learning roundtables, and statewide inservice days. Learn how diversity and broad partnerships in this project have created synergy, strength, and different perspectives to this work.

Reimagine professional learning for equitable outcomes within your district. Engage in mini-sessions on how language matters, coaching for equity, and analyzing the work through equity instructional rounds. Leave with practical strategies to implement professional learning aligned with a vision of equity for sustainable impact in your district.

Join two districts that created multiyear embedded professional learning using a collaborative process, designing and implementing new instructional frameworks in alignment with their vision for all learners. Learn strategies to ensure every touchpoint – classroom visit, feedback conversation, meeting – becomes a learning opportunity focused on district goals and impact on learners.

Examine how schools and systems can learn from teachers’, students’, and families’ experiences with high-quality curriculum and curriculum-based professional learning to strengthen implementation. Preview a framework and tool kit based on the Concerns-Based Adoption Model that helps practitioners understand the effectiveness of high-quality instructional materials and professional learning implementation, uncover disconnects between intended and actual implementation, and design tailored supports. Join a data-based strategic planning simulation, and identify steps to harness your stakeholders’ experiences to improve implementation.

Explore how teacher teams and departments can create shared expectations that capture the unique features of practice within their content areas. Create or adapt instructional frameworks with the specific needs of your subjects at the forefront. Practice using your draft framework by role-playing peer feedback conversations.

Learn to craft compelling messages, articulate needs, and develop simple strategies to keep educators informed during the launch of a new curriculum. Develop your verbal and written communication skills and your understanding of high-quality instructional materials and professional learning. Examine communication biases and learn how to calibrate strategic messages to account for them.

Investigate accessible strategies for your own well-being in eight key areas, including emotional, occupational, social, environmental, intellectual, financial, spiritual, and physical wellness, through a personal self-assessment, educator video vignettes, and discussion with fellow learners. Develop a personal wellness plan that supports your own self-care, and share strategies that transfer to your school, team, and community.

Explore how Orange County Public Schools designed a three-tiered, differentiated professional learning collection centered around coaching to meet the needs of over 13,000 instructional and administrative personnel. Identify how adult learning theories are integrated and leveraged within differentiated professional learning. Leave with a deeper understanding of current professional learning with potential for differentiation and expansion, and create an action plan outlining implementation steps and key stakeholders integral to the process of implementing learning equitably.

Explore ways an early childhood program can build a more integrated and cohesive approach to supporting a district's pre-K-12 graduation plan. Learn how to connect an engaging and culturally relevant early childhood program to your K-12 pathway using research-based methods. Prepare to address the professional needs of early childhood educators and build an academic foundation for young children and their families to raise performance in later grades.

Explore how districts and schools can leverage the use of research-based guiding principles to establish and sustain effective professional learning routines and practices. Examine the impact of learning design on instructional effectiveness, student achievement, and district and school improvement. Evaluate the extent to which local learning models align with research-based design principles and consider what tweaks could serve as catalysts for improved professional learning and educator effectiveness in the local context.

Consider the significant changes for educators when they are surrounded by a cohesive and coherent system of professional learning support. Learn how to align initiatives with educators’ daily practices, leverage the existing mechanisms in your context, and consider asynchronous and personalized learning to develop and sustain learning for educators. Leave with actionable next steps and templates for supporting shifts in instruction needed to maximize student learning.

Learn how to use student interviews to assess the other components of fluency: flexibility and efficiency. Explore the impact this shift has on student proficiency and mathematical disposition. Engage with tools for creating and conducting these assessments as well as data-tracking tools to target specific needs and provide prescriptive instruction.

See how Haywood County Schools approached improving literacy and long-term outcomes of young learners by grounding instruction in what we know works for all students. Engage with field-tested practices for early literacy that move the needle on student outcomes. Understand how these practices are rooted in a systematic and explicit foundational skills program as well as content-rich knowledge building and are responsive to challenges resulting from unprecedented schooling disruptions.

Learn how human-centered improvement processes engage community to design impactful professional learning toward more equitable education. Explore how Dallas ISD used this approach to address problems of race and racism. Identify tools and practices of human-centered improvement that you can apply to your own problems of practice.

Follow one district's journey to establish routines and processes that empowered learning leaders and staff and grew efficacy and a collective commitment around its priorities for employees, students, and families. Learn how you can empower everyone as learning leaders throughout the district to share their collective expertise and experiences as difference makers and leaders of improvement.

Experience grade-level text from the perspective of an English learner. Discover ways to leverage technology to provide students with meaningful activities that enhance comprehension. Learn how to equip general education teachers with the confidence to teach every learner in their in-person and digital classrooms.

Develop an understanding of the 10 elements for building a collaborative environment for teachers that results in improved teacher effectiveness and results for students. Gain skills for building relationships and engaging in productive conflict. Leave with an expanded repertoire of practical tools for engaging with individuals and groups.

Learn tips and strategies for how to wrangle assessment data, ask questions from it, and derive meaning from it for effective change for teachers and students. Gain frameworks and tools to apply to your classroom, team, department, school, or district to make data fun and informative. Identify next steps to better use and leverage your assessment data to help you measure students’ learning and know what steps to consider next. 

Build belonging in your professional learning. Explore the importance of belonging and the connection to Standards for Professional Learning. Learn to design the moments of belonging and the kinds of experiences that offer opportunities for people to contribute in the learning community. Bring a current professional learning opportunity you want to reimagine with and not for participants. This session leverages the Design for Belonging Framework and tool kit from the Stanford d.school.

Examine the attributes of effective feedback as well as the various types, purposes, and sources of feedback. Gain a deeper understanding of the feedback process and how to apply it to promote increased educator effectiveness. Learn how to create a culture in which educators routinely engage in the feedback process. Participants will receive a copy of The Feedback Process: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning (Learning Forward, 2019, 2nd ed.) by Joellen Killion.

Rebuild, reinvest, and reimagine coaching and leading. Learn about the human-centered design model in conjunction with structural tension to strengthen your repertoire of strategies as leaders. Create a plan of action and receive feedback to actively work through current and relevant constraints in your work. Use the principles of structural tension and human-centered design, along with the expertise of your fellow participants, to connect, inspire, create, and learn from one another through empathetic interviews, peer review, and other interactive networking opportunities.

Learn how aligning a district vision of instruction and success for all students begins at the top and permeates throughout the district. Engage with the research, process, and professional learning used to move one district toward excellence for all schools and students with a common vision of instruction. Collaborate with your fellow participants to develop a path toward a singular united focus centered around districtwide collective efficacy.

Accelerate learning in your district by creating systems for connected professional learning communities with a focus on instructional coaching and district leadership. Learn how Santa Fe ISD used a systems approach using long-range vision, instructional coaching model, and learner model that developed common language, and instruments for impacting the system resulting in dynamic growth in teachers and students. Leave with a plan for implementing a system for growth.

Learn how collaborative and reflective structures impact the outcome of any districtwide initiative. Build your knowledge around the journey of one district and access processes and tools that allow innovative change management to happen effectively. Explore inclusive environments and discover ways to build stronger communities and create learning cycles that impact the implementation of a strategic plan.

Explore guidelines for using data as a clear measure for goal setting or as a method for measuring progress. Learn how to partner with teachers to set powerful, emotionally compelling, clear goals that will have an unmistakably positive impact on student engagement or achievement. Identify ways to foster teacher agency by partnering with teachers to document and communicate meaningful progress.

Discover ways to ensure that high-quality instruction is occurring in all the classrooms in your district. Take a walk with Memphis-Shelby County leaders as they share their process for building teacher and leader capacity through collaborative classroom walk-throughs focused on high-quality instructional practices to improve student academic achievement. Leave with a model and resources to support implementation of a classroom walk-through process in your district.

Experience the power of using English learner student shadowing data as a source for making decisions for instructional changes that lead to equity and excellence for language learners. Practice coding students’ engagement using a student shadowing tool designed to track students’ academic language use. Engage in a small-group protocol for analyzing the shadowing data to determine next steps for instruction and professional learning.

Learn how Rockdale County Public Schools' leadership team collaboratively built a culturally relevant leadership framework aligned to its leadership evaluation tool. Identify your school's or district's readiness to begin the process and determine a timeline. Develop an action plan to create and then systematically and systemically implement culturally relevant leadership in your school or district.

Explore how to use learner variability to rethink the design of professional learning. Learn how to create rigorous goals for learning, reduce barriers to create opportunities, and leverage the assets that jagged learner profiles offer in design choices through the foundational concepts of Universal Design for Learning. Engage in discussions, practice with vignettes, and leave with tools to design professional learning for variable learners.

Experience how a suburban school district used systems thinking and gap analysis to increase personalized professional learning within the district’s comprehensive plan. Identify key guiding principles of your local organization that guide your professional learning. Construct and clarify your vision to build structures of support that increase personalized professional learning within your local organization. Leave with a self-created plan that increases personalized professional learning for the staff within your organization.

Engage in a slice of the Project I4 micro-credential experience for school leaders in which we cultivated relational trust with engaging protocols, used common tools for observation and having post-observation conversations, and supported leaders through coaching and peer networks. Leave with tools, protocols, and an understanding of the Project I4 coaching model and data on leader and teacher impact.

Investigate the high-impact professional learning approaches that the Broome-Tioga BOCES Professional Learning and Innovation Center team researched and implemented during the pandemic and beyond. Examine the impact of coaching on the transfer of knowledge into practice during professional learning. Apply lessons learned to reimagine the design of professional learning to enhance teacher growth and student success.

Learn how the Anchorage School District in Anchorage, Alaska, has transformed professional learning for paraprofessionals from individual learning experiences into cohesive and themed professional learning that supports growth in an identified focus area throughout the year. Gain insight into how organizing professional learning for paraprofessionals around a central theme each year has provided clarity and a common goal in supporting students with special needs. Explore how this approach can strengthen your mission and provide continuity and commitment to professional learning for groups of adult learners.

Experience a  protocol for looking at student work that has transformed teaching and learning of teachers, administrators, and students in one district through deep reflection on student mathematical thinking. Connect student thinking to classroom practice. Acquire tools to implement a collaborative protocol in your setting that affords student and teacher learning.

Experience DataLAB, a framework for professional learning communities, in which we will identify “warm” and “cool” data to leverage and make actionable. Incorporate the collection of warm data to design responsive strategies for your school and district based on qualitative trends over time.  Highlight how social-emotional learning can provide fruitful streams of qualitative data and support instruction, engagement, and retention.

Explore the topic of continuous improvement through small-group discussions, video demonstrations, and application activities designed to grow structures for continuous improvement in your home district. Identify important considerations when establishing a continuous improvement team, how to create a sense of urgency around continuous improvement, and the benefits of embracing high levels of collective efficacy among team members. Examine specific examples of continuous improvement structures and apply them to your own setting.

Learn how depth of knowledge clarifies what exactly and how deeply academic standards, curricular activities, and test items demand that students understand and use their learning. Explore how to use depth of knowledge levels as a method and model for planning and providing teaching and learning experiences that are standards-based, socially and emotionally supportive, and student responsive.

Learn strategies, protocols, and tools for supporting educators at a distance. Explore field-tested virtual coaching strategies for building trust, designing data-driven goals, modeling best practices, implementing intervention, and tracking progress toward implementation of evidence-based practices. Discover the professional learning that fits faculty needs by tapping into the collective capacity of a larger coaching community.

Explore the latest neuroscience research on executive functioning, which impacts goal-oriented behaviors that are the foundation of learning and success in life. Identify the cognitive and emotional components of executive functioning skills, and gain insight into how they impact learning and development. Learn practical and effective strategies to develop every student’s executive functioning skills.

Learn how teachers and leaders use a design-thinking approach to create a professional learning community for curricular continuous improvement that advances teacher practices and deepens student learning. Use discovery, design, and delivery methods that amplify student voice and encourage innovative thinking. Engage curriculum design teams in processes and protocols that create collective leadership and result in deep implementation.

Learn how one school district created flexible, innovative learning opportunities that teachers can engage with on-demand. Identify the attributes of quality teaching and learning you want to see in your context. Engage with a framework for designing or adapting innovative "micro" professional learning. Leave with a plan to implement at your site.

Use equity-centered professional learning planning tools to reflect on your own beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and expectations around professional learning. Learn how to design welcoming and affirming professional learning spaces that sustain a culture supporting development of all staff. Explore methods for embedding culturally responsive practices in professional learning. Apply tools to a professional learning experience of your choosing.

Experience how Anne Arundel County Public Schools is using new teacher coaches to create a professional learning community that embraces identity-affirming partnerships with teachers in their second and third years in the profession. Discover how engaging teachers in coaching with a lens of social justice and equitable practices aims to impact teacher retention and inclusive student learning environments.

Explore one district's efforts to move from traditional grading practices and beliefs to standards-based instruction, grading, and reporting. Dive into Monroe One BOCES’ standards-based road map, where we will take you on our transformative journey toward being fully standards-based, kindergarten through high school. Explore examples of standards-based assessments and proficiency scales across content and special areas, and walk through the collaboration and development of these resources. Leave with a road map outlining steps taken toward being fully standards-based, including strategies and tools that can be used with your own staff.

Learn how Louisiana is reimagining and transforming literacy outcomes through its efforts to increase literacy outcomes and behaviors through implementation of high-quality instructional practices and interactions facilitated by effective teachers who are supported by leaders and families, improve literacy instruction through a collaborative coaching model that supports teachers and leaders at the school level with regional and state-level support systems, and promote ongoing professional learning, which is an essential component of effective teaching and literacy development.

Explore how an urban school district implements an innovative approach to address the problem of one-size-fits-all professional learning by focusing on teacher agency. Learn the processes needed to implement and test a high-quality, teacher-directed professional learning program that empowers and retains a diverse teacher workforce while enhancing instructional practice and increasing student outcomes.

Learn how one district increased student outcomes by leveraging hands-on practice and rapid cycles of improvement to solidify deep understanding of math. Explore an innovative iteration of traditional lesson study that emphasizes collaborative planning, high-quality instructional materials, and rapid cycles of improvement grounded in student outputs. Become familiar with high-leverage language instructional routines for mathematics and how to use them well, and identify how to replicate components of the model in your own system.

Learn ways Moberly School District has implemented its Supporting, Helping, & Inspiring New Educators (S.H.I.N.E) program and tips for helping our newest professionals find support during the challenges of launching their career. Explore induction, orientation, and onboarding strategies for new hires in a smaller district. Collaborate to share successes and challenges of supporting beginning teachers. 

Learn how high-quality instructional materials and personalized teaching and learning can intersect to improve student outcomes. Examine promising data from districts across the region that shows teachers are using high-quality instructional materials with integrity, having positive effects on student achievement, educator performance, and school or district improvement. Walk away with practical strategies and practices for those who coach and support teachers.

Learn how a district has optimized its process to collect formative data and align professional learning supports across English language arts, math, and foundational literacy. Explore strategies to close the loop between what observers see and the support provided to educators from multiple teams. Leave with practical tips for building progress monitoring into your professional learning plans.

Explore the Students' Six process, which engages groups of high school students in a process designed to provide high-quality professional learning to their teachers. Interact with a panel of students who have benefited from this process. Learn how to encourage collaboration between students and educators and discuss ways to implement the Students' Six process in your district.

Explore how central administrators, principals, and instructional coaches work together to establish and sustain highly effective professional learning. Examine findings from a 2021 study that explored partnership agreements regarding roles and responsibilities, shared understandings of coaching work, and structures and conditions that support equitable access to professional learning. Learn how one district is leveraging the partnership to impact educator practices and promote a culture of learning. Identify ways to strengthen the principal-coach partnership and professional learning in schools, districts, or agencies. 

Explore childhood trauma, an urgent and growing issue in schools, and its profound impact on learning and teaching. Learn practical techniques grounded in research-based practices to help you cultivate a trauma-sensitive learning environment that fosters resiliency for students across all content areas, grade levels, and educational settings. Head off frustration and burnout with essential self-care techniques that will help you and your students flourish during challenging times.

Unpack the relationship between equity and educator learning using Standards for Professional Learning. Examine how Standards for Professional Learning support equity in teaching and learning. Engage in collaborative activities to explore what it means to have equity in professional learning, and discover how the standards support leading, teaching, and learning to achieve equitable outcomes for students. Apply the concepts of equity to your context by engaging in an informal assessment of the current system.

Explore how to change your school community's culture around digital citizenship. Hear on-the-ground experiences from statewide digital citizenship education work in Utah and the lessons learned from bringing together stakeholders of different backgrounds, perceptions, and thoughts on digital citizenship. Identify ways to shift perceptions on technology and create common ground.

Learn to leverage podcasting to meet your professional learning purposes. Engage in discussion around a podcast designed with Universal Design for Learning to support the variability of learners and overcome the barriers of professional learning.

Explore methods to determine whether your professional learning is contributing to school improvement and student achievement. Gather tips and takeaways from the evaluation of a professional learning experience in which teachers conducted action research in classrooms and presented findings to colleagues. Learn about a framework you can use to gather actionable feedback from any professional learning initiative.

Improve student data privacy practices in your school or district. Learn how the Franklin Special School District in Tennessee ensures student data privacy while removing the burden from teachers, administrators, and families. Become familiar with privacy legislation and how it affects educators, as well as online terms of service and privacy policies. Consider how you can apply this to your context.

Ignite your understanding of how social media can be implemented within an educational setting to build an online community. Break into differentiated roundtable discussions to create or elevate your current model, whether your social media platform is just starting out or is well-established. Walk away with tools and resources for bite-sized professional learning, spotlights, and events, and connect with others who are interested in reimagining professional learning.

Learn about a mixed-methods study that investigated the efficacy of blended professional learning (combination of in-person and online coaching). Examine qualitative and quantitative results that demonstrate the efficacy of blended professional learning and the value of additional online coaching. Discuss effective implementation and content of online coaching and characteristics of effective online coaches.

Learn how innovative school leaders are reimagining social-emotional learning (SEL) in a post-COVID-19 world. Explore actionable strategies for building a systematic approach to modern SEL that also address one of the biggest influences on students: social media.

Explore the mental health and emotional crises affecting educators and students today, and chart a course to lead our schools through grief. Determine action steps you can take to improve and enhance school culture, based on medical and military research in disaster psychology and rooted in best educational practices to properly support students and educators in new and meaningful ways.

Explore ways learning organizations can create a cohesive framework to sustain collaborative learning, collective responsibility, and shared accountability. Learn how Bay City Schools, supported by the Institute for Excellence in Education, used team-based leadership and organization frameworks to create aligned and sustainable improvement goals. Gain insights into how increased collaborative learning between leaders and educators improved adult learning and student outcomes in the frame of organizational change.

Examine the cognitive and affective characteristics of teacher leaders and how to nurture these in job-embedded professional learning. Discover opportunities to expand and deepen pedagogical content knowledge through teacher leadership and teacher collaboration. Investigate the pitfalls and hurdles in efforts to improve teacher expertise, teacher collaboration, and pedagogical content knowledge in the most challenging educational settings.

Join colleagues and leaders in an interactive and facilitated discussion on the intersectionality of the key elements to promote collective leadership efficacy through collaborative principal inquiry. Listen to effective research-based practices that will help build coherence across schools to promote equitable and sustainable student outcomes. Engage in conversations to formulate your own bridge-to-practice to implement strategic goals and tiered action plans to support principal leadership development.

Explore the GATE Program, a district-based, job-embedded alternative certification program, as an innovative solution designed to address teacher recruitment and retention needs. Learn how and why this program has proven effective as an alternative pathway for successful entry into the teaching profession. Examine a model that leverages the community’s support to attract career-changers to teaching and provides the unique support needed for these teachers to thrive in the profession for years to come.

Learn how to develop an aligned system of learning walks that includes students, teachers, campus administration, and educational services. Explore how one district reimagined learning walks through collaboration across campuses and departments. Examine the data analysis of the learning walks using the plan-do-study-act cycle, which provides real-time, actionable feedback on the current reality, allowing each department to provide support for teachers and students.

Shift your concept of traditional professional learning for educators away from a tabula rasa model of filling teachers with knowledge. Create professional learning that allows educators to engage in experiential learning and enhance their perspectives. Connect with the communities where your students live, and develop community-based relationships.

Address the challenge of meeting the personalized learning needs of all students. Learn how to create a learning environment that can open opportunities to personalize learning. Explore the type of professional learning that is required to make these instructional shifts in practice.

Learn how to help students become technologically fluent through a framework that helps teachers integrate state and national technology standards into their curriculum. Explore the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK) and how it can be used with the T.E.A.C.H. (trust, equity, advocacy, collaboration, and humility & humor) andragogy-related coaching process to create support for teachers as they integrate technology into their curriculum across multiple learning delivery models. Review and discuss selected lessons aligned to the ISTE Standards for Students and adapt these lessons to your own state standards.

Learn how to design an intentional and sustainable microcredential ecosystem in your community. Identify processes that leverage both human and technology infrastructure and activate others around shared outcomes and incentives.

Hear how one large urban school district integrates social and emotional learning into literacy. Explore engagement strategies, practices, and resources that support building a community of learners where all students feel seen, heard, and valued. Gain social and emotional literacy tools to support teachers and administrators to shift form student compliance to student engagement and empowerment.

Hear South Knox Elementary's journey to strengthen engagement as a way to intensify student agency, student voice, and student efficacy. Gain insight on how learning walks build capacity by identifying areas of strength and opportunities for growth. Adapt a learning walk template to increase capacity to move learning forward in your context and create next steps to transfer new learning.

Learn how districts can make professional learning personalized and meaningful for all teachers. Explore Norwalk Community School District's personalized professional learning approach, which provides voice and choice to teachers and PLCs based on student data. Leave with an understanding of the theory/demonstration/practice/feedback model as the foundation for personalized professional learning.

Reflect on your current practice to examine student engagement in your classrooms. Learn about research-based elements of engagement to improve teacher practice and student performance. Explore creating energetic and purposeful lessons, promoting participation and learning, and using available tools and resources to craft a classroom where we enhance the learning experience for all students. 

Explore how partnerships and on-site training between educator programs and local elementary STEM programs create authentic STEM mindsets for preservice and inservice teachers. See how using the engineering design process and 5E instructional model facilitates equitable learning and critical thinking teacher development in authentic STEM pedagogy so the teacher candidates will be prepared to effectively implment STEM planning, instruction, and assessment for enhanced student learning. Explore how professors are collaborating with local schools in using grant funding to create a state-of-the-art STEM lab on campus.

Examine those subtle perceptions or biases that we all face when looking at our students, parents, colleagues, and, the hardest of all, at ourselves. Reflect, reconsider, and self-examine how your perceptions might influence your expectations for not only your students, but also your fellow teachers, parents, school, and community -- and, subsequently, the ways you teach. Identify strategies to assist you in creating action plans in your context.

Learn how teacher leadership advocates can turn theory into action. Explore national, state, and local teacher leadership data trends that establish the need for effective teacher leadership models. Hear from one school that has implemented teacher leadership strategies to retain teachers and improve teacher practice. Determine next steps for implementing effective teacher leadership models in your school or district, including role identification, funding sources, and programmatic considerations.

​Learn how the largest state virtual school in the nation capitalizes on an aligned system of adult learning to develop and implement high-quality professional learning for teachers, leaders, and support staff anchored on Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning. Explore a coherent framework for developing, implementing, and testing high-quality professional learning that empowers and retains a diverse workforce while enhancing instructional practice and increasing student outcomes. Leave with useful tools for applying the learning to your own setting.

Gain insight into how investing in administrator pipelines is an evidence-based school improvement strategy shown to improve educator retention and student outcomes. Learn how a state education agency, an institution of higher education, and local education agencies collaborated to complete self-studies and create sustainable pipeline plans based on The Wallace Foundation model for developing principal pipelines. Replicate these strategies to ensure qualified leaders are in every role, from the classroom to the superintendent's office.

Explore three types of conflict present in the classic film 12 Angry Men and make connections to conflict present in collaborative teams today. Examine techniques of consensus-building among a group of men whose diverse personalities create intense conflict. Learn about high-leverage best practices that help teams face and overcome similar challenges to collaborate and succeed.

Explore a coaching program that uses technology, evidence-based teaching strategies, and cognitive coaching and reflection to facilitate professional growth for new staff and move veteran staff into mentoring and coaching roles. Discover the power of developmental feedback to facilitate professional growth and reflection. Learn how to embed technology in coaching cycles to increase coaches' efficiency and promote deeper reflection.

Experience Universal Design for Learning, a powerful framework that ensures learning experiences are implemented in a way that helps all students be successful. Learn how to bridge theory with practical implementation strategies to elevate educator and student engagement and improve overall student academic success.

Dive deep and unpack data from a culturally inclusive perspective. Identify ways to develop skills that are applicable to the ongoing analysis of data while crafting a culture and climate based on evidence-based practices, research, and experience. Learn how to cultivate the relationships necessary to implement change.

Expand your knowledge of implementation science and its benefit as a lever for school improvement through the implementation of a structured literacy program. Hear from school leaders and the lessons learned through a year-long study focusing on supporting leaders in four diverse districts that led to improved practice and feelings of efficacy. Engage in a virtual mind map exercise to organize your thinking, and consider the next steps in your own school’s implementation efforts.

Examine how one school district empowers its coaches to support student learning by supporting their development as coaches. Dive into a holistic support system that strives for alignment and consistency to leverage a higher quality of coaching conversations. Identify strategies to ensure that implementation is successful across a large team of coaches and multiple buildings. Leave with tools to support and develop professional learning plans for coaches.

Explore how Science Hill High School uses curriculum learning labs as the platform for job-embedded professional learning by enacting real-time instruction, collecting and analyzing evidence of student learning through structured walk-throughs, and planning for next steps to meet all student needs. Leave with a sample year-long implementation plan focused on what’s important to your school or district.

Consider stories from the field that tie research to practice and amplify the role students play in creating an equitable school experience. Illuminate leadership practices tied to listening to students furthest from justice as critical data that informs a reimagined vision for your school. Discover ways to understand student experience using student-designed tools influenced by research, analyzing artifacts from school systems, and self-assessing your leadership practice.

Examine the steps one Title I school used to support its staff culture, combat teacher burnout for new and experienced teachers, and avoid high turnover rates to become a National School of Character and a National ESEA Distinguished School. Leave with resources and practical strategies for coaching, providing feedback, individualized professional learning, and self-care you can implement today to support yourself and your own staff culture.

Examine how traditional norms silence BIPOC educators and those who are eager for organizational change and professional growth that dismantles structural inequities that continue to oppress diverse communities in our schools. Collaboratively craft group norms that cultivate the necessary relationships for transformative adult learning. Generate a variety of facilitation skills to call colleagues into reflection by protecting and maximizing norms, particularly within moments of conflict. Practice using these skills within scenarios from school settings where the status quo typically prevails. 

Learn how to engage and lead your staff more effectively, encourage teacher leadership, and develop a greater sense of culture and climate in your building. Gain practical and functional ways to use specific leadership strategies that can help shape an organization. Brainstorm leadership strengths and areas of growth in your own building or organization. Determine and prioritize issues to attack and focus on once you return to your school or building.

Explore two models of coaching that situate instructional coaching within a culture of care and include specific coaching questions and equity-based practices for coaches or mentors who routinely engage with Black educators. Engage with coaches who are currently enacting these racial equity coaching approaches. Use these adapted models, practice-based examples, and teacher-voiced definitions to inform the quality, design, and implementation of instructional coaching for Black educators.

Learn how Missoula County Public Schools pivoted in its approach to implementing professional learning when all in-person and virtual sessions were canceled. Explore a braided approach to professional learning that helps improve teacher efficacy. Delve into how Google Workspace for Education and other technology applications allow teachers to engage in self-paced learning with deliverable outcomes and built-in feedback loops.

Create more just, equitable, and effective learning experiences for all students using an innovative, strategy-based approach to professional learning. Learn about a model of culturally sustaining social, emotional, and academic development centered on adult skill-building and reflection. Apply these strategies to your own setting.

Learn how an urban school district has created cohesive professional learning that uses continuous improvement to define and reach equitable outcomes for all learners. Gain insights into the importance of embedding social and emotional learning into the classroom. Explore a professional learning model that includes micro-credential courses.

Learn how one district's instructional technology team re-established a culture for coaching with school-based coaches by creating a shared vision and assessing the strengths and growth opportunities of the coaches' skills. Identify the key components of quality coaching. Determine and interpret the appropriate data collection methods to develop a professional learning plan of support for your coaches.

Learn 8 strategies that have helped us guide some of our most reluctant educators and leaders to engage and charge toward rock star status in their technology, integration, and work. Experience the journey that instructors go through when they are introduced to a new piece of technology. Discuss, develop, and implement a professional learning topic using the lens of empathy and the tools of persuasion.

Draw on research and expertise from the fields of communication and behavior science to improve communication. Increase trust and equity with effective messaging for busy families, overworked educators, and diverse communities. Explore communication theory and practice that drives effective school communication, both internally and externally, through a 5 Pillars Framework. Examine and evaluate communication and learn practical, applicable skills for improvement by applying lessons from communication research and practitioners.

Explore a mentoring program for new principals in their journey into school leadership that districts can use for new -- and not-so-new -- professionals. Learn about resources that can help all system and school leaders make the smooth transition into school leadership’s challenges found in 2022 and beyond.

Engage in a powerful session where leaders discover a common-sense approach to engaging all educators in the work of observation and feedback rounds. Learn how we gradually built the capacity of teacher leaders to fill the role of coach because a principal and one coach didn’t cut it. Explore the tools and structures that built a strong team for schoolwide coaching, and develop a plan specific to your building.

Learn how educators and students, with the new, widespread proliferation of 1-1 devices, can engage in transformational ways of learning in and out of the classroom. Equip yourself and other educators with the key knowledge and strategies needed to enhance learning with tech tools and ultimately support active modes of learning.

Learn from one rural district's journey in ensuring effective professional learning for its teachers. Examine the elements of a professional learning playbook, from defining effective professional development to implementing a proactive quality assurance system and the many steps in between. Gain an understanding of the research-based aspects of professional learning that improves student achievement. Leave with a review process that ensures elements of effective professional learning through the planning process before it is offered to teachers.

A highly regarded urban educator in New Jersey for over 20 years, Baruti Kafele distinguished himself as a master teacher and a transformational school leader. As an elementary school teacher in East Orange, New Jersey, he was selected as the East Orange School District and Essex County Public Schools Teacher of the Year and New Jersey State Teacher of the Year finalist. As a middle and high school principal, Kafele led the turnaround of four New Jersey urban schools, including Newark Tech, which went from a low-performing school in need of improvement to being recognized three times in U.S. News & World Report as one of America's best high schools. Kafele is the author of 12 books, including his most recent release, The Equity & Social Justice Education 50 (2021).