Learning Forward Conference

Participants will

• Engage in self-examination practices to help educators critically reflect on their own racial and historical literacy development;
• Examine educator moves and learn instructional shifts to equip students to develop racial and historical literacy, engage in critical discourse, and participate in systemic change;
• Explore and apply the five components of the Center for Anti-Racist Education (CARE) Framework (humanity, historical truths, critical consciousness, race and racism, and just systems) to recognize and eliminate bias in the classroom; and
• Prepare to navigate internal and external resistance to antiracist, pro-human instructional practices.

Since most schools and districts have more assessment data than ever before, teachers are awash with a resource that isn’t as helpful as it could be. What can school systems do? Explore the components of a feedback system that impacts student understanding. Learn to align the multiple measures that are available to design instructional interventions that improve student learning. Consider how quality assessment systems can help teachers know if they have had an impact.

Participants will

• Describe a formative assessment system;
• Use assessment data to make instructional decisions, including scaffolds for success; and
• Use assessment data to provide feedback that helps students drive their own learning.

Experience curriculum-based learning and consider how it differs from traditional 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.

Participants will

• Engage in core, structural, and functional design features and enabling conditions of curriculum-based professional learning and consider implications for your work;
• Examine the foundation for The Elements, a challenge paper from Carnegie Corporation of New York;
• Consider roles and responsibilities for putting into action the elements of curriculum-based professional learning; and
• Apply The Elements framework to assess current practice and make plans for next steps.

Many teachers are simply and understandably burning out given the many demands they face in supporting students. Identify the factors that contribute to teacher burnout. Learn how to support teachers to restore their passion for teaching. Explore 12 brain-based principles for avoiding burnout, increasing optimism, and supporting physical well-being.

Participants will

• Support teachers to determine purpose and restore the passion inherent in the profession;
• Understand the correlation between humor, optimism, games, and increased immunity;
• Value the importance of quality nutrition, exercise, and sleep to support physical well-being; and
• Create a classroom that engenders optimal student success.

Learn about design thinking through a series of design for belonging exercises. Explore the liberatory design mindsets and feel, see, and shape an experiential moment of belonging for your own school, organization, or practice area. Draw on the process to plan a design action to take in your context.

Participants will

• Understand that design for belonging is a form of liberatory design;
• Design for a moment of increased belonging by using the design process to create conditions for the feeling; and
• Activate and foster liberatory design mindsets.

This interactive session will provide participants with an in-depth exploration of the Standards for Professional Learning (2022), focused on how the standards guide and support high-quality learning systems and provide high-quality professional learning for individuals and teams. Explore new resources and tools that illustrate key concepts of the standards, including equity, curriculum, assessment, instruction, and professional expertise. Engage in collaborative learning activities to apply standards' concepts and resources to a range of roles, responsibilities, and professional contexts. Participants will receive a copy of Standards for Professional Learning.

Participants will

• Gain a deep understanding of the content and structure of the Standards for Professional Learning;
• Apply the concepts in the standards to their own roles, responsibilities, and contexts by engaging in interactive and collaborative activities; and
• Leave with strategies, resources, and tools that support their individual and collaborative professional learning growth.

What kind of evidence verifies that your professional learning makes a difference? How can stakeholders know professional learning leads to improvements in teaching practices and the performance of students? Explore what factors influence the effectiveness of professional learning and consider the five levels of evidence necessary in evaluating professional learning. Discover procedures for establishing reliable indicators of success and how to apply research findings to design and implement truly effective professional learning.

Participants will

• Understand what factors trustworthy evidence shows contribute to the effectiveness of professional learning;
• Know the five levels of evidence that are essential in evaluating professional learning; and
• Develop procedures to plan effective professional learning experiences that impact teaching practices and result in improved student performance.

Are you looking to design high-quality, interactive, and relevant professional learning that can escalate changes in educator practice leading to improved student outcomes? Explore the specific learning needs of adults while experiencing a plethora of highly engaging processes to ensure those needs are met, all while extending your understanding of high-quality professional learning design. Collaborate with peers using a learning design template that can up your game in professional learning design.

Participants will

• Explore a framework for designing and facilitating powerful professional learning that is directly aligned to Standards for Professional Learning;
• Experience a learning environment that meets the physical, social/relational, and learning needs of adults;
• Engage with facilitators as they model brain-friendly strategies that capture and hold learners' attention and increase retention; and
• Prepare to use tools provided in the session for the future design of high-quality professional learning.

Learn how the application of key learning science principles can elevate the teaching and learning that occurs every day in your school or district. Seize opportunities to implement the science of learning to develop excellent teachers who are equity focused and evidence informed. Strengthen your school system’s ability to leverage learning science to recruit and retain educators who meet the needs of all students.

Participants will

• Identify key learning science principles that ensure instructional effectiveness and equity;
• Evaluate current level of learning science proficiency in order to determine initial actions to build expertise in evidence-informed practice;
• Analyze identified components of successful evidence-to-practice implementation in teacher preparation and professional learning; and
• Develop a theory of change plan that begins to outline initial steps for building capacity for evidence-informed professional learning.

Even as our lives become more personalized, whether through custom ads, personal shoppers, or movie and book recommendations, professional learning for educators has not kept pace. Explore innovative practices that empower educators to take ownership of their growth. Apply the personalized learning principles of voice, co-design, social construction, and self-discovery to design a professional learning model for your district or school. Leave with planning tools and models to put a plan into action.

Participants will

• Gain strategies to integrate educator voice early in the professional learning planning;
• Learn to engage educators as co-designers who help identify the success metrics of professional learning and map out the action plan to achieve desired results;
• Consider the role that social construction plays in the professional learning process, including expanding the role of facilitator and definition of engagement; and
• Understand the importance of self-discovery and the various forms it can take in the professional learning cycle.

Feedback is a key component of continuous improvement. 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 continuous learning. 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, 2nd edition by Joellen Killion.

Participants will

• Identify the attributes of effective feedback for adults;
• Understand the types and purposes of feedback for professional learning;
• Apply the feedback process to promote continuous improvement; and
• Explore how to create a culture that supports the implementation of the feedback process in professional learning.

The term coaching matters suggests that an effective coaching program can impact student learning in a positive way. Examine the essential characteristics of effective building-level instructional coaching programs. 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, ways coaches can improve the culture and climate of the school, and much more.

Participants will

• Build capacity (knowledge, skills, dispositions, and practices) to define and implement an effective coaching program that positively impacts student achievement;
• Use a coaching framework to examine all aspects of the coaching program;
• Analyze examples and structures as useful tools in carrying out the work of coaching; and
• Explore ways to move coaching from a focus on teacher behaviors to a focus on student results.

Two things are central to instructional coaching: setting goals and identifying strategies to achieve them. Dive deep into these two topics, with a particular focus on gathering data for goal setting and creating an instructional playbook to identify the highest-impact teaching strategies to help teachers hit their goals. Engage with other coaches to gain multiple perspectives and create an implementation plan. Leave with tools and forms you can use to ensure that coaching flourishes in your organization.

Participants will

• Learn a research-based coaching cycle, the impact cycle, that can be used in professional practice immediately;
• Learn about PEERS goals and what research says about goal setting;
• Learn how to gather engagement and achievement data that can be used for goal setting; and
• Learn why instructional playbooks are essential and how to create an instructional playbook.
• Recommended book: https://instructional-coaching-group.myshopify.com/products/the-definitive-guide-to-instructional-coaching

The biggest school and system leadership responsibility is creating conditions where each person can thrive. Achieve clarity on this priority for healthy school, classroom, and work environments. Learn how to better honor dignity in everything we do in order to activate engagement and foster improved achievement, performance, and retention. Experience a framework and improvement process to better serve our students, their families, and each another.

Participants will

• Deepen knowledge of dignity and belonging;
• Acquire an improvement process to ensure accountability for creating the conditions that people need to thrive in work and in school; and
• Enhance capabilities to both collect and use belonging data to identify a problem of practice and to address the problem with dignifying actions to ensure people have the opportunity to perform at their best.

Schools are on the front lines of many challenging discussions, from health and safety measures to curriculum choices, from issues of academic freedom to discipline policies. Discuss how to collaborate and engage respectfully with others for the health of the school and the collective well-being of all within it. Gain a framework and tools for discussing polarizing issues in productive and humane ways and strategies for managing stress and emotions during difficult interactions. Experience facilitative approaches for having productive conversations.

Participants will

• Distinguish between solvable problems and polarities;
• Gain the critical skill of suspending certainty in order to think with greater openness and complexity;
• Learn to take increased responsibility for a side of a conversation and use of language during challenging moments;
• Know how to support group members during difficult conversations; and
• Learn to identify and manage emotions, discomfort, and stress in healthy ways

Teaming and collaboration catalyze learning and teaching in schools and systems. Consider how educators engage effectively in teams and turn toward difficult conversations to enhance collaboration. Understand adult developmental theory and how it supports growth and student achievement. Learn about a developmental approach to teaming and engaging difficult conversations. Develop skills for building structures and cultures that support individual and team growth.

Participants will

• Understand how developmental theory applies to teams and teaming;
• Gain skills to improve collaboration and communication among teams; and
• Apply strategies to conduct difficult conversations to advance adult growth and student achievement.

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 instruction and what that means for student and educator learning goals. Participants will receive a copy of Becoming a Learning Team, 2nd edition.

Participants will:

• Understand the value and importance of collaborative learning to improve teaching and learning;
• Take steps to launch a learning team cycle with five key stages and examine how to implement each with specific strategies and supporting protocols;
• See how to support the meaningful implementation of high-quality instructional materials;
• Adapt the cycle to fit specific school and district calendars and initiatives; and
• Leave with a road map to focus on the day-to-day actions in classrooms among students, educators, and instructional materials for maximum impact.

Explore the classic film 12 Angry Men and make connections to conflict evident in the film to discuss the five qualities of collaboration that support effective teams. Learn about meaningful team member participation and the importance of open inquiry. Examine techniques of consensus-building among diverse team members. Understand how conflict reveals new ideas and information.

Participants will

• Define productive conflict and understand its value;
• Identify the high-leverage best practices associated with effective collaborative teams; and
• Understand trust-building and trust-busting behaviors.

As an instructional leader, your primary responsibility is to ensure high-quality learning experiences in every classroom, for every student, every day. Explore how to help teachers become self-reflective practitioners whose thoughtful approach translates into real gains in student achievement. Learn how to transform schools into cultures of commitment rather than cultures of compliance. Gain building blocks to create such cultures and design a plan to move forward immediately.

Participants will

• Embrace the need to differentiate their coaching and supervisory support of their teachers; 
• Determine and implement a capacity-building approach that builds reflection and technical expertise; and
• Collaborate to build a culture that strives toward continuous improvement, curiosity, and expertise.

The Standards for Professional Learning are foundational to ensuring our systems are learning systems. Learn that in learning systems, educators value adult learning as much as student learning, thrive through collaborative inquiry, and create conditions that foster high-quality teaching and learning for all. Explore the critical attributes of a learning system, how the Standards for Professional Learning guide learning systems to continuous improvement, the role of change theory, and how to develop a culture of collaborative inquiry.

Participants will

• Establish a personal vision of a learning system and a theory of change on how to move their own organization closer to becoming one; and 
• Design strategies and approaches promoted in the Standards for Professional Learning to strengthen their leadership in leading learning systems.

Leaders affect the greatest number of people in a system, making them a potential catalyst for transformation. Explore leadership habits that ensure your students experience surface, deep, and transfer learning. Coach educators and teams to design rigorous learning, collect and analyze evidence of such learning, and respond with high-leverage actions that foster positive impact. Leave with a set of strategies to lead with and for rigorous teaching and learning for staff and students.

Participants will

• Draw connections among surface, deep, and transfer learning;
• Align surface, deep, and transfer levels of learning to high-yield instructional practices;
• Learn strategies for collecting and analyzing evidence of impact across levels of learning; and
• Develop leadership habits that will support rigorous instruction and strengthen learner agency.

Christopher Emdin is the Robert A. Naslund Endowed Chair in curriculum theory and professor of education at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as director of youth engagement and community partnerships at the USC Race and Equity Center. Reality Pedagogy is anchored on the tenet that teaching is more than disseminating information to students. Research in education has indicated that educators who are qualified via terminal degrees in their discipline are not necessarily effective. Even when they have sufficient content knowledge, many still lack the tools necessary to address the cultural divides that render them ineffective. In his keynote, Emdin will provide tools to teach educators how to address cultural divides while delivering academic content. The 7 C’s of Reality Pedagogy are: 1. Cogenerative Dialogues; 2. Coteaching; 3. Cosmopolitanism; 4. Context; 5. Content; 6. Competition; and 7. Curation.

Keynote speaker Chris Emdin will answer your questions in this special session after the keynote address on Monday.

Learn how one school transformed how they teach, support, and connect with students by moving away from a compliance-based discipline system to a collaborative one. Review how this school took on a life-changing challenge after seeing the needs of students experiencing trauma and taking a look at school discipline data. Consider how they increased student agency and social emotional learning skills, and reduced the number of exclusionary practices to create a school where each student and adult knows they are safe, they belong, and they matter.

Participants will:

• Understand how the aims of safety, significance, and belonging for each student and adult in the school system allowed one school in rural Oregon to decrease their exclusionary discipline practices by over 55% in 4 year period and increased targeted academic achievement at every grade level;
• Know how to create and implement systems-level Tier 1 SEL and discipline practices in the elementary grades;
• Recognize how to invite buy-in and mutual respect with teachers and staff when implementing transformative school practices;
• Understand how to use trauma-informed practices to create systems-level change within a school building.

Deepen understanding of belonging as a human need and activator of engagement, the platform for achieving academic goals, and the foundation of equity. Learn to nurture belonging in the classroom by honoring dignity within three belonging structures: interpersonal, institutional, and instructional. Apply learning to instruction and facilitation of learning, walking away with a profound frame and pragmatic solutions for partnering with students to generate the energy for learning and success.

Participants will:

• Deepen knowledge of belonging and dignity;
• Learn about a proven process for ensuring belonging and dignity in the classroom;
• Bridge research to practical strategies for nurturing belonging through rigorous, standards-based instruction; and
• Increase capabilities for honoring dignity within the process of planning instruction and facilitating learning.

Consider how leaders authentically amplify student voices to impact school improvement. Explore how Baker Middle School in Tacoma, Washington, engaged students in developing a robust graduate profile aligned with the school vision and beliefs to guide school success. Apply learning to your own setting to develop a plan to authentically amplify student voices.

Participants will:

• Understand how authentically incorporating student voice into school improvement efforts impacts adult learning and school success;
• Build professional networks through dialogue, collaboration, and reflection;
• Explore tools, resources, and processes that amplify student voice; and
• Plan to apply new learning from the session in their own contexts.

Learn how to develop the collective efficacy of a team through developing rigorous, engaging, and equitable collaborative planning and data analysis practices that lead to teacher and student engagement and success. Explore how to amplify instructional rigor and boost teachers’ pedagogical skills. Consider how to analyze implementing instructional systems that will allow all students to access grade-level standards while closing achievement gaps.

Participants will:

• Understand planning processes for collaboration that impacts equitable student learning;
• Identify opportunities to build collaboration and planning systems that target equitable student learning and engagement;
• Determine key areas to improve lesson design and development to provide equity and access for all students;
• Identify challenges that often hinder collaborative structures within a building or district and understand how to address them; and
• Develop a timeline and professional development plan for implementation of collaborative data analysis and planning structures.

Engage in a design sprint to leverage intersections between professional learning and curriculum work to put into action within your own school or district. Discover one district’s approach to embedding evidence-based, culturally responsive, and actionable professional learning within the curriculum development process. Explore how curriculum-based professional learning builds the capacity of teacher leaders, as well as results in high-quality deeper learning experiences for all students.

Participants will:

• Discover strategies and structures to embed evidence-based and actionable professional learning within the curriculum development process;
• Explore how curriculum-based professional learning builds the capacity of teacher leaders, as well as results in high-quality deeper learning experiences for all students; and
• Reflect on how curriculum-based professional learning might support one’s own school and district priorities.

Hear how York High School (IL) is in its third year of not ending each semester with final exams. Discover how our assessment and relearning days have shifted discussions from grades to learning, but the road hasn't been smooth. Learn about the origin of the decision, our growth, and the impact on student learning.

Participants will:

• Understand how examples of innovative assessment practices reinforce student learning;
• Experience a simulation of the assessment and relearning process that students experience at the end of each semester;
• Understand how traditional final exams are inequitable and do not serve students; and
• Reflect upon their own summative practices and identify opportunities to better serve students.

Participants will:

• Understand how to begin and sustain professional development for teachers that catalyzes change in teacher practice toward collaboration and authentic teaching approaches;
• Know how to develop partnerships with local, regional, state, or national partners to make real-world connections in classrooms as students develop key skills and knowledge;
• Understand how to promote the 4Cs (creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking) through high-quality PBL curriculum design; and
• Design their own playbook of how to get started with the 3Ps (partnerships, professional learning, and project-based learning) with the intent of promoting deeper learning, equitable and excellent outcomes, and increased student engagement.

Explore the collaborative creation of success criteria for using multiple types of rubrics for holistic and analytical assessments of student work. Work through the norming process to gain insight on rubric scoring. Consider how to ensure scoring equity occurs across a team. Gain confidence on sharing new learnings with professional learning communities (PLCs) after the conference.

Participants will:

• Understand several types of rubrics to assess student work;
• Experience a norming protocol to analyze student samples, helping to ensure students experience scoring equity without teacher bias;
• Develop knowledge on how to use multiple types of rubrics to analyze, create feedback, and provide potential growth opportunities for students and recognize their successes;
• Understand how to help students use the self-assessment process to check their own work; and
• Gain strategies to coach their own PLCs, taking into account the stages of team development, to create their own rubric.

Consider how campus principals possess incredible ability to create positive shifts in teaching and learning and student outcomes. Learn how Friendswood ISD (TX) in partnership with Learning Forward is maximizing capacity and engagement of their campus principals and assistant principals through a focus on using Standards for Professional Learning, cycles of continuous improvement, logic models, and adult learning theory to affect change. Learn how to collect evidence on the impact of engaged campus leadership.

Participants will:

• Understand the process for intentionally engaging principals and supporting capacity development;
• Know how to implement adult learning tools and theories to support shifts in leadership practice, resulting in shifts in teacher practice and student outcomes;
• Understand how to apply their learning to create a system for engaging and supporting the capacity development of principals in their district; and
• Know what it means to be a Learning Principal and how to support and sustain this type of leadership on their campuses and district.

Discover the possibilities that emerge from using cognitive science to help make good teachers great. Infuse effortful thinking, an evidence-informed pedagogy, into teacher development for the benefit of all students. Consider how cognitive strategies such as effortful thinking can make your professional learning more effective and guided by research.

Participants will:

• Identify key strategies to increase effortful thinking in the classroom in order to better ensure knowledge will move to long-term memory;
• Analyze several lesson examples in order to evaluate the effectiveness of effortful thinking in classroom practice;
• Develop a learning plan to outline initial steps for building capacity for effortful thinking and other cognitive science strategies in professional learning programs.

Strategize for instructional change in your school district. Hear one district’s journey of educators working together to closely examine districtwide classroom practices in a focused and purposeful way to improve the student experience. Apply these strategies to your school or district. Practice using the tools with other participants.

Participants will

• Develop the skills of using and identifying effective classroom activities that are proven to engage students in learning;
• Understand how to apply lessons learned in their own roles;
• Plan change by identifying where they are on the path and what next steps are in their instructional leader journey; and
• Gain examples, timelines, and steps to follow to determine instructional priorities, including how to monitor the implementation of the priorities and how to communicate through the process.

Consider the research that indicates most teachers don’t know the best learning strategies for students and most students don’t use them. Discuss the divide between research-based, effective, and efficient learning strategies and how few teachers understand them. Learn how to use the best learning strategies. Experiment with a tool grounded in the science of teaching and learning.

Participants will:

• Understand the most promising research and strategies in the science of teaching and learning; 
• Experiment with a tool and embedded labs that change how to bring the most effective learning and study strategies directly to students; and 
• Understand how to redesign the current way students learn how to learn in their schools and districts.

Hear how a high school increased student agency and improved graduation rates through a purposeful use of in-person and online learning. Learn how educators leveraged technology to support differentiated, student-centered learning and authentic assessments while extending complex cognitive thinking. Explore student stories and artifacts of how this research-based blended learning model supports student agency and post-graduate readiness.

Participants will:

• Determine the best in-person and online structures to empower students to develop self-direction and self-efficacy and become self-reflective learners;
• Understand strategies to seek student feedback and use the reflective information to guide next steps in the iterative design process;
• Conceptualize how to practically enhance blended learning by leveraging neuroscience;
• Analyze current technology use with instructionally focused frameworks including Webb’s Depth of Knowledge, Puentedura’s SAMR model, and Florida’s Technology Integration Matrix; and
• Measure and communicate the impact of their programs.

Participants will:

• Understand how a large, urban school district developed a New Teacher Academy for professional learning for all instructional, student-facing new employees;
• Know concrete, practical strategies that lead to deeper new teacher engagement and investment in key district priorities;
• Prioritize and sequence skills and competencies necessary for a successful first year teacher; and
• Develop a multi-layered induction program for new teachers that leads to increased job satisfaction and retention.

Learn how Michigan's fifth-largest public school district 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 few years. Discover ways they supported instructional staff to develop professional development 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.

Participants will:

• Comprehend examples of how to shift professional learning to a more intentional, personalized focus to support teaching and learning;
• Acquire free or low-cost tools and resources that support the development of professional learning; and
• Attain ideas on how to discover the professional development needs of instructional staff members and develop programming to meet those needs.

Consider how, over the last 20 years, the role of educators as lead learners and the focus and delivery methods for their own professional learning have evolved significantly. Explore how the pandemic influenced shifts in professional learning to support virtual learning while reducing much of the reflective and personal focus that was present pre-pandemic. Investigate how professional learning leadership roles and structures have changed over time and the influence the pandemic has had on the way adults learn together.

Participants will:

• Understand shifts in professional learning over the past 20 years;
• Reflect on the professional learning experiences they currently offer, design, and facilitate for others;
• Identify potential gaps in professional learning design(s) using the Professional Expertise, Learning Designs, Leadership, and Culture of Collaborative Inquiry standards from the Standards for Professional Learning;  Identify generative opportunities to refine their work; and
• Develop a plan for a future professional learning opportunity.

Learn how the Henrico (VA) career ladder supports teacher recruitment, retention, and advancement by providing in-house, application-focused, and teacher-lead microcredentials and professional learning. Consider how the career ladder results in professional advancement and compensation for teachers, who receive the same recognition they would earn from completion of advanced university degrees. Engage and collaborate with other attendees through a design thinking challenge to apply the basic principles of this work to your own context.

Participants will:

• Understand the process by which a Virginia school division collaborated with diverse stakeholders to develop and implement a career ladder based in applied professional learning;
• Know the research-based career ladder structure, including the creation of teacher-facilitated microcredentials and specialization cohorts;
• Develop structured professional learning pathways in their K-12 districts that align with current organizational readiness; and
• Understand the importance of collaborating with other divisions, sharing methods to build pathways, secure funding, and market the program to stakeholders.

Disrupt the status quo of schooling by applying the six liberatory coaching practices to real classroom scenarios. Apply a liberatory coaching lens to examine a case study of an instructional coaching partnership. Design a context-specific teacher development plan with colleagues that implements the liberatory practice of coaching for relationships, not compliance in order to promote the thriving of all students.

Participants will:

• Define liberation in education, the status quo of schooling, liberatory coaching, and the six liberatory coaching practices;
• Apply a liberatory coaching lens to analyze a case study of an instructional coaching partnership; and
• Create a teacher development plan for implementing one of the liberatory coaching practices (coaching for relationships, not compliance) to support teacher growth in their specific contexts.

Learn how to understand whether mentoring and coaching systems lead to positive outcomes for teachers and students. Explore a programmatic impact framework, specific strategies for gathering impact data in the field, and strategies for using that data for continuous improvement and program sustainability. Walk away with concrete tools and resources to use in your context.

Participants will:

• Understand the importance of programmatic evaluation;
• Unpack a framework to guide the development of their data collection plans;
• Learn about set of data sources that can provide leading indicators and support data triangulation;
• Gain a process for using data for continuous improvement and program sustainability; and
• Begin formulating a plan for use in their contexts.

Learn how Miami Dade College and Miami-Dade County Public Schools' Teacher Candidate Residency Model is an innovative approach to prepare teacher candidates during internship while addressing the teacher shortage by embedding internship clinical hours in full-time teaching positions. Explore a coherent framework for designing, implementing, and continuously improving the recruitment, development, and retention of high-quality teachers. Leave with strategies for growing a teacher candidate residency model that meets the needs of your school community.

Participants will:

• Develop highly qualified and highly effective teachers who are poised to serve multicultural and multilingual students;
• Implement a teacher candidate residency program that empowers and retains a diverse workforce while enhancing instructional practice and increasing student outcomes;
• Increase the number of teacher candidates prepared to enter the profession while providing immediate support to our schools; and
• Identify next steps for modifying and replicating the model in support of teacher recruitment, growth, and retention.

Focus on the action plan of Trinity Basin Preparatory’s (TX) district-level administrators to redesign professional learning at district and campus levels to make the most impact on campuses and teacher growth. Learn about the curriculum-based professional learning model and an intentionally designed scope and sequence at all levels of the district. Explore our learning lab structure of building skills and content knowledge; observe, collaborate, and plan; implementation through system-level thinking; and content-based professional learning.

Participants will:

• Strengthen processes for district administrators to support campus professional learning needs;
• Use a template for district-level action planning to focus on professional learning scope and sequence; and
• Create an effective structure of content-based professional learning.

Learn how Fairfax County Public Schools (VA) 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 development for new and experienced coaches and measure the impact of a coach's work.

Participants will:

• Understand the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) instructional coaching program and the conditions that support the program and the coaches’ work;
• Understand how FCPS reimagined the pipeline for future instructional coaches to include a learning cohort model with embedded leadership experiences, observations, and feedback;
• Know how to better prepare candidates to step into the role of an instructional coach;
• Gain strategies to offer differentiated professional development for coaches, measure the impact of a coach's work in their building, and sustain supports for first-year instructional coaches; and
• Identify potential next steps back in their districts.

Hear how Standards for Professional Learning can become and inform policy at many levels: state or system adoption, teacher and principal evaluation and growth systems, and guidance for funding and external providers. Explore examples of different policy pathways. Discuss how to create stakeholder teams, establish plans for policy improvement and alignment, set policy goals, and evaluate how policy influences practice.

Participants will

• Understand the many ways Standards for Professional Learning can inform policy;
• Understand how standards can be mapped to state and district educator professional learning systems;
• Apply a new tool from Learning Forward that supports collaborative policy advocacy and development; and
• Create plans for using standards in your home state, district, or school.

Investigate how tools steeped in improvement science can be valuable to school and district leaders designing improvement strategies to meet the needs of their educators and students. Explore real-time strategies for the effective use of logic models and theories of change to undergird improvement efforts. Engage in use of the tools and models for transfer to your work setting.

Participants will:

• Achieve clarity around the use and purpose of logic models and theories of change for planning, implementing and evaluating programs and initiatives;  
• Understand the benefits of using tools for continuous quality improvement; and
• Develop sample models to use in their work setting.

Examine the internal obstacles to ensuring high levels of learning for every student. Explore tools to identify and defeat the enemy of equity. Discover the many subtle and seductive forms this enemy takes and the mindset and practices required to defeat it. Learn to deliver on the promise of equity, excellence, and achievement for all students, regardless of background.

Participants will:

• Identify the four pillars of equity, what they look like in practice, and how to measure and support them to ensure campus-wide implementation;
• Understand how to get teachers to engage in the kind of powerful equitable practice that results in improved student achievement;
• Understand what to hunt, gather, protect, and defend as they co-create a culture of equity and excellence; and
• Gain different communication styles and strategies for dealing with resistance.

Consider the research that shows students benefit when they have access to diverse teachers, yet teachers of color leave schools at a higher rate than white teachers. Learn lessons gleaned from six school districts across the country that have designed and implemented strategies for improving the recruitment, support, and retention of teachers of color. Gain effective strategies at the school and district level to improve the recruitment and retention of teachers of color.

 Participants will:

• Understand why teachers of color leave schools based on evidence collected by a team of researchers and teacher leaders;
• Acquire school and district-focused solutions to better support and retain teachers of color;
• Understand how a cohort of district teams across the country are taking a learning sciences approach to addressing teacher diversity; and
• Create action plans to improve how they recruit, support, grow, and retain teachers of color.

Discuss the role of resilience as educators face many critical challenges. Learn how one school system responded to the unprecedented stress on teachers by developing professional learning to focus on the whole teacher. Engage in learning activities that the team developed to build teacher resilience and give teachers the tools to lead cultures of resilience within their schools. Activate thinking around how this approach might support your school or division.

Participants will:

• Understand the role resilience plays in teacher satisfaction;
• Identify strategies to support teacher resilience;
• Unpack methods to implement impactful professional learning and build a community for resilience; and
• Create a plan to support schools and divisions in building a culture of resilience.

Examine important considerations when establishing a continuous improvement team, including how to create a sense of urgency around continuous improvement. Explore the benefits of embracing high levels of collective efficacy among team members. Learn about specific examples of continuous improvement structures and how to apply newly constructed knowledge in your context.

Participants will:

• Identify characteristics of capable and collaborative teammates for continuous improvement processes;
• Identify structures that foster success in continuous improvement;
• Identify strategies for communicating expectations for collaborative teams; and
• Establish a personalized action plan for continuous improvement.

Learn how networks support continuous learning and improvement for equity and address systemic challenges and problems. Explore how learning teams design and implement professional learning interventions using continuous improvement concepts and disciplined inquiry to lead to improved educator practice. Discover how Learning Forward’s networks are grounded in Standards for Professional Learning. Speak with Learning Forward staff about how to learn more about leading a learning network in your district or school.

Participants will:

• Understand that networks support continuous learning and improvement for equity and address systemic challenges and problems;
• Understand six core characteristics of successful networks; and
• Identify, upon reflection of the characteristics of networks, what work they need to do to feel confident in moving forward to lead a learning network.

Build individual efficacy in how to talk and listen in humane and growth-producing ways to reach the collective efficacy critical to increasing student achievement. Explore how to share and listen to feedback that can be difficult to hear. Gain strategies and tools to support the important work of developing capacity to improve communication among adults in schools.

Participants will:

• Review the research around the critical need for trust and adult communication in our schools;
• Understand adult developmental theory, mindset work, and brain research and how to meet where adults they are in order to influence their growth;
• Gain the key linguistic skills essential to humane and growth-producing adult-to-adult interactions;
• Acquire building blocks to create a culture of daring, stretch, and openness to feedback; and
• Understand key skills to manage one’s self and one’s ego without resentment.

Hear about one district’s journey to revitalize understanding and commitment to professional learning communities (PLCs) oriented around collaborative inquiry. Learn about key moves a small central services team made—in partnership with school staff—to support staff in nearly 200 schools in hopes of leveraging the work of PLCs to build and sustain collective efficacy.

Participants will:

• Build awareness around a framework for soliciting districtwide feedback to inform organizational changes relating to PLC practices;
• Understand common challenges as potential drivers for PLC work across a district; and
• Attain concrete ideas and resources to support implementing PLC best practices across a district.

Use goal setting, cycles of continuous improvement, and structures for teacher collaboration to build leadership capacity, promote educator effectiveness, and harness collective efficacy. Take your school to the next level of student achievement and well-being by activating, empowering, and inspiring every member of your school community—and have fun doing it. Leave this session with a plan for lighting a motivational inferno in your staff to spark student success.

Participants will:

• Understand a process called “State of the School,” which will help leaders address the state of their school now and know what steps to take next;
• Understand a strategic process used at two different at-risk, urban schools in Long Beach, California, to accelerate student success;
• Develop strategic next steps for taking their school to the next level in student success;
• Identify specific goals, structures for teacher collaboration, plans to build leadership capacity, and purposes for cycles of continuous improvement.

Consider what it takes to build a system of schools where there is equity in access to optimal learning and high-quality instruction for students. Learn the processes used to build leadership capacity through intentional strategies including a research partnership project, a professional learning strategy, and a school/leadership support process. Take home insights and resources to apply in your context.

Participants will:

• Understand a research-based process that has created systemness in a school division where equity and collaboration are key foci;
• Identify key components in the creation of a school system, such as the professional learning model and school leadership development strategies centered around continuous learning;
• Know the components of a comprehensive professional learning development process, based on adult learning theory and differentiation to meet learners’ needs; and
• Create an action plan for how to implement this learning in their contexts.

Discuss what can be done now to prepare for—or better yet, mitigate—a mass exodus of principals over the next few years. Learn what current research says about the role of the principal and how districts can support their early career principals to lead a thriving learning community. Examine the beginning principal’s role in school leadership to understand the opportunities and constraints defining the position. Leave with knowledge of best practices for early career principals, what experiences beginning principals need to be successful in their positions today, and how school districts can maintain a viable leadership pipeline.

Participants will:

• Understand the needs of early career principals in leading 21st century, post-pandemic schools to better understand the modern role of the principalship;
• Understand current research, essential learning, critical experiences, and resources that early career principals need to better support them in their position of leading learning communities; and
• Possess essential skills aligned with supporting pillars of effective principal practice to use in working with early career principals and in the process develop a viable leadership pipeline in their districts.

Participants will

• Examine sample meeting agendas as well as their own;
• Understand their own assumptions about meetings and their effectiveness; and
• Revise/devise an agenda toward intentionality and engagement.

Examine how the often-invisible organizational practices that undermine antiracist efforts show up for educators personally and professionally. Name and critically reflect on how these practices play out in key arenas of professional learning, including school improvement data analysis, relational trust, facilitation, evaluation, and more. Identify ways to challenge these norms through re-imagined learning design geared toward disrupting racial inequities for all learners, including adults.

Participants will:

• Identify the organizational practices that undermine antiracist efforts, how they show up for us, and how they undermine equity; 
• Examine how to leverage street data (Safir & Dugan, 2020) to operationalize equity in the school improvement process;
• Identify racial-trust busters in schools and how to build relational trust to disrupt them; and
• Employ facilitation and coaching moves that can be used to challenge organizational practices that undermine antiracist efforts.

Reflect on your school’s collaborative norms to determine ways they might limit adult learning and school improvement. Collectively craft meaningful shared norms by articulating the conditions you need to bring your best self to every professional learning opportunity. Equip yourself with facilitation skills to notice and respond when norms are in jeopardy and will likely result in adult forms of disengagement or aggression that halt organizational improvement.

Participants will:

• Uncover ways typical group norms (such as start/end on time, use technology appropriately, everyone has a voice, and assume good intentions) demean participants, impede improvement efforts, and protect the status quo.
• Discover how traditional norms silence BIPOC educators and those who are eager for organizational change and professional growth that dismantles structural inequities which continue to oppress diverse communities in our schools;
• Collaboratively craft group norms that cultivate the necessary relationships for transformative adult learning; and
• Generate a variety of facilitation skills to call colleagues into reflection by protecting and maximizing norms, particularly within moments of conflict.

Visualize the difference between the best and worst presentation you have experienced as an adult learner and consider the differences between them. Learn 20 strategies that you can use to make any professional development experience unforgettable. Explore techniques that result in sustained adult behavior change. Discover 10 things that keep adults living well beyond the age of 80.

Participants will:

• Ascertain why it can be so difficult for adults to change behavior and determine the order of change when asking adults to implement new behaviors;
• Examine six principles of adult learning theory to use with faculty and staff in professional learning;
• Experience 10 characteristics of quality professional learning to apply when implementing professional development;
• Acquire facts about the adult brain related to working with educators; and 
• Plan their next professional learning experience using an original template while incorporating some of the 20 brain-based strategies that take advantage of the ways all adult and student brains learn best.

Learn how to assess if your coaching program is a key driver in school and district improvement. Explore how to strengthen the link between the work of coaches and a school or district’s overarching goals. Consider how to support coaches in making the transition to being agents of change within the broader system.

Participants will:

• Clarify the purpose of their coaching programs and their relationship to school and district improvement goals;
• Acquire strategies to link coaching to school and district improvement goals;
• Develop a framework for linking the areas of focus for coaching cycles and conversations to school and district improvement goals;
• Learn how to assess if coaches are linking their daily work to school and district improvement goals; and
• Gain strategies for supporting coaches to connect their daily work with school and district improvement goals.

Learn how teams of teachers worked collaboratively to improve their professional practice and make the greatest gains in Leto High School's (Hillsborough County, FL) 57-year history. Explore the use of protocol-driven professional learning communities (PLCs) in the school’s success. Consider the role of empowering educators to give and receive purposeful and productive feedback.

Participants will:

• Understand the importance of distributive leadership and the benefits of creating an instructional leadership team;
• Experience protocol-driven PLCs to determine appropriate application for their own school sites;
• Determine their own ways of knowing and how that applies to giving and receiving feedback; and
• Evaluate the PLC processes in place at their current school sites to determine opportunities for structured shifts aligned to their school’s instructional needs and priorities.

What will it take to transform teaching and improve student learning at scale? What do we know from research, how are systems supporting teacher learning with high-quality curriculum, and what policies are needed to create the conditions for effective curriculum implementation? Engage with Sonja Santelises, CEO of Baltimore Public Schools, Heather Hill, professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mike Petrilli, President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Stephanie Hirsh, former Executive Director of Learning Forward, to get strategies for improving the field of curriculum-based professional learning.

Discuss how the lived experiences of our ancestors and ourselves is essential to the "what" and "why" of the work we do in education. Reflect on what poet and educator Lucille Clifton said, "We cannot create what we cannot imagine." Consider how to create space for dream design that translates to meaningful transformation for our students, our schools, our communities, and ourselves. Recognize that when we root our imagination in love and justice, we increase the possibilities for collaborative action, loving accountability, and lasting freedom. Explore how to liberate your body, mind, and education community.

Participants will:

• Reflect on past experiences and current state;
• Understand how to create space to imagine a more liberatory future;
• Apply a dream design template and time; and
• Learn from connection and feedback with each other. 

Consider how thousands of educators have applied evidence-based social-emotional instructional practices in middle and high schools. Hear about one district’s journey from exploration to schoolwide implementation, including academic and behavioral impacts. Plan instruction of evidence-based intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, embedded within content-area curriculum, to promote positive in-school and postschool outcomes for all students.

Participants will:

• Understand impacts of schoolwide social-emotional instruction at the middle and high school levels, including collective efficacy, school culture, equitable access, and equitable achievement;
• Analyze their current implementation of intra- and interpersonal competencies (i.e., self-efficacy, self-regulation, assertiveness, and conflict management) in content-area instruction;
• Identify evidence-based instructional strategies that simultaneously teach social-emotional skills and content-area standards;
• Establish personal and/or schoolwide professional learning and implementation goals through self-assessment on the College and Career Competencies Implementation Roadmap; and
• Outline a professional learning process that leads to the sustainable school-wide implementation of intra- and interpersonal competencies.

Reflect on how knowing and valuing all students within one's school community is integral to actualizing instructional equity. Learn how professional learning communities can leverage students' assets through the Framework for Teaching's Component 1b: Knowing and Valuing Students. Explore asset-based instructional methods for honoring students' identities, understanding their current knowledge and skills, integrating whole child development into instructional design, and how to leverage students' learning processes and differences to meet high instructional expectations.

Participants will:

• Deepen understanding of Component 1b: Knowing and Valuing Students by examining its elements of success;
• Evaluate their school's instructional practices through the elements of success of respecting students' identities, understanding current knowledge and skills, knowledge of whole child development, and knowledge of learning process and differences; and
• Learn asset-based instructional methods to know and value students and leverage knowledge to improve students' academic success.

Hear how shared classroom reading experiences become an anti-racist practice when they build children’s cognitive capacity, give children agency through critical literacy, and sustain and affirm children’s linguistic, racial, and cultural assets. Explore a framework for evaluating and developing teacher capacity around the books and materials, teacher actions, student actions, and classroom ecology that create equity in classrooms.

Participants will:

• Understand a framework for evaluating read-aloud and shared text experiences through the lens of equity and anti-racism;
• Identify the components of culturally and linguistically sustaining shared text instruction; and
• Know how to increase equity by building higher-order thinking skills and collaborative spaces during shared reading experiences.

Hear how high-quality instructional materials increase the likelihood that students engage in grade-appropriate work and allow teachers to focus their time on bringing lessons to life. Consider that teachers often engage in open-the-box training when first launching a new curriculum rather than teachers and leaders experiencing the continuum of support they need to use their materials effectively. Learn how to build a coherent professional learning plan that supports teachers’ instructional practices and student learning.

Participants will:

• Describe the types of professional learning that teachers and leaders need to successfully adopt, launch, and implement high-quality instructional materials;
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of sample professional learning plans; and
• Describe the role that outside partners can play in supporting districts’ professional learning plans, and identify partners who are qualified to support this work.

Explore the partnership between educative curricular resources and powerful professional learning as a pathway to assist teachers’ learning and practice. Learn how research-based professional learning characteristics can be enhanced and have a greater likelihood of affecting change when connected to the curricular resources that teachers use daily. Make action plans for considering the ways in which curriculum can provide a strong connection between the materials teachers have and the practices you wish to enact.

Participants will:

• Understand the research in content-based professional learning and pedagogical content knowledge;
• Understand the characteristics of educative curricula and how to use them as conceptual inputs for professional learning;
• Describe how educative curricula have supported changes in teacher practice and student achievement; and
• Create a plan for considering the materials already in place and how they may be used to connect curriculum and professional learning that leads to transformational changes in teaching and learning.

Learn how one school district uses their guaranteed and viable curriculum to ensure high-level learning for all students, while fostering student-centered practices and teacher autonomy. Engage with the learning community to explore beliefs and strategies that cultivate trusting relationships, collaboration, and efficacy and how these practices increase teacher capacity and student agency. Leave with knowledge, strategies, and tools to develop and sustain a guaranteed and viable curriculum that is student centered and teacher driven.

Participants will:

• Understand the components of a guaranteed and viable curriculum;
• Comprehend how a guaranteed and viable curriculum fosters student-centered learning practices, teacher autonomy, and equity; and
• Determine discussion points, strategies, and tools that can support districts’ next steps in developing and/or using a guaranteed and viable curriculum to foster student-centered learning.

Discover how Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is one of the few large urban school systems providing high-quality curriculum that centers culturally responsive and sustaining educational practices in all grades and subjects. Learn how CPS is using the Elements of Curriculum-based Professional Learning to provide system- and classroom-level supports that drive instructional and student learning improvement. Experience how Co-Labs, professional learning communities grounded in anchor protocols focused on unit, lesson, and data study, drive school-level improvement.

Participants will:

• Understand how a large urban school system vertically integrates its professional learning model to drive coherent curriculum implementation;
• Understand how well-designed Co-Labs, or professional learning community agendas grounded in anchor protocols (focused on unit, lesson, and data study), drive school-level improvement;
• Experience how teachers learn to implement the curriculum through a strong model of support;
• Understand how a network leader organizes curriculum-based professional learning models for continuous improvement and instructional coherence; and
• Get access to easily implementable tools and resources for curriculum-based professional learning at the school-level, network-level (i.e., sub-districts within CPS), and central office level.

Learn about Hampton City Schools (VA) 5-year induction program and the unexpected outcomes of its theme: Building Teachers and Growing Leaders. Investigate content and research used to reimagine induction and teacher leadership professional development that inadvertently reinvented leadership practices with non-traditional pipelines for teachers. Leave hearing testimonies and gain strategies to enhance your existing induction and/or teacher leadership development programs.

Participants will:

• Understand the importance of a comprehensive induction program encompassing both teacher professional and leadership identity development while gaining knowledge, strategies, and the ability to start and/or expand their own work;
• Distinguish teacher leadership and leadership identity components necessary for effective professional development;
• Comprehend leadership outcomes and non-traditional leadership pipelines; and
• Create a plan to implement or expand induction and teacher leadership professional learning.

Review how crucial it is for assistant principals to have intentional, coordinated professional development that grows their leadership skills. Learn how principals can develop a framework for mentoring and modeling their assistant principals and how the district can create the just-right learning opportunities that complement and build upon the principal’s mentorship. Leave with a plan for synergizing local school and systemwide efforts to increase the skills of assistant principals.

Participants will:

• Examine principals’ frameworks for developing their assistant principals;
• Learn an effective process for creating professional development content for assistant principals at the district level; and
• Create their own framework (principals) and district plan (district leaders) for developing the leadership skills of assistant principals.

Discover how hope neuroscience is a cutting-edge strategy to improve staff and student resilience, achievement, and happiness. Examine a process to measure and strengthen hope to help positively change the brain, supporting student achievement and improving school cultures to support staff retention. Explore make-it-take-it tools and strategies to immediately start improving hope so every person at school can thrive.

Participants will:

• Understand research on how hope impacts the brain, well-being, and achievement;
• Know how to use hope to build resiliency and improve their emotional health;
• Attain research-based tools and strategies to measure and improve hope that can be used in professional practice immediately; and  
• Create an implementation plan to take back to use in schools and districts.

Discuss how schools ensure students have access to and learn strategies to develop agency over their own learning and transfer their learning across multiple academic disciplines. Experience strategies a high-performing urban school uses along with stories from schools and school systems around the world to build the capacity of teachers to implement and enhance strategies to impact student and teacher agency and expertise. Leave with a set of tangible leadership and instructional strategies that will fit within your current planning templates.

Participants will:

• Identify key high-yield instructional and leadership strategies that align to agency and expertise;
• Examine the knowing-doing conversion process and identify key next steps to facilitate the conversion process in their local context; and
• Create a plan of action for implementing key strategies in their local context.

Learn how to develop a year-long self-guided professional learning plan for staff as we climb to the summit of Everest on a learning journey. Discover through each stage what life on Mt. Everest will be like for the staff you are working with. Consider how each staff member will begin their climb and evaluate themselves as well as administrators to monitor their own learning. Access all of the resources and learn about our successes and falls before beginning your own school’s journey to climb to the summit.

Participants will:

• Understand how to leverage leadership within their own buildings to reform the professional development goals of their schools;
• Initiate a year-long individualized professional development program with the intent of building capacity from within; and
• Know how to use student and teacher data to achieve exemplary results with schoolwide data.

Participants will:

• Gain insight regarding the processes and practices of an effective MTSS framework;
• Receive ready-to-use resources for strengthening MTSS systems and effective teaming structures;
• Evaluate current MTSS systems and teaming structures within their educational systems (school, district, regional, or state); and
• Develop an initial action plan for next steps in the MTSS implementation process.

Analyze how to drive your school or district equity policy and initiatives. Explore the impact of equity walks on culture and climate, strategies used to elevate student voice, and efforts to increase diverse representation to promote retention and recruitment.

Participants will:

• Understand the purpose and benefit of equity walks and how to use the results to improve school climate and culture;
• Gain strategies for elevating student voice to achieve educational equity; and
• Determine best practices to address equity concerns related to retention & recruitment.

Explore strategies for measuring the impact of professional development on teacher performance and student outcomes and discover qualitative and quantitative methods for gathering data to measure five levels of evidence. Learn what one school district is doing to move from evidence to action as well as what others in the session are doing. Leave with a plan for documenting and acting on the effectiveness of your professional development initiatives.

Participants will:

• Know the importance of using data to measure the impact of professional development on teacher performance and student outcomes;
• Understand what research reveals about factors related to teacher growth and change in instructional practices as well as on student learning;
• Know how to identify appropriate tools for measuring the desired teacher, student, and system outcomes;
• Discover how one district is using data to determine the effectiveness of their initiatives in order to plan and implement professional development based on teacher and student data and to design systemic changes;
• Understand how others in the session are measuring and acting on data they are collecting; and
• Leave with a draft of a professional development assessment and action plan.

Learn how Richmond (VA) shifted the culture around their data collection habits to enable them to provide professional learning support to meet each educator's unique needs. Dive into action planning for how to support your district in building trust by investing stakeholders at all levels in developing strong data habits – moving from collecting anonymized data to targeted support. Self-assess how your district is using the right data at the right time.

Participants will:

• Understand how Richmond is changing the narrative around instructional coaching to position it as professional learning and non-evaluative for teachers;
• Build their personalized professional learning and development playbook using strategies gleaned from Richmond’s journey; and
• Identify action steps to invigorate the culture around collecting actionable data across a large team of district staff, coaches, and multiple building leaders to build trust and buy-in.

Hear how, faced with dwindling attendance at hour-long professional development sessions, these teacher coaches decided to change their professional development model. Learn how they decided to offer smaller, digestible learning opportunities to their teachers, inspired by the concept of microlearning. Find out how you can make your current professional learning model more accessible and enticing.

Participants will:

• Comprehend the journey of transforming a professional development series from macro to micro;
• Know the benefits of presenting material in small chunks over a shorter period of time;
• Understand the purpose of the spoonful approach within a greater context of teacher support and mentoring; and
• Identify different contexts in which this could benefit their community.

Learn essential components of leadership programs that increase the transfer of knowledge, skills, and strategies into practice in schools. Experience, reflect upon, and assess adult learning strategies including the explicit use of learning intentions and success criteria, various protocols, and grouping techniques. Plan to design high-quality leadership programs and/or improve the quality of professional learning sessions.

Participants will:

• Identify design features of impactful leadership programs;
• Determine strategies and actionable steps to take to increase transfer to practice; and
• Plan to integrate new strategies and protocols to make professional learning designs more impactful.

Explore how educators in Daviess County (KY) overcame obstacles to getting new teachers personalized support using systematic video observation and feedback. Hear how new teachers and coaches adopted reflective habits and effective practices sooner as a result. Discover ways to make video reflection common practice, eliminate fear, and create rewarding experiences with video feedback. Discuss how these strategies improve school culture and student outcomes.

Participants will:

• Understand how coaching through video improves teacher practices;
• Gain knowledge through a video coaching simulation; and
• Craft an implementation plan focused on self-guided coaching, peer coaching, and coaching as part of the evaluation cycle.

Hear what current brain science says about learning and leadership and how to use this information to design more engaging experiences for both K-12 students and professional staff. Consider, for example, how emotions influence a person's ability to learn and work, whether people can multitask, and whether they have learning styles. Learn key ideas that every leader should know about how cognitive and social-emotional learning works in the brain. Leave with strategies you can use right away to create more memorable, meaningful, and motivational experiences for both students and staff.

Participants will:

• Separate truth from myth regarding several popular statements about the brain;
• Learn three key ideas about the brain that will improve leadership in K-12 education;
• Apply key ideas from brain science as a tool for vetting future educational and leadership decisions; and
• Reflect upon their core beliefs about learning and leadership through the lens of current brain science.

Discover what feedback teachers find most useful, what information addresses their greatest concerns, and what they consider most helpful to improve their interactions with students and their impact on student learning. Explore five feedback characteristics based on our recent research with multiple K-12 school districts. Uncover feedback that provides meaningful information, focused communication, and clear direction for improving teacher development and student learning.

Participants will:

• Understand the common types of teacher feedback used in K-12 schools today;
• Learn and crosswalk five characteristics teachers identify as most helpful to their professional growth and improving student learning;
• Gain practical insight on how to create effective feedback practices that teachers trust; and
• Acquire strategies, using case study evidence, to collaboratively identify areas in need of instructional improvement and practice giving effective feedback.

Walk through a protocol to examine your multilingual learner student data and school readiness factors to align key priorities for students with district- or school-level strategies. Learn how to design and build tools and resources to support key priorities for multilingual learner students through leveraging cross-functional team partnerships. Walk away with a design plan that strategically supports the priorities, tools, and resources to support the needs of multilingual learner students in all classrooms across the school.

Participants will:

• Understand the key student demographic and school readiness factors to support planning for multilingual learner students and their teachers;
• Identify strategic alignments between needs of multilingual learner students and district- or school-level priorities; and
• Gain strategies to build partnership with other district or school teams to weave cross-functional priorities together to provide a stronger learning experience for multilingual learners.

Explore Standards for Professional Learning and ways in which they can be implemented to improve the quality of professional learning for educators. Examine case studies of successful application of the standards through Alabama’s Regional Inservice Centers. Leave with a clear understanding of how to implement Standards for Professional Learning in a regional context including strategies to overcome common obstacles.

Participants will:

• Understand how Standards for Professional Learning improve professional learning for educators;
• Evaluate case studies of successful application of Standards for Professional Learning within regional and district settings in Alabama; and
• Discuss potential challenges and possible strategies for overcoming obstacles in implementation of standards.

Dive deeply into rich resources that support implementing Standards for Professional Learning. Learn how to effectively use Innovation Configuration maps and discover the latest tools for standards implementation. Discover how the supplementary resources for standards provide direction for translating standards into the daily work of educators in various roles and with varying responsibilities. Examine all the resources available to get the most from Standards for Professional Learning.

Participants will:

• Experience a high-level review of Standards for Professional Learning;
• Understand the resources available to support implementation of Standards for Professional Learning; and
• Identify specific actions for applying standards to their daily work using implementation tools.

Discuss how feedback is the vehicle for instructional improvement, but inconsistencies within schools create discord and potential stigma around this tool for change. Learn how our team used evidence-based strategies and research to transform leader-to-teacher feedback practices through large-scale professional learning. Discover how we coupled empirical evidence with implementation data to develop a leadership pilot for first-year assistant principals. Depart with a deeper understanding of evidence-based decision-making processes to inform continuous improvement.

Participants will:

• Develop awareness of the components of evidence-based actionable, objective, and accountable feedback practices, with respect to adult social and emotional learning;
• Understand how a large urban school district used various sources of evidence to implement responsive changes within professional learning for a targeted sub-group of school leaders;
• Conceptualize the process of using real-time data gleaned from evidence-based changes to inform future decisions, with respect to long-term implications; and
• Consider opportunities within current professional learning offerings and/or school and district-based programs or processes where key data points may be leveraged to provide evidence for action, specifically considering leadership development and shared ownership of an initiative.

Explore how Anne Arundel County Public Schools (MD) brings its equity policy to life by employing its self, systems, and steps framework to all facets of a large, suburban school district. Learn how the framework can be employed by educators at the classroom, school, and district levels. Apply and use the framework to advance the work of equity in your role as an educator.

Participants will:

• Explain how Anne Arundel County Public Schools (MD) operationalizes its equity policy using a self, systems, and steps framework to impact student’s academic, social, and emotional achievement;
• Comprehend the language necessary for the work of equity; and
• Apply the self, systems, and steps framework to their role within their educational organization to create equitable environments within their classrooms, schools, and/or districts.

Learn firsthand from a large, innovative school system (Prince George’s County Public Schools) how improvement science practices are leveraged in developing evidence-based change ideas across K-12 mathematics classrooms. Examine the School Improvement Network Improvement Community (SI-NIC) driver diagram and investigate how disciplined plan-do-study-act (PDSA) testing can help to transform schools’ strategy selection and measurement to drive improved student mathematics outcomes. Develop your own PDSA test to bring back to your school and share with colleagues.

Participants will:

• Understand and apply the components of a plan-do-study-act cycle;
• Generate learning goals and make predictions to guide a PDSA test;
• Compare various types of measures and instruments that can be used to determine effectiveness of a change idea.
• Construct a testable change idea for vetting by using a scoping protocol; and
• Explore how a PDSA cycle can be incorporated into school improvement planning processes.

Hear from a South Bend (IN) team about their experiences with building high-quality teacher leadership teams, guided by Learning Forward resources including Standards for Professional Learning. Reflect on connections to the examples and experiences related to aligning and improving teacher and student learning. Consider how to apply lessons learned to effective implementation in your unique learning environments.

Participants will:

• Understand how districts and schools can align to improve teacher and student learning at the building level through an inquiry-based cycle approach to school improvement teams;
• Gain insight on how to use the book Becoming a Learning Team and its teaching and learning cycle to improve adult and student learning;
• Learn how to implement and integrate the Standards for Professional Learning through the lens of the Conditions for Success frame.

Delve into the process of designing inclusive and comprehensive pathways that enable students to grow into careers in teaching or classified roles within your district. Acquire practical tools to align curriculum, assessments, and experiential learning opportunities, ensuring students and alumni are ready for future roles in your district. Gain processes for organizational change including partnering with businesses and community leaders. Learn best practices and exchange valuable insights as we support you with models for success that respect and nurture your school community.

Participants will:

• Learn innovative strategies and pathways to support students and alumni toward a career in teaching or in the workforce as a classified district staff member;
• Apply insights to foster personalized learning, align curriculum, engage community leaders, and establish work-based learning partnerships; and
• Create a culture of growth, preparing students for success and advancing educator and student learning for the future success of the school district.

Learn how to leverage your instructional vision to bring academic synergy to your school district. Uncover strategies to engage all stakeholders to develop an inclusive instructional vision and learn how to build a coalition of support by hearing from one district’s journey. Walk away with ready-to-use resources and materials. Uncover innovative ways to build a strong instructional community.

Participants will:

• Know how district leaders equitably engaged multiple stakeholders to construct the instructional vision;
• Understand how the instructional vision was used as a mechanism to drive change in academics and instruction; and
• Create a system of ongoing learning and development that provides district-level support in enabling school and community leaders to take ownership of their district’s instructional vision.

Participants will:

• Visualize how standards and equitable processes can work in collaboration for greater alignment;
• Connect with how one state is approaching retention as a collaborative effort;
• Understand where they are in their own journey to systemwide, high-quality professional learning; and
• Know how similar plans/resources can be put in place for their state/district/school.

Participants will

• Learn to apply research on high-performing education systems to their own districts, and understand how professional learning functions within these systems to drive equity;
• Understand how to think deeply about the incentives, structures, and supports that are needed to establish regular collaborative professional learning and teacher career ladder;
• Gain insight into the real-world application of these concepts as they discuss the steps to design and implement an educator career ladder to deliver equitable, excellent instruction in every classroom, as well as how to address roadblocks and built momentum for sustainable change and continuous improvement throughout the process; and
• Understand their current system’s context and leave with a better sense of how they can begin redesigning their professional learning to ensure equitable opportunities for scholars and teachers in every classroom.

Imagine a school where staff input into important decisions is not only desired, but is encouraged, expected, and implemented in systematic and systemic ways. Explore the research on implementation science, examine a possible structure for engaging staff, and hear about the practical implications of this work in one system. Walk away with a plan for how you will engage all staff in meaningful decision making.

Participants will:

• Understand the importance of a leadership team for leading successful implementation of improvement efforts;
• Understand how these concepts were implemented in one system, together with successes and roadblocks; and
• Create a preliminary plan for how to incorporate these concepts into current structures in their school setting.

Learn how a university-based partner collaborates with schools and districts in shifting from a professional development (PD) to professional learning (PL) mindset. Hear examples of how school and district leaders shift their approach from delivering PD to teachers to intentionally co-designing powerful learning opportunities with teachers to ensure equitable school and student outcomes. Examine impact data from school and district leaders in relation to their shift, as well as the successes and challenges they had in the process. Leave with a checklist for action that can be used for improving professional learning outcomes.

Participants will:

• Identify how school and district leaders can shift their mindsets from professional development to professional learning using Standards for Professional Learning;
• Understand from school and district leaders how this shift was made and the impact that it has had on professional learning effectiveness and student learning outcomes;
• Examine a checklist for leaders to reflect on how they design professional learning; and
• Create an action plan for how this learning could be implemented in their settings.

Research on social and emotional learning (SEL) has grown dramatically in the past decade. Discover the latest research in the field of SEL including what we know, what we don’t yet know, and what this means for creating caring and equitable schools. Join Dr. Mark Greenberg and Principal Natasha Buckner-Pena (Chicago Public Schools) to learn how schools can infuse evidence-based programs into all aspects of their operations to dramatically improve the culture, climate, and engagement of students, staff, and families.

Learn how Pomperaug Regional School District 15 (CT) spearheaded the work of the Middlebury and Southbury Equity and Inclusion Council. Hear the story of how we involved multiple stakeholders and the action steps we took to ensure all feel welcome and included in the schools but also the two towns of Middlebury and Southbury. Explore a set of questions to consider as districts work together with their communities to reach people of all backgrounds.

Participants will:

• Understand how a school system and community engaged together to be inclusive for students and adults;
• Understand how staff and students can help ensure that schools are welcoming and inclusive;
• Understand what the community can do to support equity and inclusivity; and
• Receive a set of questions to consider when doing this work with schools and the community.

Focus on rigorous content for all learners, with a focal point on English Learners, English Language Development Standards, and equitable practices. Discuss various classroom activity ideas, to include oral activities, to engage all learners. Explore professional development presentation styles to connect to classroom-based activities.

Participants will:

• Collaborate on equitable, oral activities;
• Apply knowledge obtained about professional development presentation styles to their own professional development; and
• Begin to understand how to increase rigor in the classroom for all learners.

Explore the interactive Mathematics Lesson Planning Protocol (MLP^2) to support teacher candidates and/or practicing teachers in planning high-quality mathematics lessons. Consider how many teachers encounter planning pitfalls using resources that don’t promote understanding of mathematics concepts. Discuss how to use the protocol to develop teacher expertise in making informed instructional decisions. Access a structure for planning and coaching conversations.

Participants will:

• Understand how the Mathematics Lesson Planning Protocol (MLP^2) adds equity considerations to intentionally designed instruction;
• Understand that when mathematics is meaningful, all students have the opportunity to access the content;
• Know how to use the protocol and how it was developed; and
• Consider options for use of the protocol in their own work or with other educators.

Learn how portfolios are a means for authentic assessment of student learning, not merely a collection of learning tasks and a quick turnaround for implementation. Explore what portfolios are, how they empower students to demonstrate their learning over time, and how to bring about systemwide change and a paradigm shift across grades 6-12 concurrently.

Participants will:

• Understand what a portfolio is and isn’t;
• Identify underlying beliefs about student learning and assessment;
• Determine alternatives to common assessment challenges that leave students out of the design equation; and
• Develop a starting point for their own exploration of how this would work in a classroom, school, or district after hearing about the work one district is doing.

Explore useful tips and ideas for increasing educator retention in your district or campus. Discuss the role of ensuring early success for novice teachers and administrators as a critical component of increasing educator retention. Engage in dialogue and gain strategies for onboarding, mentoring, and growing educators.

Participants will:

• Use this theory of action to begin planning in their contexts: creating sustainable programs that support onboarding and induction for newly hired/appointed teachers and leaders will drastically impact the retention of educators beyond their first year in their respective roles;
• Identify the non-negotiables for an onboarding and mentoring program in their districts; and
• Use the BEST framework to create and design professional development for mentors and mentees that will empower and transform both sets of educators.

Consider that teacher professional learning programs are often measured using quantitative tools and metrics, and while this can gauge effectiveness, it often doesn’t capture the extent of change. Learn how to use evidence to build on specific practices that lead to changes in teacher practice. Explore the use of both qualitative and quantitative data to build a robust understanding of the effectiveness of professional learning to support future implementation.

Participants will:

• Acquire ways to use backward design principles to identify types of qualitative and quantitative data to collect and how to use this data to evaluate professional learning;
• Evaluate qualitative data to make sense of quantitative metrics; and
• Understand how developing teacher noticing practices and reflection can serve as a method of data collection.

Engage with professional learning designers, researchers, and leaders of an international school network in Qatar as they share their journey to evaluate the impact of professional learning. Discover how the team developed metrics based on theoretical frameworks to evaluate professional learning. Learn how they improved their system of evaluation to impact teacher efficacy, institutional support, and student outcomes.

Participants will:

• Understand the process the team went through to develop and contextualize their professional learning evaluation tools;
• Know how the team adapted tools to evaluate professional learning impact; and
• Understand how to improve professional learning evaluation to impact teacher efficacy, institutional support, and student outcomes.

Explore how principals are redesigning their leadership based on Standards for Professional Learning and the roles they play in leading learning of adults and students. Experience using the cycle of continuous improvement and designing adult learning based on the equity standards and the Culture of Collaborative Inquiry and Learning Designs standards. 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.

Participants will:

• Engage in understanding and using Standards for Professional Learning to increase your effectiveness;
• Explore the new standards with a focus on equity, learning designs, assessing progress, and leadership; and
• Develop a plan of action for implementing the standards with intentionality.

Engage in a discussion with instructional leaders from Goochland County Public Schools (VA) and the University of Richmond about their, and your, successes and challenges in creating and implementing authentic yet scholarly-informed coaching models. Learn how Goochland and UR have partnered to create organizational alignment (for teachers, school leaders, parents, and coaches) around a coaching program that is both organically grown and highly informed.

Participants will:

• Apply the work done by Goochland and the University of Richmond to their coaching teams to create better cohesion and a unified goal for instructional outcomes;
• Share their experiences in developing and implementing a coaching program in preK-12 schools; and
• Understand how to develop and leverage relationships with university partners.

Discuss how top-down directives often do not create the buy-in necessary to create institutional and classroom change, and that new initiatives are often met with reluctance, apathy, and sometimes flat-out refusal. Explore of framework of Inquire, Discover, Create, and Implement. Learn how one school’s inquiry-based framework empowered staff to identify student and professional needs, create measurable goals, and implement systems to impact change.

Participants will:

• Understand the process behind an inquiry-based framework to identify student and professional needs;
• Use the information through the process to create measurable goals;
• Implement systems to achieve impact based on the inquiry-based framework; and
• Envision how an inquiry-based framework could work at their own schools.

Discuss how it takes a village to support professionals. Explore how fostering mutually supportive relationships and networking with others help grow skills, confidence, and knowledge, allowing individuals to develop into better versions of themselves. Participate in a conversation about how feeling supported by empowering colleagues can lead to personal growth, professional opportunities, and sustainable success.

Participants will:

• Recognize and internalize ways to improve networking skills and strengthen professional connections;
• Analyze their current professional contacts for potential networks and support systems; and
• Map out a plan to strategically position network opportunities and sustainable professional and personal growth.

Learn about Learning Forward's Academy, a professional learning experience that offers educators an unmatched opportunity to profoundly deepen their expertise and increase their capacity to meet the challenges in the modern educational landscape. Hear from Academy coaches and members about how this 2 and ½-year inquiry-based learning experience has transformed their work.

Participants will:

• Learn about the Academy experience; and
• Hear about opportunities to expand their involvement Learning Forward.

Discuss how every educator can – and should – be an advocate for high-quality professional learning. Learn to make your case, tell your story, and win support. Explore advocacy strategies and tips that are applicable to any advocacy effort. Hear current updates on federal news and action. Join us to hone your skills, build confidence, and get excited about being an advocate.

Participants will:

• Understand tips and strategies for effective advocacy;
• Build confidence in participating in advocacy activities; and
• Keep up to date on federal Title II news.

Discuss the importance of a strong foundation of trust to ensure equitable opportunities and outcomes for all students. Experience the power of five trust-building practices alongside a continuous cycle of learning for instructional leaders. Walk away with successful strategies to sustain professional learning and improve student achievement.

Participants will:

• Gain five key trust-building practices;
• Understand self-reflective questions to support an informal inventory of current practices;
• Understand a cycle of continuous improvement to increase student achievement and ensure equitable opportunities and outcomes; and
• Review successful practices to implement to help all instructional leaders meet short and long-term goals.

Learn how the Center for Strategic Leadership partnered with Metro Nashville Public Schools to develop a residency program for aspiring school leaders to better equip them to sustain existing learning practices, systems, and cultures. Explore the benefits of professional partnerships to establish leadership pathways informed by data and district needs and discuss components of principal residencies to inform the development of job-embedded leadership pathways.

Participants will:

• Understand key components of a meaningful residency program;
• Explore creative partnership and funding opportunities; and
• Discuss opportunities for and barriers to residency programs for design in their school or district settings.

Join us for a lively panel discussion exploring how successful educators in a range of roles use coaching skills to foster autonomy, efficacy, and growth for other educators. Facilitated by Sharron Helmke, Learning Forward’s vice president for professional services, the panelists will explore when and how they choose coaching interactions over other modes of leadership, including how to embed coaching into both collegial and supervisory conversations. Representing research and practice, the panelists will discuss the power of coaching to sustain learning, bolster collaboration and collaborative organizational cultures, and engender equity among the educators they support. They will also share how they’ve deepened their own professional expertise through being coached themselves and by coaching others. Panelists will include:

Jackie Owens Wilson has 45 years of experience in K-20 education through multiple levels of the education system, with expertise in leadership, coaching, standards, and professional learning. She currently serves as assistant professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware and executive director of the National Policy Board for Educational Administration. Wilson and co-author Gary Bloom just released a book with Corwin Press titled Blended Coaching: Skills and Strategies to Support the Development and Supervision of Professional Educators.

Jen Lara is a professor of education, lead coach, and co-creator of Anne Arundel Community College’s (AACC) Engagement Coach Training Program – the only community college-based, ICF-accredited, Level 2 coach training program in the U.S.  Lara is an ICF Professional Certified Coach and taught K-12 students in Colorado, on the Navajo Nation, in Ecuador, and in inner-city Baltimore.

Participants will

• Distinguish coaching conversations from other types of professional conversations;
• Learn how coaching conversational skills can easily be embedded into professional conversations between peers as well as between supervisors and their direct reports;
• Explain how an increased use of coaching conversational skills can create a more equitable, respectful, and collaborative organizational culture; and
• Identify ways that educators can develop or deepen their professional expertise through coaching and by coaching others.

Keynote facilitator Sharron Helmke and panelists will answer your questions in this special session after the keynote address on Tuesday.

Hear about Drop Everything and Listen (DEAL) with Empathy, a concept that, when combined with premises of improvement science, allows adults to identify and interrupt their biases. Explore the role of student voice change ideas in producing steady positive shifts in culture, helping adults refine their practices, and contributing to more effective implementation of your site's instructional program expectations. Learn how empathy can interrupt power inequities at school.

Participants will:

• Practice designing opportunities for student experience to be brought into professional learning spaces;
• Practice framing language and access resources that can be used to interrupt bias about who is qualified to give instructional feedback; and
• Understand the historical and contextual conditions that contribute to the erasure of student experience in typical school improvement cycles.

Gain a heightened awareness of the need for increased equity in our schools and discover actionable strategies for achieving greater gender and sexual orientation equity. Explore gender and sexual orientation terminology, unpack problematic habits, and experience self-reflection as a tool for personal continual growth in this area. Dive deep into research-based best practices for supporting LGBTQ students through mindful, inclusive pedagogy. Devise a plan for promoting gender and sexual orientation equity in your school and community.

Participants will:

• Recognize the parallels between gender identity and self-expression, with the goal of establishing a point of reference for understanding gender as a spectrum;
• Understand the key terminology surrounding gender and sexual orientation equity, delineate the difference between equity and equality, and explain the relationship between equity and bias;
• Understand the current state of equity and the lack thereof as it relates specifically to gender and sexual orientation;
• Acquire best practices for supporting LGBTQ students in the classroom by exploring research-based best practices for ensuring an equity-centered approach to instruction;
• Understand curricular materials that address gender and sexual orientation equity as well as strategize ways to use these materials within their current teaching context;
• Reflect on their classroom practices and engage in a self-audit to ascertain evidence of an equity-centered approach and decide on requisite changes to increase gender and sexual orientation equity;
• Heighten their awareness of implicit and explicit messaging in the media that promote bias and inequitable practices; and
• Devise a plan for promoting gender and sexual orientation equity in their school and community.

Uncover what your students are thinking.  Use formative assessment data, providing real-time insight into students' voices. Discover a new model of student engagement, aligned with the science of Learning and strategic planning. Leave with turnkey practices on how to collect evidence of students' voices and engagement data to inform strategic planning, professional learning/mentoring, and building sustainable systems of support.

Participants will:

• Develop assessment tools that build students' voices so that every student excels;
• Learn to use data from students' voices to build ongoing assessment materials to create a culture of continuous learning for all students;
• Understand that formative assessment data needs to be actionable, equipping educators/leaders with research-based instructional strategies to improve student engagement outcomes; and, 
• Develop assessment tools with real-time tools to be used at department meetings and for superintendents' conference days.

Uncover how everyday, ground-level activities in our schools and systems can contribute to and ignite movements. Learn about the field of curriculum-based professional learning – a growing effort focused on equipping educators with what they need to engage students in rigorous, student-centered instruction. Explore how you can drive the broader effort forward in your school, system, and well beyond.

Participants will:

• Define fields broadly and explain why field-building is a powerful tool for population-level change;
• Identify the characteristics of the field of curriculum-based professional learning; and
• Explore how to advance the field of curriculum-based professional learning from their current role or vantage point.

Unpack the concept that the student, teacher, and content are the three most important factors of classroom success, yet less than 20% of teachers have access to standards-aligned curriculum. Study the research and understand the materials you have and how they were selected. Learn how to advocate to ensure that all educators and students have access to high-quality instructional materials.

Participants will:

• Understand the instructional core and the research behind the impact of curriculum and instructional materials;
• Reflect on their district's current curriculum and adoption process; and
• Know how to advocate for high-quality instructional materials.

Learn about research evidence demonstrating the impact of practicing instructional routines as part of professional learning, before implementing with students. Hear about a research-proven program that uses mixed-reality simulation to help math teachers practice and develop questioning and discussion strategies and see a live demo. Learn about a free resource to support collaboratively practice of math instructional routines with colleagues and try out using the resource with other conference participants.

Participants will:

• Know about the evidence of how practicing instructional routines positively impacts instruction and student learning, and how this approach to professional learning is reflected in Standards for Professional Learning;
• Leave with a resource to support collaborative practice of instructional routines with colleagues and will be prepared to use the resource in their own district or school after trying it out and reflecting on its use during the session; and
• Receive a document from the presenters afterward that summarizes the ideas, reflections, and suggestions generated from the participants throughout the session.

Learn how First Nations students in Canada who relocate to urban centers to further their education often experience disconnectedness from community, culture, and language, experiencing an educational environment that is not reflective of their cultural identity and that presents a barrier to their success in school. Explore the partnership between The Critical Thinking Consortium (TC2) and the Matawa Education and Care Centre (MECC), created to design teaching and learning resources to enhance Indigenous students' outcomes, including practices to prompt generative thinking from communities, families, staff, and students to support decision making that advances education.

Participants will:

• Understand the key elements of an innovative approach to collaboration that supports improved outcomes for First Nations students;
• Gain access to collaboratively developed resources that embody culturally relevant and respectful pedagogy and content; and
• Identify the effectiveness and inclusivity of these resources while also exploring valuable Indigenous ways of knowing and traditional content in connection to curriculum.

Engage in analysis-of-practice using videoclips from the classroom as one teacher implements high-quality instructional materials and from professional learning as study group members analyze that same classroom videoclip. Link this experience to the Elements of Curriculum-based Professional Learning and implications for your setting. Consider leadership roles and responsibilities for putting the Elements into action.

Participants will:

• Learn from a nested analysis of practice from a powerful professional learning program and highlight core, structural, and functional design features and enabling conditions of curriculum-based professional learning linked to BSCS’s highly effective Science Teachers Learning from Lesson Analysis (STeLLA) professional learning program;
• Determine leadership roles and responsibilities for putting into action the elements of curriculum-based professional learning based on district leaders’ experiences; and
• Reflect on the experience and consider implications for their work.

Consider how, just as baseball coaches and managers need to place the right players in the right positions, district leaders need to identify the best leaders in the right positions. Join our team, as we discuss creating pipeline courses for instructional coaches, principals, and administrators that allow districts to not only identify leadership potential in their current rosters, but empower their teacher leaders to explore leadership opportunities and grow in their understanding of essential leadership skills.

Participants will:

• Understand research and best-practices behind successful leadership pipeline programs;
• Identify key stages of building leadership capacity;
• Explore artifacts and share experiences of leadership development; and
• Articulate how to implement this in their own setting.

Consider how districts build a comprehensive leadership development program to build leadership capacity, from teacher leaders to administrators. Experience how Frederick County Public Schools (MD) implements the Exceptional Leaders Innovating and Transforming Education (ELITE) Leadership Program based on a core set of standards and research-informed practices. Leave with a strategic plan to implement and sustain a comprehensive program to overcome the challenge of recruitment and retention of leaders.

Participants will:

• Identify and analyze the key components of a high-quality, comprehensive, and research-informed leadership development program and select components that would best fit their school system/district’s needs;
• Identify the challenges of recruitment and retention of high-quality leaders throughout the system and determine strategies to support their development;
• Understand how to improve decision-making and communication skills; and
• Develop an action plan for creating and implementing a high-quality leadership development program that effectively meets their system/district’s current needs.

Consider how educators need to give our students the skills to analyze, synthesize, and curate information. Learn how Project Zero’s thinking routines promote students' thinking by taking what students have learned about and have them synthesize their thoughts to make their thinking visible. Learn first how using these routines helps all our students to make their thinking visible using a series of routines and scaffolds. Discover when and how using technology tools can amplify these routines and promote equity in your educational setting.

Participants will:

• Understand and identify the impact of Project Zero’s thinking routines;
• Know when and how using technology tools can amplify the use of these routines;
• Practice using thinking routines from a student point of view to see their impact; and
• Develop a plan for implementation of thinking routines to promote equity and accessibility for all students.

Participants will:

• Develop a vision for teacher leadership and the impact it can have on teachers, teaching teams, and entire schools;
• Understand the learning experiences of one district and collaborate in identifying practices that to implement in their own systems to accelerate teaching and learning in schools; and
• Initiate the work and assume collective responsibility for student learning in their own contexts.

Participants will:

• Understand the fundamental findings of cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, cognitive load theory and their impact on memory and new learning;
• Recognize how to reduce extraneous cognitive load to maximize intrinsic working memory so that students can more readily access lesson objectives;
• Understand how the brain encodes new information and assimilates information into current memory schemas; and
• Use session-provided strategies and methods to refine current lessons which overall reduces teacher workload by increasing student efficiency of learning.

Learn how Miami Dade County Public Schools addresses teacher recruitment and retention by establishing partnerships to build teacher capacity, to grow our own from preservice to teacher leadership, and to provide teachers’ career lattice opportunities. Explore ideas, models, and methods such as teacher leadership academy and grow your own pipelines for resource officers, alternative track educators, and paraprofessionals. Experience, firsthand, how these models serve as exemplars to support teacher recruitment and growth and student learning.

Participants will:

• Understand how collegiate collaborations are instrumental to develop teacher pipelines,  support teacher career lattices, and address all teachers’ needs from preservice to the instructional leader level;
• Understand the models’ theoretical components, associated competencies and standards, inherent training, and activities that support professional growth and teacher recruitment and retention;
• Understand how individual experiences are aligned with Standards for Professional Learning; and
• Identify next steps for modification and implementation of pipelines and models in support of teacher recruitment and retention at respective sites and school districts.

Dive deep into the challenge of the increasing number of inexperienced teachers, many without formal teacher training, who need intensive support to succeed. Design instructional frameworks to support individual teachers in developing foundational skills like classroom management, planning, and instructional delivery. Learn how to give feedback using an instructional framework and develop observation guides for new teachers to use when observing veteran teachers.

Participants will:

• Identify a high-priority area of practice where a teacher needs support, such as planning, instructional delivery, or classroom management, using root-cause analysis to address foundational issues first, as part of a longer-term improvement plan;
• Identify the key components involved in enacting this practice, then articulate a growth pathway for each component by delineating levels of fluency to make a concise instructional framework;?? and
• Understand and practice how to give feedback that enables teachers to move to the next level of fluency, using specific evidence of practice and expectations from the framework, and how to provide observation guides for learning from more experienced peers.

Learn about an antiracist professional learning framework developed for leader critical self-reflection and action troubling the notion of compliance-based, and one day professional development. Engage with a community of learners to reflect on personal bias, how you process and envision the world, and understand your influence as an educator.

Participants will:

• Learn about the antiracism conceptual framework;
• Use the framework to reflect on your personal educator praxis; and
• Reflect on their personal influence as educators and consider what co-creating identity-safe schools and classrooms for students might look like, sound like, and feel like.

Learn how a professional learning service provider for a network of schools aligned their offerings with organizational objectives and teachers' and leaders' standards. Study their robust needs assessment that included surveys, stakeholder focus groups, and school performance data. Follow their journey to increase participation and coherence while identifying the components that make up a strong needs assessment survey and apply them to your context.

Participants will:

• Understand the Education Development Institute's process of creating a professional learning needs assessments;
• Engage in a self-assessment using the Innovation Configuration map for the Evidence standard of Standards for Professional Learning; and
• Understand how to apply their learning to their own context.

Examine the effective attributes of a sustainable mentorship program. Learn how professional learning aligned to program mission and vision increases educator efficacy for new teachers and mentors. Explore tools to design, implement, and use evidence to create a strategic mentor training program and differentiate support. Use data to support the goals of your program and create sustainability.

Participants will:

• Know how to create program goals and align the mentor training program to the success criteria for desired outcomes;
• Apply tools to design professional learning for new mentors and explore differentiation options for more experienced mentors;
• Collaborate on data collection methods and prioritize evidence based on the goals of the program; and Determine structures for long-term sustainability of the program.

Hear how systemic changes in literacy practices require well-informed instructional leaders at the building and district level, given leaders’ impact on student outcomes. Discover changes in language and literacy practices, assessments, teacher training, parent engagement, and use of instructional materials that are aligned with Ohio’s plan to raise literacy achievement and Ohio’s dyslexia support laws. Learn about Ohio’s Literacy Improvement Pathway, additional resources for implementing the science of reading in K-5 buildings, and a plan for implementation of facilitated ongoing professional learning with coaching for building and district leadership.

Participants will:

• Understand the rationale for targeting administrators with literacy professional development;
• Learn how the Literacy Improvement Pathway Course was developed and implemented statewide;
• Identify the systemic components that improve literacy achievement for all students; and
• Understand the impact, after one year of implementation.

Discuss how a systematic approach to professional learning that provides multiple entry points fosters equitable outcomes across a network. Learn how Network Improvement Communities, learning walks, and convenings can function as a unified system to build capacity to meet network and school goals. Examine your own learning systems and plan next steps for your context.

Participants will:

• Understand how our team supported strong academic outcomes across a network of high schools through providing an interconnected system of professional development experiences;
• Learn to apply a similar framework to their professional learning activities to ensure they function as an interconnected system; and
• Identify actionable next steps for strengthening their professional learning work.

Explore a unique method of leveraging empathy practices to design high-quality, meaningful, and responsive learning environments that prioritize people before content. Evaluate your current status as a facilitator and consider goals that will elevate your practice. Prepare a plan for how you will integrate human-focused practices into future facilitation opportunities and create a tool to monitor the implementation of the plan.

Participants will:

• Reflect on current facilitation practices;
• Acquire human-focused facilitation practices;
• Transfer new ideas about prioritizing people into an upcoming facilitation opportunity; and
• Design a feedback tool to assess implementation.

Explore the move away from traditional professional learning models that are often lecture-based, exclude multiple stakeholders, and provide limited opportunities for educators to directly apply the content to their own contexts. Shift from “sit-and-get” to a model that is flexible, responsive to educator needs, encourages reflection, and focuses on collaboration for positive student and educator outcomes. Review data and feedback from Michigan educators.  Reflect on your own practices and plan how to improve future professional learning.

Participants will:

• Describe three benefits to including multiple stakeholders as recipients of professional learning;
• Compare and contrast features of sit-and-get (lecture-based) and interactive, reflective professional learning approaches; and
• Explain how five components can impact implementation and sustainability of professional learning.

Move away from the metaphor of professional learning as drinking from a firehose toward professional learning for growth. Explore tried and field-tested strategies (including igniting engagement, leveraging adult learning theory, clarity, chunking, instructional design, etc.) to turn the firehose into a garden hose without watering down the learning experience. Learn how to make a splash so the learning will last.

Participants will:

• Identify and discuss the principles of andragogy;
• Reflect on how they currently design professional learning experiences to meet the needs of adult learners;
• Clarify the role power plays in their professional learning designs; and
• Identify and explore practices for creating a culture of collaborative inquiry within their professional learning contexts.

Ignite learning in your classroom and schools through a professional learning flight plan that builds learner agency. Examine numerous strategies as you build a plan for lifting off and accelerating learning through high-impact strategies with amazing student and classroom examples. Design a flight path that best fits your students to enable them to soar in their learning and grow their efficacy to take flight.

Participants will:

• Codify the enabling weather conditions that exist in your classroom or school and provide the foundation for learner agency to thrive in your district, school, or classroom;
• Design practical steps and select tools to use in the creation of your own flight plan to grow learner agency;
• Attain valuable tools, establish next steps, and bank critical insights that inspire your own team to increase engagement and efficacy in learning based on research and the science of learning; and
• Explore a wide variety of other flight models – or evidence-based learning designs – that have proven successful from districts who are building learner agency in their organizations.

Discuss what it means to move from one-size-fits-all learning for all teachers. Learn how one award-winning school created a culture of coaching that led to increased teacher efficacy and accelerated student growth and achievement through individualized coaching, feedback, and professional development. Leave with a roadmap and resources to support a comprehensive coaching model that brings out the greatness in every teacher.

Participants will:

• Acquire strategies on how to create an educator profile that guides a differentiated approach to build on the strengths of every teacher;
• Understand a coaching cycle that provides individualized support, feedback, and professional development for teachers;
• Walk away with a ready-to-implement coaching roadmap that provides an equitable approach to empower greatness in all staff; and  
• Develop skills for building and implementing systems that create an equitable approach to coaching and feedback.

Discuss how district and central office leaders advance equity in participation with teachers and school leaders. Identify the conditions and systems necessary to sustain an equity agenda Examine systems and processes for creating or revisiting your districtwide equity agenda – vision, shared understandings, strategies, monitoring systems – and tools for gathering meaningful data that deepen the district’s common understanding of equity. Learn from our partnerships with over 40 districts across the country.

Participants will:

• Identify the elements of, and a process to create, an actionable districtwide equity agenda;
• Analyze the components and uses of equity visits as professional learning data collection tools; and
• Examine the technical and relational conditions necessary for central offices and schools to work together to foster professional learning that advances and sustains equity.

Hear about a statewide approach to developing the capacity of educators to lead change for English Learners. Understand how Hawaii is supporting educators at the state, district, and site levels with a three-year professional learning plan to cultivate a culture of collaborative inquiry, engage in cycles of continuous improvement, and affect change. Explore the importance of committing to a shared vision of excellence, staying equity-focused, understanding high-quality teaching for English Learners, and employing research-based practices to guide decision-making.

Participants will:

• Understand how the Hawaii Department of Education and WestEd have partnered to build the capacity of state, district, and school leaders to improve the educational outcomes of English Learners through an ongoing process of systemic professional learning and implementation;
• Know the importance of committing to a shared vision of excellence, staying equity-focused, understanding high-quality teaching for English Learners, and employing research-based practices to guide decision-making; and
• Understand how teams of leaders examined the current English Learner student experience through qualitative and quantitative measures, contrasted the current reality with the identified ideal, and strategically planned for implementation through ongoing professional learning.

Discuss how schools, systems, and leaders thrive, not just survive, during change. Learn a research-based framework to build and engage collective leadership practices that grow retention, efficacy, and school improvement. Leave with a plan that applies specific strategies to your own school or district’s leadership challenges.

Participants will:

• Understand a research-based framework for building collective leadership conditions and practices in schools;
• Examine and analyze how other schools and districts have used collective leadership frameworks and practices as part of professional learning systems to address challenges related to retention, instruction, professional learning, program design and implementation, equity, leadership pipelines, or consolidation;
• Identify targeted ways to apply that framework to their own school or system’s work; and
• Craft an action plan to implement what they have learned in their professional context.

Learn from the April 2023 issue of The Learning Professional, which highlighted promising practices, lessons learned, and impact achieved by intermediary organizations leading networks of schools using continuous improvement strategies to improve student outcomes. Explore a subset of these articles, with the authors discussing their work over the course of this multi-year initiative. Delve deeply into on one article with the author of your choice.

Participants will:

• Understand how continuous improvement practices have been effectively implemented in a diverse set of educational contexts to improve student outcomes in on-track and college readiness outcomes;
• Engage deeply with an author of a Learning Professional article to learn important details of implementation and context of their published case example; and
• Begin the process of planning an improvement project in their own professional context using the types of tools and approaches highlighted in the special issue.

Unleash the power of teacher teams to build educator capacity in evidence-based practices that increase student achievement and ensure equity. Experience activities and tools that build collaboration skills, collective efficacy, and professional learning. Discover how teachers create a surround-sound environment that communicates high expectations for all students. Apply a four-step formative assessment for results cycle to create a sustainable system of continuous improvement and build capacity for use of data.

Participants will:

• Apply a framework and tools for building a system of continuous improvement within teacher teams;
• Engage teams in learning together, taking action, and reflecting/assessing impact around evidence-based classroom practices that impact student achievement;
• Facilitate within a four-step formative assessment 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; and
• Guide teachers in incorporating concrete high expectations strategies that motivate all students and reflect a belief that “Smart is not something you are; Smart is something you can get through effective effort.”

Uncover how coaching as a way of being has the potential to influence the performance of all employees and the entire culture of an organization. Explore how effective coaches reflect on their personal identity, embrace the dynamics of race and gender in interactions with others, and seek opportunities to learn and grow through the role of coach. Consider that a coaching approach offers educators the opportunity for job embedded and personalized learning and the potential for personal transformation.

Participants will:

• Understand how leader performance expectations and evaluation systems, supported by a coaching approach, have accelerated a district’s excellence and equity agenda
• Understand the role of coaching as an equity driver and job-embedded learning opportunity;
• Understand how a district approaches equity leadership and talent development, including a district developed and led coaching program for principals; and
• Identify starting points or next steps in developing a culture of coaching across a school or district.

Unpack a vision of an equity-centered school leader: one who cultivates prosperity and liberation for students and staff, particularly those from historically marginalized populations, by increasing access and inclusion, building trusting relationships, removing barriers, and creating a shared culture of accountability. Explore three core drivers to nurture such leaders: increasing accessibility of pathways to leadership, sustaining aspiring and current principals with transformational coaching, and equity-centered professional learning.

Participants will:

• Understand an innovative approach to cultivating equity-centered leadership in a large, urban school district;
• Understand specific programs to support the development of equity leaders;
• Identify the qualities of a typical leader and work together offer a broader definition of who can be a leader; and
• Identify the characteristics of authentic, inclusive leadership and its benefits.

Participants will:

• Distinguish between and among the Four Hats of Shared Leadership: coaching, consulting, presenting, and facilitating;
• Understand the capabilities associated with each of the four hats and use those capabilities as a self-assessment tool;
• Understand when, why, and how to effectively and efficiently use each hat; and
• Plan next steps for deepening proficiency with the four hats.

Study the design and implementation of a new approach to professional learning for principals and the district leaders who support them. Explore the evidence that principals are eager to learn from each other as they assist teachers in developing effective practices for raising student performance. See how the artful steps of focusing on the standards, engaging principals in cycles of continuous improvement, and coaching them to success is much like the tango: fast-paced and shifting directions as needed, but never losing sight of the goal—success for all students.

Participants will:

• Develop skills principals are developing in their learning communities to engage teaching teams in data analysis, cycles of continuous improvement, and engaging individual teachers and teams in feedback conversations;
• Gain strategies for focusing learning teams on achieving learning goals for themselves and their students; and
• Use tools to design ongoing professional learning with teams.

Hear how one large metro school district integrates Personal Relational Competencies (SEL) into academics. Explore strategies, practices, and resources that support building a community of learners where all students feel seen, heard, and valued. Gain strategies to support teachers and administrators to shift from student compliance to student engagement and empowerment. Incorporate neuroscience with relational practice through a trauma-informed, strengths-based, and culturally responsive framework that provides practical solutions for challenging students.

Participants will:

• Understand practices and strategies to build relationships, foster agency, and build a community of learners;
• Apply engagement strategies and structures that can be used in the classroom and in professional learning to engage all learners;
• Know how to create the optimal state for learning and engagement by integrating social and emotional learning practices into instruction; and
• Incorporate neuroscience strategies with social and emotional practices for equitable learning solutions.

Examine the reading crisis and how a lack of evidence-based literacy instruction contributes to the achievement gap that haunts our nation. Learn about the science of reading and the shift schools need to make from balanced to structured literacy in service of equity. Hear how Montgomery County Public Schools (MD) is providing professional development to all K-5 teachers in service of this shift and the impact the work has had on student learning.

Participants will:

• Understand the national reading crisis and recognize the impact current reading practices have had on equity and student learning outcomes;
• Understand the essential ideas provided by the science of reading and how they inform how to effectively teach all students to read;
• Explain how the science of reading research informs the need to shift from balanced literacy to structured literacy and the critical impact educator knowledge about the science of reading plays in effective implementation; and
• Recognize the complexity of shifting reading instruction to reflect the research and understand the first steps Montgomery County Public Schools is taking towards effectively implementing structured literacy by prioritizing professional development.

Reflect on the gap between our knowledge base and current practice in the way we grade and report student learning. Explore research on how best to communicate information about students’ performance in school to ensure fair, accurate, meaningful, and equitable grading policies and practices. Consider evidence on ways to improve communication between school and home, including standards-based and competency-based learning models. Review policies to avoid due to their proven negative consequences for students, teachers, and schools.

Participants will:

• Gain knowledge about the advantages and shortcomings of different grading methods and their implications for classroom policy and practice;
• Attain strategies for reforming grading and reporting that are fair, accurate, meaningful, educationally sound, and supported by all stakeholders; and
• Develop guidelines for implementing effective standards-based and competency-based grading policies and practices at all grade levels.

Consider how equity coaching is a leadership stance that supports the idea that practice is what changes behaviors and behaviors are what change systems. Learn how improving educators’ coaching skills can help them lead others to embrace change and replace current reproductive practices with new relational approaches. Explore 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.

Participants will:

• Learn from discussions about oppression and education and examine assumptions about bias, privilege, change, and learning;
• Adopt listening as a culturally responsive leadership and teaching skill to increase cultural proficiency and better diagnose challenges and support students to grow and learn; 3
• Develop educators’ ability to create culturally responsive spaces focused on strong instruction and collaboration with their peers; and
• Use skills for coaching change in challenging contexts, including social-emotional intelligence and building trust and relationships.

Explore three elements of effective coaching practice: the GROWTH conversational framework, based on an approach first developed in Australia; essential coaching skills; and a coaching way of being. Gain a solid grounding and platform from which to develop more sophisticated skills and understanding of coaching as a way of leading or coaching as a highly effective leadership stance. Consider how coaching as a leader is more nuanced than other forms of coaching. Begin to adopt a coaching way of leading with more confidence.

Participants will:

• Understand the challenges administrators face when they try to have coaching conversations;
• Comprehend the most popular approaches to coaching and their strengths and limitations;
• Understand the GROWTH coaching model and how administrators can use it to guide coaching conversations; and
• Name the skills and beliefs that administrators should adopt to be effective coaches.

Observe how other systems are rebuilding, reinvesting in their people, and reimagining structures to move out of their ruts in coaching and leading. Consider challenges facing coaches and other instructional leaders. Explore the principles of structural tension and human-centered design along with the expertise of participants to connect, inspire, create, and learn from one another through the problem-solving process.

Participants will:

• Gain inspiration and hope from a network of colleagues;
• Understand the human-centered design model in conjunction with structural tension to strengthen their repertoire of strategies as leaders;
• Create a plan of action and receive feedback to actively work through current and relevant constraints in their work; and
• Identify their assets and leverage the assets of other participants in a learning community through empathetic interviews, peer review, and other interactive networking opportunities embedded into the format of this experience.

Comprehensive, aligned principal pipelines have been shown to be feasible, affordable, and effective. Join Mark A. Gooden, professor of education leadership at Columbia University, to learn how the Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) framework can be applied to each of the seven domains of principal pipelines using a new tool with self-guided questions for districts, all with the goal of supporting principals who can advance equitable outcomes for students.

Explore the power of an assessment culture that includes partnership through self-assessment. Support the development of learners who are confident, capable and who are invested in their own growth and achievement by inviting students to document learning, analyze evidence, make decisions, and celebrate growth. Analyze why this approach matters and how to make it happen.

Participants will:  

• Understand why self-assessment is critical in every classroom and what factors ensure self-assessment is a productive and authentic part of the learning process;
• Gain practical strategies for engaging students at all grade levels with self-assessment, including collecting and analyzing evidence, setting goals, and celebrating growth; and
• Understand the ways portfolios, data notebooks, and other self-assessment tools support partnership, equity, and decision-making.

Cultivate safer, inclusive learning environments for LGBTQIA+ people through Safe Zone trainings. Explore four components of Safe Zone training (allyship, language, learning spaces, and curriculum). Learn how one district organized LGBTQIA+ specific professional learning, including Safe Zone training, and share the impact it has had on the educators and young people in their district.

Participants will:

• Reflect on their own socialization relative to LGBTQIA+ inclusion;
• Build their LGBTQIA+ vocabulary and conversational skills, so that they can use those skills to proactively engage with students, colleagues, families, and community members;
• Analyze the results of a physical space audit to identify ways it can become more welcoming, affirming, and visibly supportive of LGBTQIA+ students, colleagues, families, and community members; and
• Learn about one district's intentional planning for LGBTQIA+ inclusivity and identify components from this model that they can incorporate as they create their next steps.

Explore practical solutions to the most common classroom management, behavioral, and socio-emotional problems teachers face today as they work towards creating safer, more supportive, and responsive learning environments. Learn to effectively respond to and de-escalate passive resistance and aggressive confrontation from students. Receive a dozen takeaway techniques that will reduce arguing, off-task time, and misbehavior to increase structure, consistency, and calm.

Participants will:

• Learn to make visible the invisible aspects of classroom management by shifting their thinking about challenging students and creating a safe and structured environment for all students;
• Understand the impact of having a calm, predictable classroom on traumatized students and how it sets them up for success rather than resistance;
• Understand why traumatized students tend to test teachers more and how to pass that behavioral test without taking it personally;
• Gain non-verbal strategies for teaching and reinforcing rules and procedures without triggering fragile students, and understand that verbal commands invite verbal responses, whereas non-verbal directions invite cooperation;
• Gain a research-based strategy for connecting with challenging students and formulate a plan for implementation;
• Understand de-escalatory strategies for dealing with student resistance that teach personal accountability and behavior instead of being punitive; and
• Develop a leveled consequence hierarchy to use and/or share at their schools, which teaches students the power of choice and allows for maximum flexibility during tough disciplinary situations.

Explore a range of initiatives that cultivate more authentic school-family partnerships. Consider how one district deepened school leaders’ and educators’ capacity around forging stronger partnerships with families and ensured more equitable access for traditionally underrepresented families and students. Examine the latest research on family partnership best practices, how to bring those high-leverage strategies to life, and key learnings to apply in your own context.

Participants will:

• Understand best practices related to authentic family partnerships at both the school and district level;
• Know about easily replicable and high-leverage outreach efforts that strengthen relationships with traditionally marginalized families, increase two-way communication, and empower families with greater voice; and
• Walk away with concrete strategies at the intersection of cultural responsiveness and family partnerships to implement at their school or district.

Experience a curriculum-based professional learning design that shifts practice in the instructional core. Examine a professional learning design for improving teacher practices with curriculum, student connections to content, and relationships between teachers and students. Learn how structures that include building peer collaboration and follow-up coaching are impacting outcomes for students.

Participants will:

• Identify attributes of curriculum-based professional learning that shift practices in the instructional core;
• Describe the tangible shifts in conditions that enable curriculum-based professional learning to drive impact; and
• Prioritize levers that increase the impact of curriculum-based professional learning and that build the conditions for impact at scale.

Learn from teachers’ experiences with high-quality curriculum and/or curriculum-based professional learning (HQIM/PL) to strengthen implementation. Train up on the Curriculum Implementation Change Framework (CICF), a framework and toolkit that helps leaders collect and analyze data on teachers’ attitudes toward and use of HQIM/PL to guide implementation planning. Engage in a support planning simulation and leave ready to use CICF to strengthen your HQIM/PL.

Participants will:

• Gain access to a new, customizable change management framework and tool suite made for HQIM/PL implementation ahead of public release;
• Learn about and apply the framework and tool suite through a data-based strategic support planning simulation;
• Understand how this framework and tool suite can be used in their own districts/schools/systems to collect and analyze data about teacher experiences with HQIM/PL implementation to improve implementation via tailored supports (including individualized professional learning); and
• Commit to an action plan for using this framework/toolkit and/or its principles in their contexts.

Explore national, state, and local data trends that establish the need for strategic teacher leadership. Develop an evidence-focused action plan for implementing a strategic teacher leadership model in your school or district. Identify high-leverage leadership roles, develop selection criteria, and plan to evaluate evidence of impact. Hear from one school that has turned evidence into action by implementing a solutions-focused model to improve new teacher retention.

Participants will:

• Understand their current reality to develop a high-leverage teacher leadership action plan;
• Learn about high-leverage teacher leadership models and how they impact outcomes for teachers and students; and
• Examine one school’s current teacher leadership model to identify transferable attributes.

Learn how to foster thinking and problem-solving in other adults even during brief, seemingly routine conversations. Acquire and practice a few basic coaching conversational skills to step away from the burden of trying to solve others’ challenges and instead encourage self-efficacy and sustained growth in those you lead.  Explore how such moves shift culture and encourage ownership and accountability for individual and team success.

Participants will

• Build capacity in others within daily conversations;
• Communicate mutual respect and value through active listening;
• Intentionally navigate a conversational continuum that allows for flexibly partnering with others; and
• Ask questions that foster independent thinking and problem-solving..

Study several practical strategies and tips to promote engaged online learning and foster student well-being. Engage in a range of interactive learning strategies. Apply strategies before a course begins or during online instruction. Learn about supports that keep students sailing on course.

Participants will:

• Know practical strategies to build critical collaboration skills and design equitable learning environments;
• Be able to develop individual and collective knowledge and expertise to promote student success; and
• Apply various practical strategies to their own professional learning that aligns with their school and division goals.

Investigate how to ensure that instructional coaches have every opportunity to learn and refine their important craft. Learn how Sumner County Schools (TN) created purposeful structures to coach the coaches at all levels of experience, empower them to build on their strengths, and support their professional journey of continuous improvement. Leave with a plethora of practical ideas to bolster those who constantly fill others’ cups, our coaches.

Participants will:

• Understand multiple structures to facilitate the growth of coaches;
• Know how to differentiate support, offer choice, and build capacity in all coaches at all experience levels, from novice to veteran;
• Gain methods to identify and prioritize the needs of their coaches; and
• Create action steps to implement structures in their contexts.

Consider how to write about your professional learning insights, experiences, and journeys for publication. Identify writing goals and ideas, gain strategies and tips for communicating effectively and compellingly to an educator and/or policymaker audience, practice writing in response to prompts, and give and receive feedback from peers and facilitators. Examine submission processes and guidelines for The Learning Professional and other publications.

Participants will:

• Understand strategies for communicating insights, experiences, and stories about professional learning;
• Identify topics and messages specific to their work;
• Practice writing for an audience of educators and/or policymakers;
• Give and receive feedback from peers on quick-write drafts;
• Explore publication venues; and
• Set a writing goal and make an action plan.

Develop an understanding about the nature of conscious and unconscious biases as a natural part of how our brains work. Explore a tool that unearths the roots of these biases in self and others and practice an intentional questioning strategy that cracks open habitual patterns and unlocks new possibilities for thought and action. Plan for application of the tool and strategy with self, one-on-one with another, and with groups.

Participants will

• Understand a tool for uncovering the hidden beliefs, assumptions, and values that result in conscious and unconscious biases;
• Practice using a questioning strategy that interrupts conscious and unconscious biases and opens possibilities for new patterns of thought and action; and
• Develop an action plan to effectively respond to biases for equitable systemic change.

Take the first toward deep implementation of the Standards for Professional Learning by assessing the current state of professional learning in your school or system. Experience an overview of the Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI) and how this web-based teacher survey helps schools and districts measure their alignment with standards, identify strengths and areas of focus in their professional learning, and plan professional learning that has maximum impact on teaching and learning. Participants will analyze SAI data and apply it to professional learning in their systems and learn how to use the tool to measure alignment to standards.

Participants will:

• See examples of how schools and systems use the SAI as a tool for measuring alignment to standards and planning targeted professional learning;
• Take the SAI and examine real-time data; and
• Use supporting tools to conduct SAI data analysis and apply it to professional learning in their systems.

Participants will:

• Share their knowledge by collaborating to identify tools and processes currently used to assess professional learning;
• Be able to determine what type of evidence (qualitative or quantitative) is yielded by the use of current tools and processes of assessing professional learning;
• Explore how to create a system of professional learning assessment that balances the collection of qualitative and quantitative evidence;
• Discover ways of upgrading tools and processes and using tools and processes in tandem to yield in-depth evidence of adult learning; and
• Determine what can be learned about the experience of professional learning participants and how to provide differentiated responses for ongoing adult learner support.

Explore microcredentials, an innovative professional development experience that is not only becoming prevalent, but also increasingly accepted for continuing education credit for school educators. Learn the emerging research that says microcredentials are popular, accessible, and, most importantly, transforming for leaders and teachers. Review a framework and sample set of microcredentials for district and school educators.

Participants will:

• Understand the landscape of microcredentials as well as the main elements and features of microcredentials for educators;
• Experience a simulation of one 8-week microcredential for school leaders focused on equitable academic discourse in the classroom; and
• Know the research, viability, and implications for microcredentials in K-12 education.

Learn how to design, implement, and evaluate school-based professional learning aligned with student and adult learning needs. Explore the process and tools needed to analyze school-level data, examine the context and culture, plan teacher-facilitated professional learning, support its implementation, and evaluate its effects on students, educators, and the school’s culture.

Participants will

• Identify the key players responsible for school-based professional and their roles;
• Analyze the process for designing, implementing, and evaluating school-based professional learning, learning tied to educators’ daily work;
• Explore tools to use to enact the process; and
• Apply the learning to their own contexts.

Consider how traditional top-down approaches to professional development may not always be effective or efficient for teachers. Explore the benefits and best practices of teacher-led professional development, in which teachers are given the agency to identify their own learning needs and work collaboratively to create the professional learning that meets their needs.

Participants will:

• Understand the benefits and outcomes of teacher-directed professional learning;
• Know strategies for designing this type of professional learning starting with the school culture and progressing towards functionality and implementation;
• Access a framework and infrastructure that supports teacher-led professional learning, outlining time, cost, and supports necessary for success; and
• Apply this understanding and experience to their own schools and empower teachers to innovate in their own teacher-led professional learning.

Learn how a suburban school district developed and implemented a personalized professional learning structure to support the district’s comprehensive plan. Examine key elements of adult learning theory, reflect on your current practices, analyze guiding documents, and address logistical barriers. Begin to develop a plan that increases personalized professional learning within your organization.

Participants will: 

• Apply principles of adult learning theory and identify existing needs to shift towards increasing personalized learning for teachers;
• Identify current organizational practices as well as aspiring plans to improve the professional learning of their staff;
• Construct and clarify their vision to build structures of support that increase personalized professional learning within their local organizations; and
• Develop a plan to support the development of teachers’ facilitation skills.

Discover how a lab-based coaching cohort was developed in a large school district to support project-based learning that is scalable to all content areas. Analyze strategies on how to begin implementation: grounding teachers in project-based learning best practice, immersing teachers in innovative learning experiences, and engaging them in coaching cycles. Learn about structures of this model, its effectiveness in improving instruction, and how it builds capacity in teacher leaders.

Participants will:

• Experience a hands-on design challenge used in professional learning with teachers to grow their efficacy in implementing project-based learning in their classrooms;
• Understand how project-based learning allows students to have equitable and innovative learning experiences;
• Understand how a lab-based coaching cohort for teachers can support the implementation of project-based learning; and
• Consider ways to implement this structure in your district over time, from year one to full systemic implementation.

Discover how Yorkville 115 (IL) is providing personalized new staff mentorship to their employees. Learn ways to provide meaningful, relevant support while considering each member’s role, experience, and interest. Unpack the various strategies that help educators thrive: choice seminars, full-day learning summits, learning walks, ed camps, instructional coaching, peer cohorts, and mentor observations. Walk away with tips and tools for leveraging the whole district community in a comprehensive orientation and mentoring program.

Participants will:

• Understand a variety of learning modalities that provide educators with various experience levels opportunities to thrive;
• Implement personalized instructional strategies with their staff; and
• Receive a program handbook, seminar and summit resources, surveys, and observation forms.

Learn how Nebraska District 145 Public Schools create coherence by systematically and systemically aligning goals to a singular focus. Leverage professional learning to empower teachers in reaching those goals. Assess the alignment and coherence of district, school, professional learning community, and individual continuous improvement goals in your setting to identify your school or district's readiness to begin the process and determine a timeline.

Participants will:

• Know why aligning goals creates coherence and empowers teachers;
• Be able to assess the alignment of the district, school, professional learning community, and individual continuous improvement goals;
• Determine if current professional learning facilitates goal attainment; and
• Create an implementation action plan.

Hear about implementation science, a framework that school leaders can leverage to support teachers’ ability to implement curriculum effectively to ensure increased equity and access for all learners. Engage in establishing or expanding your knowledge of the tenets of implementation science and explore methods to use those tenets. Learn how to capture the effectiveness of initiatives. Understand how to develop an action plan to further success through shared ownership.

Participants will:

• Develop a basic understanding of implementation science, which refers to the “methods or techniques used to enhance the adoption, implementation, and sustainability” of an intervention;
• Understand a framework that can be applied in their settings to support an implementation effort with key guiding questions;
• Understand how to use the core principles of implementation science to identify barriers, develop comprehensive solutions, and engage multiple stakeholders toward a shared common goal; and
• Acquire a roadmap and specific resources to navigate the complexities of implementing a curriculum as designed to improve all student outcomes specific to their context.

Unpack how colonialism devastated Indigenous communities, forcibly taking children into residential schools and punishing people for speaking their language or engaging in cultural practices. Consider that 90 countries have Indigenous populations with similar experiences, including Canada and the United States. Explore the need to engage Indigenous communities in rebuilding trust. Learn about community engagement with Anishinaabek communities and how the process is applicable to equitably working with underserved communities, in a session led by First Nation educators.

Participants will:

• Cultivate an awareness of the research concerning historical systemic inequities and resulting multi-generational trauma continuing to impact Indigenous educational attainment;
• Consider the characteristics and benefits of responsive evidence-informed community engagement for Indigenous communities;
• Understand relevant, responsive strategies, initiatives, and actions for Indigenous education institutions to engage learners, families, and communities along with evidence of the resulting positive learning outcomes; and
• Reflect on ongoing opportunities and challenges to reaffirm sovereignty from an Indigenous worldview.

Learn how the Delaware Framework for Collaborative Leadership defines a culture of learning, professionalism, and collaboration that is essential to the successful implementation of high-quality instructional materials. Unpack how to create a system of collaboration from the district superintendent to classroom teachers to achieve the district’s academic vision and maximize the impact of instructional materials.

Participants will:

• Understand the importance of creating a culture of collaboration to provide teachers with the professional learning they want and need to skillfully use their instructional materials;
• Identify the roles and responsibilities of key players in effective and equitable academic systems; and
• Create intentional communication, collaboration, and professional learning plans to ensure cohesion across work streams in alignment with their school system’s instructional vision that supports all students.

Participants will:

• Understand the components of two promising approaches to professional learning developed through a researcher-practitioner collaboration;
• Understand use of video-enabled classroom observations as windows into classroom practice for the purpose of teacher reflection;
• Build knowledge about sustained collaboration with coaches or teacher teams to work towards learning goals in a shared framework;
• Know the factors necessary for successful implementation of each promising practice; and
• Examine a real problem of practice from their district or school and consider how they might apply promising practices from the two approaches to professional learning to resolve their problem of practice.

Discuss how getting close to the experience of students and families helps educators creatively solve complex problems. Consider the value of taking intentional strategic risks in an inclusive culture in which brainstorming is encouraged and failure is celebrated. Practice design thinking as a framework to solve your most complex challenges: building empathy, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and testing solutions. Reimagine how your central office innovates in service of students.

Participants will:

• Understand a framework for innovation;
• Center innovation in equity;
• Apply design thinking to a current challenge; and
• Identify ways to use their strengths to foster innovation on their teams.

Learn how Broward County Public Schools (FL) developed a vision for instructional coaches, teachers, and teacher leaders and established systems to support growth and development over the past five years. Examine the district’s teacher professional learning pipeline for instructional coaches, teacher leaders, and teachers that supports and sustains high levels of teacher practices and student academic achievement. Dive into student and teacher data to understand how our teacher professional learning pathway and support model, EMPOWER, has impacted the success of our schools, particularly some of our most critically challenged schools.

Participants will:

• Understand how lessons learned from Years 1 through 4 of the BCPS turnaround schools initiative were used to develop and refine the Reclaim & Elevate (R&E) Summer Experience;
• Determine how our BCPS turnaround school's teacher mentorship program, EMPOWER Broward Teacher Mentors, successfully aligns to the NBCT Program;
• Identify key components of a high-quality implementation plan for using teacher leaders as agents of change; and
• Create an action plan for how to implement this learning in their setting.

Explore how to create high-functioning professional learning communities (PLCs) and team meetings that are focused and productive. Learn how microcredentialed professional learning can help classroom teachers facilitating PLCs to build capacity and lead meaningful reflective work in their teacher teams. Collaborate to apply research-based methods for PLC best practices and a microcredential training system to your own work supporting teacher growth and impact on students.

Participants will:

• Understand the processes by which the professional learning team from a Virginia school division revived the PLC culture in over 70 schools;
• Understand how to create a meaningful and impactful microcredential that features real application of skills, detailed feedback on work, and demonstrated teacher growth as well as the learning targets and goals guiding strong PLC facilitator support;
• Design next steps for their own work based on these practices, with emphasis on supporting a diverse population of educators and school needs, and empowering voices equitably throughout the process; and
• Share the challenges and needs of participants from a wide variety of contexts and systems.

Learn how two districts improved leadership growth and student outcomes by prioritizing high-quality summer learning for staff and students. District Summer Learning Network participants from Newark, NJ, and Tuscaloosa, AL, share the evidence-based improvements that they implemented while leveraging professional learning for future leaders. Consider these issues in terms of your district and leave with a clear set of recommendations, aligned with the PSEL standards, for the cost of a single initiative.

Participants will:

• Understand the current research and practice base for school leader learning and principal pipeline development;
• Understand the research base that indicates that summer learning programs can be dramatically improved to close learning gaps, promote whole child development, and improve equity;
• Identify and map the leadership learning and professional learning opportunities that exist within the context of summer learning transformation, learn how the districts each approached that work, and what resulted; and
• Reflect on and apply those steps to their own summer learning and leadership pipeline work.

Learn about a continuous improvement process to build instructional leadership capacity for school and district leaders in the Department of Defense Education Activity’s worldwide school system. Explore a plan to ensure leaders experience content-specific leadership professional learning aligned with educator professional learning to improve instruction systemwide. Consider the importance of partnership among content, leadership, and professional learning teams. Gain strategies for reexamining the structures you have in place to provide content-specific leadership professional learning.

Participants will:

• Identify strategies and structures for aligning educator and leader professional learning for instructional improvement;
• Examine educator and leader professional learning plans to identify features of collaborative planning for high-quality professional learning; and
• Reflect on opportunities to strengthen partnerships for content-specific leadership support.

Learn how a large school district and their external partner have worked together to launch, implement, and sustain an instructional initiative. Explore the different strategies used to engage teachers and leaders in professional learning and continuous improvement around personalized learning. Reflect and plan for implementation within your own district as you dive into examples of personalized learning in action.

Participants will:

• Acquire strategies for sustaining instructional practices across a large school division;
• Understand practices that can support effective partnerships;
• Reflect on how these strategies and practices might support one’s own district priorities; and
• Develop action steps to support the successful implementation of initiatives.

Explore how to support high-quality school leadership and enhance the leadership capacity of principal supervisors. Learn how an urban district has operationalized five essential leadership plays through job-embedded coaching, strategic professional learning, and distributive leadership. Capitalize on existing leadership development programs and systems in your organization to develop a responsive plan for impactful school leadership.

Participants will:

• Understand change-management processes used by an urban district to refine and implement strategic leadership plays to respond to critical school leadership needs;
• Develop a plan for responsive school leadership; and
• Collaborate with peers to consider the multiple layers of support needed to implement your responsive school leadership plan.

Learn how schools effectively support teachers to make instructional improvement at scale. Explore how instructional improvement can be advanced at a grade level or school by using a wrap-around system that supports teachers at group and individual levels. Leave with ideas for developing an organizational structure as well as protocols and tools for use across different levels of leadership.

Participants will:

• Identify the components of a system designed for instructional improvement;
• Understand how each component of instructional improvement individually and collectively influences changes to instruction;
• Understand the tools and protocols used by the leadership team to impact instruction; and
• Conduct a self-assessment of their district practices to identify opportunities for advancing their systems.

Unpack district leaders’ needs to understand if their investments in professional learning are translating to classroom practice. Learn how Winston-Salem/Forsyth (NC) measures the return on investment of their instructional support and new initiatives. Investigate the power of aligning your data collection tools while responding to the unique professional learning needs of all stakeholders. Create a plan to develop a culture of continuous improvement and execute your programs with fidelity.

Participants will:

• Learn how Winston-Salem/Forsyth (NC) was able to breakdown departmental silos and align on a common set of data collection practices to inform the impact of professional learning supports on classroom practice;
• Understand a root-cause analysis framework to assess their data collection practices to inform teacher support and professional learning; and
• Leave with strategies for quick-wins no matter their role at the district to help isolate and define the levers needed to start making adjustments to support educator growth.

In 1987, Chicago was declared among the most troubled school systems in America. By 2017, it was described as the fastest improving urban system in the U.S. Understand key learnings about how and why this system transformation occurred. Learn how, through an active innovation space, system leaders developed partnerships with new and existing organizations and how a new civic and community architecture emerged to support school and system improvement. Explore the essential roles of recruitment, hiring, beginning teacher and principal support, and professional learning for practicing educators as key drivers of this transformation. Join Al Bertani and Tony Bryk to learn about this story of transformation.

Take the Leadership Compass assessment to identify which of four leadership styles you embody. Examine any weaknesses in your own leadership styles that you could supplement through cooperation with leaders who have complementary strengths. Discuss examples of your own advocacy experiences and identify ways in which that work could be enhanced by drawing on the different strengths of other leaders.

Participants will:

• Identify and understand their personal work/leadership styles so they can build more effective teams with colleagues who have complementary strengths;
• Provide feedback to one another on advocacy work going on in states and understand that work to identify ways in which it could be improved through an awareness of leadership styles; and
• Identify one issue in their current professional environment that they could address through advocacy and with collaboration with other professionals.

Discuss how high growth for all is an outcome of equitable and excellent opportunities to learn. Explore the role of formative conversations in helping learners grow and make meaning from their experiences. Engage in routines that activate funds of knowledge, encourage thoughtful discussions, and promote continuous reflection. Leave with tools to implement and sustain high-impact teaching and learning in literacy and math.

Participants will:

• Understand the impact of the national conversation around literacy, mathematics, and learning recovery for students and teachers;
• Align on the components of high-quality professional learning;
• Experience the power of formative conversations in situating learning; and
• Explore practical tools for equitable and excellent instruction.

Learn how Lubbock (TX) ISD is on track to exceed its ambitious goal of increasing the percentage of students in A- and B-rated schools from 42% to 80% by 2026. Engage in a discussion about the strategies used by instructional leaders at every level to fuel educator growth and student achievement. Explore three main strategic areas: data practices for informed decision-making; what the district stopped doing to focus on what matters most; and personalizing professional learning.

Participants will:

• Understand the data collection and analysis practices that helped breakdown silos, ground leaders throughout the district in fact-based conversations, and make decisions faster with confidence;
• Acquire strategies for conducting their own de-implementation process to help them spend more time on doing the things that matter most to support teachers and drive student achievement; and
• Acquire strategies for how to scale the personalization of professional learning to meet the unique needs of all educators.

Unpack how DEI mission-driven work requires team members to be forthcoming about their own assumptions, instructional missteps, student struggles, and hesitancy to adopt change without fear of judgment from their colleagues. Explore the role of psychological safety in building trusting teams. Learn how skillful team leaders make intentional moves to strengthen trust and encourage diverse voices to speak up in ways that lead to shifts in practice and improved student outcomes.

Participants will:

• Explore a learning-centered framework for leading and observing teacher and leadership teams;
• Expand their notion of what trust looks like in the classroom and on a team; 
• Explore the research-based need for psychological safety in a group; and
• Gain facilitation moves to strengthen team trust.

Explore how data can play a critical role in guiding instructional practice. Be intentional about the data teachers collect to improve how they interpret assessment results and improve instruction. Learn about a framework for data collection and interpretation that includes meaningful measures of student learning that puts classroom assessments at the center of the discussions.

Participants will:

• Identify high-quality measures of student learning from curriculum-embedded assessments;
• Design a plan for considering and interpreting assessment data as a part of PLC, MTSS, and other collaborative frameworks; and
• Understand how classroom data can provide powerful information for your data-driven instructional efforts.

Imagine what’s possible when academic success is a nonnegotiable for all students. Learn how to support teachers in their continuing education around equity and build a culture of equitable teaching and learning. Leave with knowledge that will help you think about equity from a different perspective and position you to engage in deep reflection, dialogue, and more equitable practices.

Participants will:

• Understand how academic identities relate to equitable teaching and learning;
• Explore the Entry Points for Equity Framework and examine how to leverage them in educational settings; and
• Discuss their current equity needs and barriers to implementation.

Explore the role of books in educator professional learning and how books can amplify and outline critical lessons. Join a panel of authors who will share their writing experience and the impact their books are making on educators and ultimately student success. Ask questions of the panel and pitch your own book ideas.

Participants will:

• Discover the process to move research and evidence-based practices into a published book;
• Gain insights into topics needed by educators; and
• Acquire strategies that first-time writers need to ensure their book is practical, focused, and user-friendly for educators.

Explore how people react to the introduction of new technologies and how their ways of thinking influence their reactions. Discuss how those who think in binary, either-or, ways, tend to resist and even ban the use of certain technologies, such as ChatGPT. Learn how to help educators engage in slower, more reflective thinking that will help them evaluate and use new technologies more effectively.

Participants will:

• Learn how educators are thinking about, and dealing with, the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence;
• Learn how binary thinking can lead to bad decisions about technology and how to avoid it; and
• Learn specific strategies and tactics to avoid engaging in binary thinking, especially around use of technology in education.

Participants will:

• Build understanding of the importance of student voice in teacher and staff learning;
• Apply a student voice professional learning planning tool to their specific context;
• Connect the use of diverse student voices to equitable professional learning experiences; and
• Reflect on ways in which student voice can increase teacher efficacy, retention, and equitable practices.

Discuss how, while heteronormativity is a pervasive culture within many schools in the United States, more inclusive curricula promotes less hostile and safer environments not only for students but also parents and the community. Focus on one aspect of creating a more inclusive curriculum. Explore how lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) integrated curricula can create diversity in educational representation and allow students to flourish inside and outside the classroom.

Participants will:

• Understand the importance and impact of LGBTQIA integrated literacy across multiple disciplines;
• Increase awareness of the issue of LGBTQIA student and staff issues to increase campus safety;
• Build ability to access tools for policy change;
• Know how to use and integrate representative resources and curriculum;  
• Increase confidence in accessing LGBTQIA curriculum and resources to use in the classroom; and
• Increase awareness of the literature on this topic.

Explore the importance of alignment. Discuss how students learn and teachers thrive when high-quality instructional materials, effective teaching practices, and authentic assessments are deeply aligned. Engage with scenarios from the field and use a consultancy protocol to workshop instances of misalignment in your own settings in an effort to move toward deeper alignment.

Participants will:

• Know the importance of alignment between curriculum instruction and assessment;
• Explore scenarios from the field of misalignment; and
• Identify instances of misalignment from their own contexts.

Discuss the impact of educator attitudes, beliefs, and culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy on student achievement. Explore the latest research on the relationship between educator beliefs and student outcomes. Engage in a reflective discussion to identify asset-based approaches and dismantle deficit-based approaches to teaching students who may be culturally and linguistically different.

Participants will:

• Understand the need for culturally responsive attitudes and beliefs;
• Reflect on the need for educator confidence and efficacy when engaging culturally diverse learners; and
• Apply practical strategies for developing beliefs that are congruent with high expectations for diverse students.

Hear about a suburban district’s journey as they re-establish their Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) framework and refine practices to be more responsive in a post-COVID world. Explore how Minnetonka Schools (MN) builds on their legacy of high performance by striving for continuous improvement by establishing systemic MTSS processes and practices.

Participants will:

• Understand how to design a systemic model that meets five research-based criteria for an effective MTSS framework: Data-based decision making, multi-level instruction, fidelity and evaluation, infrastructure and support, and assessments;
• Understand Minnetonka's three-year implementation plan to shift understanding of the former RTI model to a comprehensive MTSS framework; and
• Understand how to use a data protocol to diagnose the health of their district's Tier 1 core instructional program.

Consider how andragogy and its original principles have long dominated discussion of educators’ learning needs, yet 21st-century adulthood is fundamentally different than adulthood was when the theory developed. Explore what it means to be and to become an adult today, leveraging knowledge from the field of human development to discuss updated perspectives on professional learning design, implementation, and evaluation.

Participants will:

• Know a brief history of major perspectives on adult development, adult learning, and andragogy;
• Discuss how future professional learning design should approach educators’ needs based on principles of human development and learning, knowing that many early career educators may feel caught between adolescence and adulthood;
• Determine how to update professional learning design, implementation, and evaluation based on the differences between adulthood in the 21st century and adulthood in the past; and
• Reflect on the distinct developmental needs of the typical early-career educator, exploring how more nuanced and human-centered design, implementation, and evaluation of professional learning may contribute to retention and growth for our least-experienced educators while also supporting the growth of all educators as lifelong learners.

Discuss how frequent, high-quality, asset-based feedback can result in increased trust and high achievement for all scholars. Learn how this process may create some discomfort at first but leaders overcome this reality by building trusting relationships. Hear about the critical role teacher/leadership coaching plays in helping educators overcome their disempowering mindsets, embrace new practices, and improve scholar outcomes.

Participants will:

• Understand how to engage faculty members in an ongoing dialogue about instructional practices and the effect that these practices have on student learning;
• Gain protocols that help teachers and leaders generate a shared definition of effective teaching and learning; and
• Acquire concrete strategies for supporting educators to make real-time instructional shifts based on data.

Participants will:

• Understand the impact of administrator feedback on teacher growth and student achievement;
• Know about different strategies and models for providing effective feedback to teachers;
• Understand key components of effective feedback and examples of best practices;
• Develop practical skills, tips, and tools to improve the quality of feedback given to teachers; and
• Know how to implement effective feedback strategies in their own schools or districts.

Participants will:

• Understand coaching strategies and skills to co-create conditions of trust and collaboration with teams;
• Know ways to authentically engage teams in conversations with different levels of data;
• Understand the benefits of using a data protocol that fosters collective teacher efficacy and promotes continuous improvement; and
• Reflect on how taking a coaching approach can shift teams from compliant data talks to empowered action that improves for outcomes for all students.

Unpack a case study on Educate LLC’s work with a school district in New York City that centers best practices for data-driven teacher leadership that fosters equity. Experience a process for equity-centered data analysis with a specific emphasis on driving outcomes for vulnerable populations. Engage processes that support data-based decision making with equity at the core and success for all as both the journey and the destination.

Participants will:

• Know how to foster inter-school collaboration to support districtwide initiatives around data-based capacity building;
• Know best practices for taking an equity-based approach toward engaging data in teacher teams; and
• Know how to engage collective responsibility through creating action plans that drive data-based instruction to improve student and educator outcomes.

Learn about Learning Forward's Academy, a professional learning experience that offers educators an unmatched opportunity to profoundly deepen their expertise and increase their capacity to meet the challenges in the modern educational landscape. Hear from Academy coaches and members about how this 2 and ½-year inquiry-based learning experience has transformed their work.

Participants will:

• Learn about the Academy experience; and
• Hear about opportunities to expand their involvement Learning Forward.

Learn how to shift traditional perspectives of observation from a process that happens to educators to a shared conversation between leaders and teachers. Explore how school leaders were able to translate an abstract teacher evaluation framework to a collaborative observation structure that improved classroom teaching and student outcomes. Analyze your own evaluation framework and identify opportunities for educators to co-create a culture of empathetic observation through professional learning.

Participants will:

• Understand traditional perspectives of evaluation and the role empathy plays in connecting or disconnecting teachers from the process;
• Learn from case studies from the School District of Philadelphia that tell the story of how leaders have approached changing the culture around observation and evaluation at the school level;
• Acquire impactful practices for beginning the work of re-defining observation in their educational settings; and
• Analyze their own evaluation frameworks and consider opportunities to foster an empathetic culture of observation and feedback.

Explore how leaders, staff, and stakeholders work together to drive implementation efforts through a statewide Virtual Professional Collaborative. Learn how this collaborative is addressing the unique challenges of virtual schools through coaching, professional development and data collection. Attend to gain awareness and experience how the Kansas Learning Network partnered with virtual schools and state department leaders across Kansas.

Participants will:

• Understand how Kansas Learning Network developed a statewide professional virtual collaborative through leadership, communication, collaboration, and data-based decision making;
• Understand how to meet student needs and address challenges/barriers through the use of statewide data, small group data, dialogue, and best practices during a common collaborative time; and 
• Understand the benefits of providing content through professional development from outside experts and using coaching practices to push thinking for participants virtually so educational professionals can come together to share, teach and learn from one another eliminating the barrier of distance.

Participate in a guided session that explores changes and challenges with classroom and school culture. Address issues you’re facing at your institution and discuss ideas or solutions with other educators. Engage with other educators to problem solve, share ideas, and explore ways to improve and impact classroom culture.

Participants will:

• Establish a compelling vision for professional learning;
• Sustain a coherent system of support; and
• Advocate for results-oriented, evidence-based professional learning.

Join Learning Forward and the U.S. Department of Education for a sneak peak of the new National Educational Technology Plan (anticipated winter 2024). Preview some of the plan’s findings and recommendations and discuss how educators might support the plan’s implementation. Consider your roles as system leaders, school leaders, and policymakers in laying the groundwork for taking up the plan’s recommendations. Find out what you need to know about this forthcoming critical document.

Participants will:

• Preview some findings of the new National Educational Technology Plan;
• Align findings to current needs in school districts and schools across the country; and
• Provide input to plan development team about how plan can be best supported in implementation.