Beyond Diversity is a powerful, personal transforming two-day seminar designed to help administrators, staff, and stakeholders understand the impact of race on our lives, our work, and our learning. Interactive and stirring exercises strengthen participants’ critical consciousness of race and leads them to investigate the role that racism plays in deinstitutionalizing achievement disparities. Most importantly, it models and teaches a protocol for discussing race in ways that are productive, insightful and generative. We cannot solve the problems created by racism without discussing race, and Beyond Diversity with a 25-year history and over 100,000 alumni, imparts a method for having a Courageous Conversation.

Implement high-impact, equity-minded systems and site-based reforms by listening first and designing second. Experience and internalize the five modes of design thinking as a continuous improvement strategy. Reflect on the power of each mode and strategize potential applications of design thinking for a change effort in your local context. Build capacity to cultivate a culture of collaboration and power cycles of team learning when solving big problems.

Join Crystal Gonzales, Aida Walqui and Renae Skarin to learn high-quality, educative curriculum is a fundamental component of an educational program that helps students access rigorous content and prepares English learners for college and career. Learn fundamental design principles and guidelines for selecting or adapting high-quality materials that will support educators in improving educational outcomes for English learners. Examine sample lessons featuring specific scaffolds that simultaneously promote access to language and content. Practice reviewing learning materials and making suggestions for improvement.

Learn how your beliefs can be reinforced or undermined by a rigorous multimethod approach to research. Explore a variety of methods, including quantitative analysis, case studies, qualitative methods, meta-analyses, and syntheses of meta-analyses. Engage in a case study addressing a problem of practice through the lens of alternative research methods. Discover how you can become better advocates for the best available research and, along the way, be willing to challenge some of the prevailing myths of education.

Learn about an innovative model of professional learning in which mathematical content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and knowledge of student thinking are developed within the actual work of teaching. Understand equitable practices and how they can be developed within the model of professional learning. Investigate instructional routines and consider the affordances of teacher learning and student learning through engagement in the routines and analysis of lesson artifacts. Leave prepared to integrate components of the model of professional learning in your own setting.

This workshop will expose participants to a powerful three-pronged whole-school model for advancing equity in our schools: Social and Emotional Learning, Restorative Practices, and Brave Conversations about race. The foundation of the equitable school is social and emotional learning for all members of the community. SEL skills enable both young people and adults to build meaningful relationships – and research tells us that young people both need and crave such connections, and that adults are not given adequate preparation in these skills prior to assuming their roles in schools. Restorative practices, and circles especially, offer a powerful container in which to practice these skills and build a deep sense of community. Participants will gain tools and strategies for framing cross-racial conversations about race and racism and engage in an interactive experience of a brave space, through enlightening, meaningful and supportive conversation.

Teacher leadership as a means to improving schools is a powerful strategy to promote effective, collaborative teaching practices that lead to increased student achievement, improve decision-making at the school and district level, and create a dynamic teaching profession for the 21st century. Explore steps to improve teacher leadership in your schools and districts. Identify and challenge assumptions that interfere with the goals of teacher leadership. Foster a collaborative culture with the ability to manage and lead change.

Effective educators in schools today must be culturally responsive in practice to effectively support educational equity for each student. Learn key practices for developing educators’ culturally responsive practice through co-constructed school-community learning experiences. Experience through simulations learning opportunities anchored in community engagement experiences that support the development of culturally responsive practices among teachers and leaders. Develop plans for implementing school-community learning experiences for developing culturally responsive educators in their home schools, districts, and programs.

Transform your school with instructional excellence, collaborative professional learning, reflective culture, and collective leadership. Build strategic, intentional systems of supports to strengthen principal and teacher leadership, goal setting, sustained professional learning, coaching, and data analysis. Identify the areas in your schools that need to be strengthened, and learn specific strategies for improving them within a system of continuous improvement.

Teaming and collaboration catalyze learning today in schools and systems. This session will provide guidance and tools to help educators engage effectively in teams and turn toward difficult conversations and situations to enhance collaboration. Explore 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.

Increase your effectiveness as a presenter and facilitator. Learn ways to promote your presentations, manage groups, effectively give directions, scaffold strategies for interesting presentations and effective facilitation. Extend your personal skills and repertoire for delivering important content and navigating group dialogues and discussions.

Engage with a story of educational transformation - informed by the knowledge of our teachers, students and community; grounded in the wisdom of our indigenous people; weaving together a global education conversation, an empowering curriculum, and learning sciences. Explore the role that school and district leadership play. Experience the frameworks and processes used to support and sustain the work and explore the possibilities for applying them in your context.

Beyond Diversity is a powerful, personal transforming two-day seminar designed to help administrators, staff, and stakeholders understand the impact of race on our lives, our work, and our learning. Interactive and stirring exercises strengthen participants’ critical consciousness of race and leads them to investigate the role that racism plays in deinstitutionalizing achievement disparities. Most importantly, it models and teaches a protocol for discussing race in ways that are productive, insightful and generative. We cannot solve the problems created by racism without discussing race, and Beyond Diversity with a 25-year history and over 100,000 alumni, imparts a method for having a Courageous Conversation.

Implement high-impact, equity-minded systems and site-based reforms by listening first and designing second. Experience and internalize the five modes of design thinking as a continuous improvement strategy. Reflect on the power of each mode and strategize potential applications of design thinking for a change effort in your local context. Build capacity to cultivate a culture of collaboration and power cycles of team learning when solving big problems.

After years of pushing relentlessly on tested achievement, there is a growing realization that young people now need to focus more on leading lives of meaning and purpose, develop self-confidence in who they are, and have a sense of belonging to other people and to something bigger than themselves. Discover how we as educators can support students to succeed and thrive. Learn how to expand your definitions of learning, promote students’ well-being, and help them grow in confidence and joy. Examine inspiring cases of schools that strengthen students' learning, engagement, identity, and well-being. Reflect with peers on their own efforts to move beyond a preoccupation with achievement and effort toward a wider commitment to learning and development.

Explore the Global Education Innovation Initiative, a research-practice collaborative that supports the transformation of public education to empower youth to participate civically and economically in a rapidly changing world. The initiative conducts research, engages in informed dialogues, and develops curriculum. Dive into the results of three studies examining the contributions of ambitious curriculum in guiding the development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills that enable students to become self-authoring individuals in a complex and uncertain world. Examine how highly effective teacher professional development programs in 10 countries support teachers in gaining the competencies to lead students in powerful learning. Learn about a professional development approach that is anchored in the development of project-based curriculum aligned with real-life challenges, as reflected in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Systems can be difficult to describe. All of us know the respiratory system exists, but few can explain its essential roles and responsibilities in sustaining living organisms. Effective learning systems are no less difficult to describe. Join this session, based on the book Becoming a Learning System, and focus on the essential attributes of a learning system, roles and responsibilities of key players, strategies for building district- and school-based learning agendas for learning teams, and how systems thrive in a cycle of continuous improvement. Hear how one district made the journey to become— from district leadership to school-based leadership teams—a model system of learning. Learn about the successes and the challenges; leave with strategies you can use to apply to an issue in your own district for which professional learning is an appropriate response.

Based on the latest book in Learning Forward’s “learning series,” this session focuses on the actions of the professional learning team in the application of a five-stage cycle of continuous learning. Participants will explore case studies and learn about ideas and actions that support the development of learning teams that experience and model professional learning that is long term, sustained, and standards driven; grounded in a cycle of continuous improvement; and capable of inspiring all to take responsibility for the learning of every adult and student in the school.

Feedback is a core part of a continuous improvement process for educators. The usefulness of feedback among educators depends on its quality, the context in which it is provided, and the frame of mind of those engaged in the process. Examine the attributes of effective feedback as well as the various types, purposes, and sources of feedback among teachers. Learn how to create a culture in which educators routinely exchange feedback, engage in interactions, and assess the effectiveness of feedback. Gain a deeper understanding of the feedback process and how to employ it to promote increased educator effectiveness.

Participants will receive a copy of The Feedback Process: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning, by Joellen Killion.

All students deserve excellent foundational skills instruction that sets them on paths to college and career. But just what does equitable, standards-aligned, high-quality foundational skills instruction in a K-2 classroom look like? This session will focus on the components of a strong foundational skills experience for all students, including turnkey resources to build content knowledge and an observation tool that supports improvement of teacher practice though coaching, reflection, planning, or professional learning.

Bridge the gap between the current state of mathematics instruction and your vision of success for all students. Explore how Innovation Configuration (IC) maps can serve as tools to support the work of instructional leaders in your efforts to promote deep mathematical understanding in students. Learn about ways IC maps, rooted in research-based mathematics teaching practices, can provide opportunities for purposeful reflection on progress, inform action plans based on teacher and student learning needs, and support dialogue and ongoing learning designed to build a stronger instructional program.

Many schools have not been able to pivot from developing cultural proficiency to using culturally responsive practices to raise achievement scores. This session will focus on designing learning experiences for teachers that help them use culture as a cognitive scaffold rather than as multicultural "window dressing" in lessons and units. Examine tools and scripts to shift negative deficit thinking about student learning ability. Learn coaching strategies for designing lessons, units, and instructional activities that are cognitively demanding and engaging for students in ways that expand students' ability to carry more of the cognitive load.

Educators know that collaborative professional learning strengthens instructional practice and enhances student learning, but the reality is that collaborative learning does not always lead to improved practice. Explore a transformative professional learning model that uses continuous improvement cycles, teacher-led video study of classroom practice, and student-facing rubrics to strengthen instructional practice and enhance student learning. Learn key practices to step up site-based collaborative learning, including guidance for how to integrate classroom video and strategies that promote teacher and student agency.

It seems like everyone is talking about curriculum these days, particularly as districts across the country are finding more and more aligned products on the market and a variety of materials that could work for their students. Ultimately, however, the responsibility for creating a rigorous classroom environment rests with teachers, and far too often they have not been engaged in curricular decisions in meaningful ways. Learn how two districts have moved past engagement lip-service into real, thoughtful discussion and feedback to ensure the right decisions are made and that there is lasting ownership distributed throughout the teacher community. Learn from leaders from Baltimore City Public Schools (MD) and Orange County Department of Education (CA) about their successes, challenges, and recommendations for others. In this interactive session, participants will gain hands-on practice with planning tools and protocols while collaborating with the facilitators, curriculum adoption experts, and each other.

Today’s schools must strive to ensure every student can succeed. Indeed, most are not currently designed to ensure equity. Come question your assumptions about the role of teachers as leaders who can partner with principals to advance the individual and organizational learning needed for equitable schools. Examine schools’ use of an equity framework to transform educators’ beliefs, practices and policies, and collaborate with colleagues to create a powerful plan.

Learn how to effectively implement anti-bias instruction in your classroom. Explore practical strategies for accomplishing academic and social and emotional goals. Discuss learning conditions that honor all identities and reflect diversity, equity, and justice. Explore ready-to-use materials, apply rigorous standards, and plan ways to incorporate research-based teaching practices, and leave with ideas and tools for transforming your classroom and school.

Imagine consistently presenting with purpose and intention in any setting with a choreographer’s mindset. Learn how communicative intelligence can enhance your ability to communicate with greater congruence and authenticity in any setting, including one-on-one, committee, and entire staff meetings. Explore the essential abilities of effective presenters, including credibility, rapport, reading a group, listening, acknowledging, responding, and recovering with grace. Practice strategies for handing challenging questions and comments from participants with dignity while maintaining a positive group dynamic.

Visualize the worst presentation that you have ever been a part of as an adult learner. Now visualize the best. No doubt there is a considerable difference between the two. Examine six principles of adult learning theory that should be considered when interacting with faculty, staff, and professional learning communities. Experience 10 characteristics of quality professional learning that should be applied when implementing professional development. Plan your next professional learning incorporating some of the 20 brain-based strategies that take advantage of the ways adult and student brains learn best.

Much of our joy and sorrow in life, and our success and failure at work, are the direct result of our relationships. Our relationships flourish or fail depending on how well we communicate. Learn how to listen and communicate with empathy, find common bonds, and build emotional connections. Develop the beliefs and habits that lead to better conversations and more life-giving conversations.

Join this interactive session bridging theory and practice in adult learning to develop school leaders' capacity and sustainability. Develop effective leadership capacities through a lens of improving the supervision of instruction by equipping them to design and implement meaningful, differentiated professional learning to support teacher learning and increase student achievement. Explore adult development theory and engage in reflection and action planning.

Learn how frequent, short, unannounced classroom visits followed by face-to-face coaching conversations and a brief narrative summary are powerful ways to build trust, affirm good instructional practices, coach teachers, and keep administrators in touch with teaching and learning. Explore strategies to persuade skeptical colleagues of the efficacy of mini-observations and help teachers feel safe with the process. Hone your observation and feedback skills for face-to-face feedback conversations.

Professional learning that improves educator effectiveness is fundamental and leading adult learning today needs a specific skill set in order to connect teaching and learning. Engaging professional learning should be designed for transfer to the classroom for students. The purpose of this highly interactive session is to examine the attributes of result-driven professional learning while practicing tips and gaining tools for engaging the adult learner.

Experience the power of design thinking to engage students, faculty, and parents to understand and solve school challenges. Hear school leaders’ stories on how they leveraged design thinking to support their school reform initiatives by engaging stakeholders through a design team model, a form of distributed leadership. Engage in hands-on design thinking exercises and learn how to implement the process in your school or district. Leave the workshop with the knowledge, confidence, tools, and support for using human-centered design to address school reform initiatives.

Examine the findings of the Institute for Teaching and Learning’s latest research project and the elements of personalization that schools and districts are leveraging to improve teaching and learning. Explore the successes and challenges, specifically looking at where personalized learning for educators and students is proceeding at similar rates and where gaps exist. Reflect on your own professional learning needs using a framework for teacher effectiveness. Design your own multimodal personalized professional learning pathway aligned to a microcredential of your choice.

Develop an understanding of the integration of social and emotional learning and equity by exploring self-awareness as it applies to the image you project versus your ideal image. Participate in activities that elevate self-identity, gaps between your “real” and “ideal” self, and strategies for self-improvement. Discover how this critical awareness enhances teacher-student relationships and transforms classrooms into socially and emotionally supportive learning contexts for students.

If you wait until summative assessment to ascertain whether students have learned what you are teaching, then you have waited too late. Learn to ask higher-level questions that cause students to think deeply. Create and assess a list of products and performances to determine if students are learning. Identify the four ways that students can knock the top off of any test.

Learn about the design, implementation, and assessment of a coaching academy in one school district. Assess your school community’s needs. Explore the complexities of shifting the role of coaches in a school. Practice listening as the foundation for all coaching practices. Develop a reflective stance using strong communication skills including nonverbal communication, paraphrasing, pausing, presuppositions, and positive intention. Expand the notion of coaching beyond traditional roles and titles.

Learn structures and processes to strengthen leadership of all educators across the organization to ensure all students are learning at high levels. Explore systems that support ongoing, collaborative professional learning and continuous improvement to close achievement gaps. Dive into strategic processes that foster deep collaboration and inquiry among principals, central office leaders, and teachers to enhance instruction and close achievement gaps across the organization.

Advance student access to equitable instruction through strategic implementation of a protocol that integrates reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Analyze the qualitative features of a complex text and engage in an interactive model of juicy sentence deconstruction. Develop a plan for implementation of juicy sentence instruction.

Discover how leaders committed to equity can strategically frame school improvement efforts in a way that demonstrates equity in action. Learn about one school district's equity-through-dignity initiative and how one high school has transformed its culture and is seeing equitable results in disaggregated student outcome data. Leave with a framework for dignity containing tools to make equity aspirations a reality.

Improve your understanding of culturally responsive teaching and ways to embed it into your curriculum. Develop and clarify equitable language. Design more flexible lesson plans to meet multiple needs. Review and assess your current organizational practices and learn how to dismantle the ones that do not promote equity.

Examine ways to be intentional in helping diverse learners gather, process, store, retrieve, and apply academic content. Explore how to engage learners from diverse cultural backgrounds through meaning, models, monitoring, the mouth, music, and movement. Reflect on your own instructional practice using the these elements as a framework.

Learn about an innovative professional learning model focused on developing teacher agency through formative assessment and how to incorporate four key aspects of scale in the professional learning design. Hear from one district four years into implementing a districtwide approach to formative assessment. Consider how district leaders have attended to professional learning and systems change to support each of these dimensions of scale: sustainability, spread, depth, and shift in reform ownership.

Experience how one school district uses professional learning and a cycle of support model to build capacity to improve teacher instructional practices for leading instructional excellence. Learn how this instructional support model fosters pedagogy and builds content knowledge of a core group of school administrators, instructional coaches, and educators in the district’s most academically challenging schools. Examine how the instructional model incorporates the implementation of a standards-based lesson plan framework that brings equity and increases rigor for all scholars. Leave with an implementation plan focused on the systematic collection of target data to inform ongoing professional learning and support in turnaround schools.

Understand the issues facing women in education leadership and how these affect adults and students of all genders, system policies and practices, and the overall emphases of education reform. Identify the strengths and blind spots of the archetypal masculine and feminine leadership styles and values. Discover your own leadership style, how it influences beliefs, how it fits with gender norms and norms in education, and when to change vs. work for system change. Form a plan for the next step in your leadership development.

Learn how one district used personalized professional learning to meet teachers' unique professional learning needs. Explore key components of personalized learning and the benefit of incorporating these components into teacher professional learning structures. Reflect on professional learning within your district to identify opportunities for increasing personalized experiences. Consider the impact of personalizing teacher professional learning on student achievement and student exposure to personalized instruction.

Central office leaders across the country continually grapple with how to lead their teams to meaningfully work differently to better serve students, teachers, and school leaders. Learn how to apply design thinking and the latest research on central office redesign in your efforts to lead and work more effectively. Leave with a change project prototype and a plan to enlist central office colleagues.

The professional development is planned. Now what? How can we ensure that the professional learning of administrators and teachers actually improves our effectiveness and results for students? Examine the processes and tools used to measure and report the impact of professional learning in an economically diverse, high-mobility, high-performing district.

Learn the components of a comprehensive learning design that develops and sustains authentic collaborative learning for teachers focusing on increasing high-leverage student learning strategies. Become familiar with data that highlight the literacy work of co-teaching teams and the process, skills, and tools supporting teachers’ collaborative efforts. Sketch components of a collaborative learning design that connects to your own context, including leadership, professional learning, literacy teaching practices, and student outcomes. Leave with a set of protocols, templates, and practical ideas that can support collegial conversations about implementation of effective literacy teaching and learning strategies.

Bring your device to this interactive session and explore how to curate content for powerful moments in professional learning. Learn to leverage content from your school or district to make professional learning more personalized and meaningful. Practice strategies to create content using video and collaboration. Explore resources to organize content for meaningful learning experiences to inspire collective efficacy and bring joy to professional growth.

Build a school community of trust and collective efficacy through norms, structures, and administrative support. Cultivate teacher teams that design culturally competent lessons, based on collaborative, formative data analysis, to meet the diverse needs of learners and embed the social emotional support necessary for student success. Create organizational structures and schedules that lead to sustainable improvement, increased educator effectiveness, student achievement, and school turnaround.

Develop a foundational understanding of an organizational framework that creates a systemic, coherent plan for improving student learning and strengthening educator practice. Understand the instructional leader's role in supporting purposeful and effective professional learning communities as a vehicle for improving the whole school. Learn how this framework can provide systemic tools and structures that enable district and school leaders to continuously monitor and improve curriculum, instruction, assessment, and professional learning. Engage in self-assessment that can drive changes in leadership practice.

Create learning experiences that stick — that is, make a difference in educator practice and transform learning for students — through thoughtful planning of the content and design of the learning experience. Explore avenues to create memorable learning experiences and engage in a peer review protocol to examine professional learning using the Standards for Professional Learning, social and emotional learning competencies, and design elements for engaging adult learning. Upgrade current and future professional learning experiences.

See how a district used effective protocols and learning designs to establish a cycle of continuous improvement. Engage in team learning on protocols and learning designs that will shift educator practice. Discuss how the continuous improvement cycle can help align district, campus, and department goals on professional learning and student achievement. Experience protocols and learning designs that can be applied to your problem of practice in support of your vision.

Examine the ripple effect that was created when one school district began a change process to close the knowing-doing gap in professional learning. Hear the struggles and successes of this districtwide model. Explore components of effective change management and build a tool box to create similar programs in your own district. Learn the value of assessing the classroom impact of professional learning and how it impacts student achievement.

Discover job-embedded professional learning approaches for instructional leaders. Choose from a variety of minisessions that leverage inquiry, innovation, and imagination that promotes cultural proficiency, distributive leadership, and technology. Leave this session with concrete strategies to take back to your educational setting.

Participants in this session will learn how to coach teams in two areas: (a) how to work together effectively as a team (i.e., establishing team norms, developing strategies for improving team communication, and monitoring team effectiveness), and (b) how to use protocols for learning, including using video to learn a teaching strategy, analyze a lesson, focus on a theme, develop checklists or a playbook, or collaboratively problem solve.

Engage first-year teachers through observations, feedback, and solution-based action research cycles. Facilitate professional development for mentor teachers to deepen their ability to conference, observe, and give feedback to beginning teachers. Develop coaches' skills in building relationships, leading professional learning, and individual or team coaching.

Peer coaching provides a supportive, collaborative framework for teachers to bring professional learning to life in their classrooms. Review a peer coaching handbook to develop a common understanding of what peer coaching means. Discuss the rationale and purpose for a peer coaching model. Determine how peer coaching is used in the context of an instructional and systems coaching framework. Lay the groundwork for implementing a peer coaching model in your district and buildings.

Discover how lab classroom coaching cohorts were developed and implemented in a large school district for STEM integration in science and math 6-12. Participate in a model STEM lesson, and interact with strategies to re-envision STEM implementation. Spark and develop ideas for professional learning through the structure of this model, its effectiveness in improving instruction, and how it builds capacity in teacher leaders.

Engage in a hands-on experience for enhancing teaching and learning through meaningful coaching strategies. Examine four strategies for shifting mindsets toward independence in learning: mining, modeling, mirroring, and mentoring. Learn how mirroring leads to intentional, meaningful feedback that facilitates transfer of the newly learned concept or skills. Explore concrete, dynamic coaching moves to shift mindsets about teaching, learning, and coaching.

Explore a clear, flexible, and innovative teaching framework that fully integrates social and emotional learning and academic development. Examine how this model supports indigenous students in remote communities, some of the nation’s most at-risk children and youth. Develop a deeper awareness of the specific elements of the teacher-student relationship that supports success. Leave with specific relationship-building and social, emotional, and academic development strategies that you can implement in your classroom.

Examine the impact of adverse childhood experiences within the physical, social and emotional, and academic lives of students and educators. Gain practical knowledge in social and emotional learning competencies. Become versed in key frameworks that assist educators in building students who are more resilient. Design an action plan to raise awareness about adverse childhood experiences and use this information to improve student learning.

Structured feedback on teaching can play a central role in both establishing standards for and providing evidence of professional learning and effective practice. Learn about measurement tools that focus on the content knowledge and teaching skill used in practices such as evaluating student work, representing content to meet student learning needs, and explaining or modeling content concepts and practices. Explore the tools and consider their usefulness in providing valuable evidence to guide professional learning and opportunities for teachers to engage around these professional competencies. Discuss strategies for using the tools in teacher learning communities, and how data can support continuous improvement and provide evidence of impact.

Drawing on their cutting-edge research, Andy Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley, and colleagues will show how schools can work together to initiate large-scale changes that benefit all students. Their book, Leading from the Middle provides a new model of change that ensures every child gets great teaching every year. Examine what role system leaders at the top should play to activate and energize more leadership from the middle. Leave with an understanding of how to harmonize your own approaches with other ongoing change initiatives from the top or bottom of your system.

Much has been said about creating “safe” and brave spaces to have racialized conversations.  But what happens when we are “out in the wild” beyond the confines of safe spaces and our conversations take on a racial dimension?  We will examine the skills we need to easily lead racially sensitive conversations in our classrooms with students or in professional learning spaces with adults in schools or central office. Anchoring in the neuroscience from Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, you will leave with a set of capacity-building activities to build your fluency and sense of distress-free authority in guiding challenging conversations

Learn the essential components of a successful university-district partnership, including protocols for exploring shared values and goal-setting, timelines and models for planning outcomes, collaborative creation and scoring of applicant screening tools, and development of a co-teaching model. Explore tools and documents that support this work. Discuss how you might leverage similar initiatives in your context.

Explore one district’s efforts to build capacity at all levels. Create an implementation plan to develop the technical skills and social and emotional intelligence noninstructional leaders need to thrive and support key school leaders and initiatives. Learn to identify candidates for a noninstructional leadership pipeline. Examine success criteria and outcomes for the pipeline, along with potential look-fors when evaluating the pipeline annually.

Explore implementation data from two partnerships working with educators on childhood trauma and restorative practices. Learn how to develop resilient, engaged, and academically successful students by providing them with a safe, stable, and supportive school environment. Consider ways to enhance the culture and climate for staff, students, and families. Improve student outcome data with a focus on increased student achievement and a reduction in suspensions and expulsions and reported incidents of aggression.

Understand the importance of having a diverse teaching staff and the impact that teachers of color have on students of color’s long-term outcomes. Gain strategies, ideas, tools, and resources on how to recruit more teachers of color. Engage in discussion and reflection on takeaways for improving teacher of color recruitment in your home district or school.

Promoting equity in mathematics education requires that we operate on the belief that all students can learn and ensure access to high-quality mathematics curriculum, but the details are critical. Hear real lessons learned designing mathematics curriculum and adult learning experiences to ensure grade-level learning for all students. Leave the session with practical ideas and plans to influence teacher beliefs, capacity, and implementation of aligned materials.

Determine what student ownership looks like for your K–2 classroom. Analyze and explain the correlation between student ownership and increased student achievement. Implement research-based practices that foster the development of student ownership in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and climate. Create an action plan for sustaining current practices and building on self-determined areas of need.

Use a nationally calibrated process to assess the standards rigor of student work artifacts. See concrete examples of assessment for learning in action. Consider what learning experiences we want to guarantee our students through curriculum architecture. Understand how a guaranteed curriculum supports teachers in their daily work.

Explore real-time strategies for the effective use of logic models and theories of change to undergird your improvement efforts. Gain clarity around the use and purpose of logic models and theories of change for planning, implementing, and evaluating programs and initiatives. Analyze the benefits of using tools for continuous quality improvement, and actively engage in developing sample models for use in your work setting.

Remember your WHY: students! Delve into and explore a continuous improvement mindset. Engage in the plan, do, study, act (PDSA) process and see examples of successful implementation and results.

Examine how inquiry cycles work alongside existing school structures to maximize impact on teacher practice and student learning. Learn about the instructional leadership team inquiry cycle. Consider how the current structure of your school’s instructional leadership team may need to be modified to support instructional priorities.

Gather ideas to help leaders ignite passion and tap into the inner genius of their team in order to encourage risk-taking, learning, and growth. Discover strategies to help leaders maximize their time. Examine a coaching model designed to support leaders in giving feedback that teachers value and helps move practice forward.

Increase student ownership of learning by empowering teacher teams to engage in collaborative inquiry. Learn to implement a structure to execute inquiry rooted in deep implementation of the formative assessment process. Hear teams share how the collaborative inquiry impacted their professional practice. Hear students share their renewed interest in the learning process. Bring collaborative inquiry to your setting.

Study the five principles of competency-based education that support personalized learning for teachers and administrators that will increase learning for your students. Learn how competency-based education and personalized learning support in-depth professional learning as well as college- and career-ready graduates. Plan next steps to incorporate the tools, resources, and materials used for the transformation of learning in your school, region, and state.

Learn and practice designing professional learning that transfers to effective on-the-job performance. Using development of teacher leaders as the performance improvement focus, apply design strategies that make learning "sticky" and reduce time to mastery. Develop a performance plan for a course and individual participants, and create an outline for design of the course using the practices found in the latest research.

Experience innovative, engaging professional learning through a game-based instructional design. Challenge yourself to uncover clues and complete digital puzzles in an escape room scenario. Reflect on how the learning design not only supports you as a learner in your quest to successfully “escape,” but also builds key knowledge, skills, and dispositions. Learn how to create your own digital breakouts that will teach adult learners while fostering critical thinking and collaboration.

Experience how reflective conversations build the capacity of teachers to improve instructional practice and promote high levels of student learning. Investigate how this teacher-centered professional learning enhances trust and fosters a culture of reflective practice. Gain skills needed to design and support this type of professional learning in your school or district.

Since 2016, the LIFT network, a group of Tennessee districts, have focused their efforts at improvement on literacy instruction. This session will highlight the work of two districts to change literacy practices and outcomes using high quality instructional materials across their districts. After two years of focused work, Lenoir City saw historic gains in literacy: the percentage of students scoring “on track” or “mastered” on Tennessee’s ELA exam nearly doubled last year and the state designated the district’s one elementary school a “Reward School” for its strong academic achievement and growth among all students and demographics. Of Sullivan County's eleven elementary schools, five were designated as "Reward Schools" and all elementary schools received a 3, 4, or 5 in TVAAS literacy gains. In this exciting conversation, participants will gain an understanding of how each district has built investment among adults, managed change, monitored progress, and broadened and deepened impact over time and have a chance to reflect and plan for their own work.

Developing peer mentorship capacity fosters a growth mindset that leads to improved teacher practice and student outcomes. Explore the concept of mentoring the mentor. Determine how developing a school-based mentor leadership role can shift school culture. Craft an action plan for infusing mentorship to positively impact participants’ work.

Learn how stress and anxiety impact the body. Experience the positive effect that simple, evidence-based strategies can have on the nervous system. Understand the latest research on regulating stress to improve learner and educator performance. Recognize the neuroscience of stress and focused breathing techniques as an intervention for stress reduction.

Continuous improvement is a social and emotional learning activity that is often addressed with solely technical solutions. Investigate how addressing the social and emotional learning aspects of continuous improvement can catalyze your equity work. Learn how your professional learning communities can become sites for adults to cultivate their self-awareness about their effectiveness by routinely practicing and developing their social and emotional competencies in service of student learning.

Identify and implement creative methods for summarizing and analyzing districtwide or schoolwide data using a customized data analysis protocol. Next, implement changes to instruction and professional learning based on your data. Finally, use data as part of your professional learning.

What efforts are involved in scaling up the Courageous Conversation throughout municipalities? Modeling the practice of adaptive leadership this panelist will contribute to the discussion by speaking to experiences that have led to healing, progression and new challenges as we navigate the complexities of achieving higher levels of racial equity at a systems level.

Research shows that fewer than 20% of teachers nationwide have access to aligned, high-quality instructional materials. This disproportionately affects our poorest students and students of color. Understand the current condition of the instructional materials market. Learn from leaders at the state, regional, district and non-profit levels about how they translate policy into action, signal the importance and indicators of quality, create incentives to “make the best choice, the easiest choice”, and support implementation to ensure quality use of materials. Gain inspiration from others’ lessons learned and identify next steps for your own work.

Join other affiliate leaders and interact with Learning Forward's Board of Trustees and senior staff members. Gather new information and share ideas with your fellow affiliate leaders. Lead your affiliate in advancing the Learning Forward vision, mission, and strategic priorities in your state or province.

Fill in the gap between the known importance of strong adult professional culture for effective schools and what leaders do daily to make it grow in a sustainable way over time. Understand the key elements of strong adult culture. Learn how successful leaders build trust. Leave with an action plan for your own leadership.

Learn about the key domains of effective leadership and the diverse practices today’s leaders employ that enhance adult and student performance. Engage in appreciative inquiry to identify leadership strengths and work collaboratively with others to maximize those practices. Select a focus area and identify effective practices that successful leaders employ that foster effective teaching and learning.

Empowering teacher leaders, building collective efficacy, and positively impacting students are major components of one district’s leadership academy. Learn how the academy provides the space, time, and collegial environment that foster individual and collective leadership capacity building. Examine the structures created to integrate ongoing job-embedded professional learning. Study strategies that empower teacher leaders to take ownership in monitoring professional learning’s impact on students.

Learn how teachers and school leaders can embrace reading knowledge and skills while leading and managing the change in reading so teachers and students feel sustained success. Identify reading problems of practice and generate problem-solving sequences and strategies using Learning Forward’s Standards for Professional Learning. Critique the strengths and needs of your setting to implement sustainable professional learning in reading.

Leadership standards provide a strengths-based view of leaders who cultivate collaborative, equitable, and rigorous learning communities in schools. Explore practical ways of using the standards to develop and enhance school leaders’ understanding of their roles as well as their daily performance. Develop an understanding of the resources and options available and needed to cultivate learning leaders who embody the leadership standards goals. Draft an action plan for using leadership standards to enhance and support school leaders’ job performance.

Gain understanding, insights, skills, and knowledge to create engagement rather than silence, knowledge rather than ignorance, empathy rather than apathy, all of which makes for a courageous conversation. Increase your knowledge of identity development and how this knowledge can dramatically increase a level of color consciousness. Explore tools, activities, and insights that serve to increase engagement of those involved in courageous conversations regarding oppressions. Examine unconscious bias and activities to challenge and confront personal bias.

Learn the research and theoretical basis for systems learning design using teacher leadership networks to impact instructional change for racial equity. Analyze sample protocols, instructional tools, learning designs, and teacher leader case studies. Reflect on how teacher leadership communities of practice can support and strengthen racial equity initiatives within your district or school.

Travel on an exciting journey leading your students toward mastery of grade-level standards through the use of flexible groups and assignments. Create deeper learning experiences for your students by not teaching to the middle but teaching to meet the needs of each individual student in this energizing and engaging session. Participate in varied tiered lessons and create grade- and subject-appropriate tiered lessons.

Examine the process, professional learning, and structures necessary to equip teachers and leaders with requisite skills to prioritize and embrace empowerment for all learners. Deepen your understanding of what it means to be a fierce leader of race, equity, and diversity dialogues. Identify challenges and barriers in society that impact educators’ ability to create and sustain cultures of empowerment for all learners. Learn key tenets within equity pedagogy and prejudice reduction strategies.

How might our own biases and blind spots affect our ability to improve school climate and culture? Explore an approach to professional development, centered around confronting the historical legacies of race and achievement, that supports teaching for equity and justice. Learn how a partnership between a school district and an education nonprofit led to educators becoming more self-reflective and critically conscious of their mindsets and practices. Examine the implications of this work and research for your own context and rethink schoolwide practices and policies through an equity lens.

Teachers should have opportunities to learn from the work of teaching, and coaches should have curriculum structures to support this work in job-embedded ways. Examine the educative structures of a mathematics K-5 curriculum designed to support teachers and coaches. Explore how these structures empower teachers in their learning of both mathematics and pedagogy, create collaborative coaching opportunities, and put student learning at the forefront of all instructional decision-making.

Experience a hands-on approach to teaching the underrepresented gifted child. Practice three-dimensional science strategies to introduce an innovative approach to laboratory instruction that applies current research about how people learn science. Perform a lab using Next Generation Science Standards. Investigate model-based inquiry and argument-driven instruction.

Explore seven key project-based teaching practices and discuss video examples of these practices in action. Learn how project-based teaching differs from traditional instruction yet still includes features familiar to many teachers. Apply your understanding of project-based teaching practices to your own professional growth or to support teachers in building their skills for creating effective projects that engage all students.

Experience a model for student-driven inquiry within the science classroom. Design a unit using tools and resources to assess the levels of student thinking. Learn how the model supports three-dimensional learning.

Learn how change happened quickly in the nation’s second-poorest educational system, with results that have a dramatic and positive impact on equity and excellence. Understand the flaws in prevailing change models and evaluate alternative change processes. Apply a model of change to your needs. Synthesize the best leadership and teaching strategies to create an action plan.

Big ideas, big needs, little budget — no problem. Learn how to design effective professional learning with little to no budget impact. Engage in conversations that start with what you have as a launchpad for innovative professional learning that impacts student success. Leave with ideas on how to stretch your professional learning reach through technology, creative partnerships, and capacity building.

Learn from one charter network's journey from a data-driven school focused on rigorous instruction to one that leverages the practice of reflection in project-based learning in a way that maintains rigor, informs planning, and supports student learning. Motivate a mindset shift by building sustainable routines, while continuing to gather, analyze, and integrate meaningful data. Develop a plan to impact your school system and build connections with others.

The most effective approach to revising assessment strategy is to look at the assessment system as a whole and focus on supporting great teaching and learning. Experience how one organization addresses common challenges related to assessment volume, purpose, and quality. Engage in case studies of real systems, and leave with steps your system can take to address equity for students through assessments.

Learn how state, university, and community leaders partnered to develop and implement a three-year professional learning framework for up to 60 leadership teams. Unpack the implementation strategy and resources associated with the first-year implementation that includes regional, virtual, and district-hosted coaching rounds. Review artifacts developed by teams across the state and discuss the readiness for a similar initiative in other provinces and states.

How do you balance district goals, build teacher capacity, and address the personalized learning needs of your teachers? Experience how one middle school uses video-powered learning through site-created microcredentials so teaching and learning improve through the eyes of their students. Learn the why, what, and how to creating your own implementation plan using coaching, professional learning communities, or video-learning clubs in your own district.

Implementing continuous improvement cycles can be equally exciting and daunting. Learn how a university-district partnership with Learning Forward’s What Matters Now Network is examining the alignment of teachers’ instructional practice with the Next Generation Science Standards within their regular school-level professional learning communities. Hone your data evaluation skills in a simulated plan-do-study-act cycle using formative data. Leave with simple and adaptable protocols that make getting started manageable in your district or organization.

Explore how Learning Forward’s Standards for Professional Learning can engage teachers and apply teachers’ learning to refine and strengthen their practice. Apply the standards to change theory, logic models, and strategic plans. Gain a comprehensive view of how the Standards for Professional Learning can support any initiative. Leave with an outline of a plan that ties directly into your setting.

Increase your understanding of the design and implementation of school improvement plans and how to create systems for sustaining ongoing improvement. Learn about four key elements that are critical to a school improvement plan. Analyze these elements in your school setting and identify areas for growth. Leave with action steps and insights into developing and implementing a high-quality school improvement plan.

Learn how educators at a pre-K-2 school used their problem of practice and voices to guide the transformation of teaching and learning, resulting in improved student achievement. Consider how the problem of practice sparked discussion about continuous improvement that changed the school culture and educator practice. Explore how student reading has steadily improved over the past five years. Acquire strategies and tools to apply in your setting.

Engage in collaborative conversations focusing on instructional practices for English learners with disabilities, including how to advance academic language development and academic achievement. Reflect on the necessity of professional collaboration in working with English learners with disabilities. Participate in a lesson-tuning protocol to tune a lesson that targets English learners with disabilities to make appropriate accommodations to instruction.

How do lead learners support teachers with the integration of technology by using a framework focused on technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge? Hear about one school district's diffusion of technology with authentic, purposeful, and collaborative implementation to accelerate learning. Leave with an understanding of how to coordinate efforts with curriculum to lead purposeful integration of technology with a focus on content and pedagogy.

Hear how three coaches collaborated with 14 elementary teachers to create structures and systems to support individual students as visible learners. Develop an understanding of learner agency and gain insight into structures that support students in working along a progression of proficiency. Leave with an understanding of how to make math personal and a plan for implementation.

In an era of personalized, deep, and empowered learning, a common direction and implementation strategy are essential. Travel through one district’s journey toward empowering globally competent learners. Reflect on and analyze data that measured the impact of this professional learning. Leave with ideas, strategies, and electronic resources to support your own planning.

Boost achievement and dramatically reduce achievement gaps by aligning how we teach with how students’ brains best attend to, process, retain, and recall information. Experience simple, research-proven instructional strategies that are aligned with six fundamental principles of brain-friendly teaching. Make teaching more effective and enjoyable by helping dendrites branch, improving students’ ability to transfer information from working to long-term memory, and narrowing achievement gaps.

Learn how teacher pipelines are instrumental to developing and retaining teachers. Explore how these programs are instrumental in developing site-based teacher leaders who support and address all teachers’ needs. Study the model’s theoretical constructs, elements and components, associated competencies and standards, inherent training, and activities that support professional growth and teacher retention. Identify next steps for modifying and implementing pipelines and models that support teacher retention.

A strong mentoring program in vital to retaining early career teachers. Engage in learning activities to understand ways to establish an environment that promotes teacher effectiveness and increases student learning. Examine a mentoring program that builds a thorough understanding of the professional learning opportunities the Danielson Framework provides to enhance coaching conversations, classroom visits, and teacher evaluation.

Discover keys for equipping beginning teachers for successful, rewarding careers to increase instructional excellence and equity for all students. Engage with experienced coaches to explore the benefits of a confidential, nonevaluative approach to coaching that results in self-directed professionals. Gather practical design tips and an overarching philosophy that will support your school in retaining and training excellent teachers.

How do you align layers of support in order to provide teachers with a consistent coaching experience at every level? Learn how one school district systematized and streamlined processes to maximize human and fiscal resources, accelerate teacher practice, and improve student learning outcomes. Create your own district plan to implement high-leverage actions to streamline job-embedded continuous cycles of improvement.

Explore how one school system implemented an evidenced-based teacher induction program. Identify the key components and benefits of an evidence-based teacher induction program. Examine standards for induction programs. Create an action plan for implementing an evidence-based teacher induction program in your district.

Learn how to leverage Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning to design and build an effective, systematic, and sustainable new teacher mentoring and induction program. Explore key components and practices to increase teacher retention, teacher effectiveness, and student achievement. Reflect on what elements of the standards are embedded in or missing from your current induction and mentoring systems.

Getting students to adopt a growth mindset and have grit and perseverance in a task is often dependent on the task design. Learn how to restructure traditional tasks in ways that promote intellectual safety through personal response. Explore how to craft learning tasks that promote growth mindset by focusing on intellectual and emotional safety. Apply a rubric for designing student work as a tool for professional reflection, analysis, and planning.

Understand the inverse relationship between innovation and the status quo. Become familiar with the mindset and practices of status quo defenders and status quo disruptors. Identify blind spots in our work that go unnoticed and require examination. Leave with best next steps to facilitate breakthrough disruption in your district, province, school, or team.

Explore strategies for building positive classroom culture, strengthening community, and preparing students to be successful. Learn techniques to promote students’ self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and decision-making skills. Empower students with strategies to build confidence, cooperation, curiosity, and communication skills in the classroom. Leave with activities and techniques that can be used immediately in your classroom to improve students’ attitudes and beliefs about self, others, and school. 

Hear how one small, rural middle school went from low-performing to high-performing in seven years. Explore ways to implement effective professional learning community practices and tweak them to fit your small, rural school. Learn about collaborative tools, succinct and reliable baseline data, growing vertical collaborative content teams, and defining high levels of learning for all students. Consider strategies for surviving small-town culture wars when education becomes political.

Engage in conversations on the assessment of implementation of professional learning and the assessment of impact. Examine research to support effective professional learning assessment that will establish and sustain effective practices. Explore your own context and entry point for assessing professional learning. Craft a plan for assessing professional learning effectively and systematically supporting all staff and students.

Learn how to talk about data with a team of adult learners in a nonthreatening, nonjudgmental way. Understand the deeper whys and hows behind creating a high-functioning team ready to tackle the difficult issues facing schools. Leave with strategies to shift the dynamics on a school team for deeper learning and honest exploration of data.

Explore the implications of a coaching dashboard and performance data on practices of professional learning to determine student impact and teacher effectiveness. Learn how one urban charter school network ensures equity in classroom practices for our youngest learners. Journey with an instructional leader as they put equitable practices into action and push student outcomes.

Learn how district and university partners developed, researched, and sustained a five-year video-based analysis of practice science teacher leader program with educative curriculum materials. Come to hear, see, and experience how the partnership empowered teachers to drive professional learning using videos of their own teaching. Leave with samples of tools and protocols used to facilitate conversations that support teacher collaboration about the science content storyline and making student thinking more visible.

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

Gaining clarity on a district’s leadership standards, being intentional about tapping potential leaders, engaging with pre-service partners to strengthen principal preparation, and developing tracking systems to effectively document a leader’s professional journey can produce significant benefits for districts, schools, and students, new research finds. Learn how district leaders from New York City and Charlotte-Mecklenburg used these and other strategies to strengthen the principalship, decrease principal turnover, and achieved improved results for students as part of The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative.

It may seem overwhelming to turn a school around or implement change. Where to begin? At Solution Tree, we can help you face even the biggest challenges by breaking them down into manageable pieces, creating a clear plan, and supporting you throughout the implementation process. Join us for a panel discussion where educators reveal the dramatic transformations made possible when schools focus on building a culture of learning for professionals and for students.

Sponsored by Solution Tree

Explore multiple models of school-union collaboration that have resulted in student and public school success, particularly around the needs for:

- Cultural competency training
- Grow your own, educator recruitment programs
- Effective professional learning
- Early career educator engagement and support
- Educational Support Professional training programs. 

As you learn about these models, you will also identify what needs you wish to address, and identify some potential partners, funding or grant opportunities that could aid you with this venture. The National Education Association members contribute approximately $9 million a year to support the NEA GPS Fund. Through this fund, local and state affiliates work with partners to impact student success and aid educators in being more effective.

Sponsored by NEA

Shrinking budgets, tight schedules, better research, and technology are leading educators to rethink the way we support teachers… but with classroom video. How do we make the shift? Attend a diverse panel of High-Impact Instructional Leaders discussing their journey around implementing personalized professional development pathways with video for all their teachers. - How did they start? - What outcomes are they realizing? - What best practices would they recommend?

Sponsored by Sibme

PLC+ is a practical and evidence-based framework focused on supporting the planning and implementation of both student and teacher learning. In the same way that teachers work to identify the learning needs of their students, it is important that PLC’s identify the learning needs of their adult learners in order to develop the most appropriate instruction for students in their classroom. In this session, attendees will learn how PLC+ can refresh current collaborative structures and help support teachers’ decision-making in the context of self and collective efficacy, expectations, equity, and the activation of their own learning.

Sponsored by Corwin

Learn how to foster shared leadership that encourages teachers to engage in collaborative teaching and learning cycles designed to provide formative feedback on all phases of teaching, including lesson planning, implementation, and analysis of student work. Explore productive and efficient ways to use professional learning communities as a vehicle to drive improvements in standards-based instruction and student achievement.

Sponsored by WestEd

Professional learning requires an investment in time and resources. How do you ensure a return on that investment before it's too late to make course corrections? In this session, learn how three districts have implemented a job-embedded learning system to streamline professional learning workflows, understand teacher progress toward organizational priorities, and power continuous improvement with actionable data. Leave with strategies for ensuring your district is using professional learning data for checkups, not autopsies.

Sponsored by KickUp

Based on Tom Gusky’s five levels of evaluating professional learning, we introduced a new framework for professional learning. We will discuss how this framework was developed, why we felt the need for a different way to deliver professional learning in schools, and some of our lessons learned in the field. There will be opportunity to reflect on your own professional learning planning efforts and evaluate it next to Gusky’s five levels. We will discuss next steps for responsive professional learning.

Sponsored by NWEA

In 2018-19, Metro Nashville Public Schools’ MAP reading data grew faster than the nation in grades 3-8 and TN Ready reading data grew faster than the state for the first time. The district also increased dual enrollment participation, dual enrollment pass rates, industry certifications, and participation in industry certification exams. District-wide average ACT scores increased and suspensions decreased. Learn how the school district began to “focus on focus” by creating a system where departments helped one another achieve the collective goals of the organization through an innovative partnership with the Arbinger Institute.

Sponsored by Intentional Leadership LLC

Explore the possibilities if our teaching and leadership focused on understanding the students and teachers around us and encouraged us to make decisions based on what would serve them best. Examine assumptions, beliefs, and blind spots as we see how empathy for others and school change decision-making are inextricably connected. Discuss five key principles for teaching, leading, and learning that would drive us all toward empathy, joy, and benefit. See how approaches focused on trust, voice, and the appreciation of the full humanity of every member of the school community can make schools and classrooms more humane and effective places.

Explore the educator microcredential ecosystem and how it can support personalizing professional learning in your school, district, or state. Develop a deeper understanding of the theory of change supporting microcredentials, how districts and states have been implementing microcredentials, and recognition and incentive structures. Design a microcredential implementation plan that addresses specific challenges or needs in your school, district, or state.

Learn how to prepare your facilitators to consistently develop engaging and effective professional learning for adult learners. Discover how one school district has built a certification program and provides coaching supports for all staff who engage in professional learning with instructional and noninstructional staff. Practice using planning and coaching tools, with time to customize them for use with your district team.

Learn how coaching thinking creates a culture of thought and reflection for students and adults. Understand the relationship between thinking, cognition, and behavior. Enhance your listening skills. Increase your knowledge of how to focus a coaching conversation on thinking.

A solid understanding of social and emotional health is the one thing no educator can afford to ignore. Learn about social and emotional health and easy-to-grasp concepts in neuroscience to help you understand what is happening in students’ brains and how to use that information to enhance learning. Walk away with simple, tangible strategies to implement immediately.

Trust is an essential element of any relationship. Explore the synergy of four drivers — trust, collaboration, leadership, and professional learning. Consider ways to build trust, encourage deep listening, transform resistance, and design learning structures at all levels of your system. Discuss how to enhance high relational trust on your teams.

Learn how schools can move from traditional top-down structures to a more collectively-led model so that all educators take collective responsibility for student learning. Explore the Center for Teaching Quality’s new playbook for doing so, which includes information about the types of professional learning that may need to take place to make this shift. Leave this session with an action plan for taking the appropriate next step for your context.

Learn how teachers and leaders in an urban district developed an Innovation Configuration map that enabled observers to garner feedback on their feedback. Examine your own beliefs and experiences about written feedback. Write and receive feedback about your written feedback. Assess your feedback using an Innovation Configuration map.

Learn how to build a culture of ownership among all stakeholders in your district or organization. See how redefining leadership creates pervasive spheres of empowerment and leads to extreme ownership at all levels of a school district. Leave with the experiences gained to innovate your current organizational structures to support a culture of ownership.

Experience key aspects of an intensive, videocase-based, anlaysis of practice science professional learning program that has been tested in large and small districts. Learn about the program's impact on teacher practice and student learning as well as how to sustain it through teacher leadership development. Access tools and processes for using video to improve teacher practice and student learning.

Learn how you can dismantle the district policies, classroom instruction, and methods of community engagement that contribute to systematic educational inequality. Examine research-based practices for addressing the root of inequality, and identify strategies and resources that build educator capacity to eradicate it. Leave with an equity action plan you can begin using immediately in your school or district.

Learn strategies and activities for raising equity awareness so that you can name, explore, and weave them throughout the curriculum. Discuss equity through the lens of positive, personal, and cultural identity. Engage in facilitated conversations focused on cultural biases, universal equity, resilience, and weaving equity into the curriculum and culture of your setting.

Explore how implicit biases impact our professional practice. Learn what’s going on subconsciously in the brain, how our unconscious “isms” impact everything we do, and how we can become more aware of our unconscious biases and modify our behavior so our classrooms become more equitable places for learning. Leave with a list of next steps you can take to transform your school into a more equitable learning environment.

Engage in reading a series of informational texts that will help us feel the shift of knowledge and its importance in supporting the growth of all learners. Use tools within a framework that builds background knowledge and makes explicit processes for comprehending complex text. Learn about how one state is using these tools to support experienced and new teachers and develop a plan to take this work forward in your own setting.

Learn how to deepen teacher capacity in developing the content knowledge needed to more expertly leverage your curricular materials, teach to the rigor of the Common Core Standards, and adapt materials for your students, thus resulting in a more equitable learning experience. Experience and discuss components of a professional learning approach grounded in continuous improvement that is job-embedded, team-based, curriculum-specific, and led by a content leader. Self-assess your current conditions, and analyze artifacts from school districts to support planning for your own context.

Engage in a process of collaborative inquiry into equity challenges for educators accessing professional learning. Design professional learning that is intentionally inclusive of language and culture. Learn how one professional learning institute has designed culturally responsive professional learning for a diverse audience of educators within an international educational context, and reflect on how this model can be used in your own context.

Conducting walk-throughs is often seen as a necessary evil in a leader’s job, but, done well, walk-throughs can be the ultimate source of personalized coaching. Review tools and structures that have proven invaluable to one school district. Study the link between classroom observations and professional growth. Brainstorm ways to improve your district’s walk-through process.

Explore how teacher teams at a middle school in a large urban district are strengthening their schoolwide literacy program by providing structured opportunities for professional learning and literacy leadership development. Study a reading strategy that sets aside time during the school day to provide individualized reading support. Acquire new ideas for building internal coherence within and across academic learning communities on effective literacy practices.

Define rigor and cognitive engagement as a product of five design elements. Participate in high-impact tasks of technology and thinking, then analyze the components of rigor to find what engages students and allows learners to make meaning in all content areas. Use a tool to tweak current practice into stronger, learner-focused tasks and  build powerful formative assessment from the standards.

Learn what one district has identified as the top five components for designing valuable professional learning to support their strategic plan and continuous improvement efforts. Examine adult learning strategies, materials, and resources that you can add to your professional learning toolbox for easy implementation in your school or district.

Learn how districts have designed professional learning plans and systems coaching practices to facilitate school improvement. Study a tool to inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of systems coaching at the individual, school, and district levels. Use and adapt resources, tools, materials, and planning documents to facilitate job-embedded systems coaching at the school and district levels.

Learn how a mathematics learning community built systemic partnerships designed to enhance teacher practice. Explore the structures, strategies, and tools that promote teacher leadership and sustainability. Examine quantitative and qualitative data that illustrate the effectiveness of the process. Create an action plan for how to implement this learning in your setting.

Create authentic learning experiences for educators that allow them to demonstrate their efficacy through products that promote challenging and equitable experiences for their students. Learn how one school district implemented a text set cohort model and built a national platform for educators to share their work. Leave with a compilation of resources and a customized plan for your district’s needs.

As administrators and coaches, we know that educators operate from a learner mindset when they continually build their instructional practice and bring out the best in students. Learn skills for coaching self and others towards active mindset awareness and navigation. Acquire strategies for coaching educators to reflect on their unconscious beliefs and take action steps toward adopting a learner mindset.

Examine the impact of innovative coaching methods and identify salient instructional coaching components that align with specific school needs. Discern impact areas at your school that would benefit from coaching models and programs. Create an action plan with detailed strategies and timelines on how to infuse coaching structures at your school to promote instructional shifts, teacher growth, and student achievement.

Learn how to increase your district's and school’s capacity to successfully coach and support collaborative teams as they implement best professional learning community (PLC) practices. Examine why coaching collaborative teams is so important to successfully implementing the PLC process. Engage in hands-on activities that unpack the process of coaching teams through a framework of clarity, feedback, and support.

This session is for Learning Forward Academy graduates. Hear from Andy Hargreaves as he shares his recent work on leading collaborative professionalism and its implications for Academy graduates. This session will be an interactive conversation with Q&A.

Experience how movement, music, and drawing align cognitive, physical, and emotional processes to improve learning. Engage the mind and body with activities for all ages of learners. Learn to use trauma-sensitive strategies with adults in professional learning that can then be applied in K-12 classrooms.

Learn how to construct an evaluation framework for professional learning using best practices from Joellen Killion’s Assessing Impact. Practice developing an aligned data plan that defines the when, what, and how of data collection. Build evaluation muscle by using one district’s real-life framework to analyze and interpret data from its new teacher induction program.

Learn how to use Learning Forward's Standards Assessment Inventory (SAI) and Standards Into Practice: Innovation Configuration Maps to introduce the Standards for Professional Learning to leaders and faculty and assess the current level of implementation of the standards in your school, district, state, or province. Analyze actual electronic SAI data and collaborate on either school- or district-level decisions based on the data. Refine your data into a school or district continuous improvement plan and deepen your understanding of how to guide school and district faculty and staff through the design of standards-based, sustainable, long-term school and district/state/province improvement plans.

Unleash the power of teacher teams to maximize the impact of formative assessment on student achievement, engagement, and equity though application of 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. Experience activities for building teachers' expertise in each of these high-impact steps.

Discover the transformation effort that has taken place in one school district through the two-year development of a data culture. Learn about the impact a data-wise staff and student body can have on your school system. Leave this session inspired to bolster your data culture knowing the impact it will have for your school or district.

We may not always know it, but many of our students arrive at school each day with the weight of the world on their shoulders, having experienced adversities that impact their physical and emotional wellbeing and make it incredibly difficult to excel at school. But with curiosity, compassion, and the right tools, we can create school environments where all students can thrive. This lecture will focus on how trauma and toxic stress impact student brains and what that means for school staff. Participants will learn about typical and trauma-impacted brain development, trauma-informed practices, student resilience, and the importance of staff wellness.

Assignments play a critical role in determining the degree to which students are being fully prepared for college and careers. Assignments also offer a window into instruction, teacher expectations of their students, how teachers understand their standards, and how students interact with the curriculum. Research from the Education Trust has revealed that nearly two decades after many states have adopted higher rigor standards, students continue to be given assignments far below the rigor demanded to be successful in college and careers. This session will contain a review of recent research on the quality of assignments and provide an overview of a framework for participants to analyze assignments in their schools and districts.

Hear about a partnership that is building leadership capacity throughout all layers of the organization, from principal supervisors to teacher leaders. Learn how communities of practice, leadership walks, and coaching serve as the primary learning designs to increase leaders’ use of a framework that supports continuous school improvement. Apply tools to plan leadership development to scale. Identify and target leadership development needs in your context.

Explore the dynamic transformation of a principal preparation program, built on an established and committed university-district partnership. Examine critical components, including an assessment of foundational needs, equity and access, cross-institutional stakeholder collaboration, scope/sequence redesign, syllabi revision, university faculty/mentor principal co-teaching, aligned internship, culminating experience, and funding sources. Glean valuable insight from longitudinal data and recommendations for building capacity of tomorrow’s educational leaders to better serve our nation’s most vulnerable youth.

Open educational resources (OER) can be a powerful tool for meeting the needs of students as well as deeply developing educators. Explore the instructional strategies and support systems necessary for the effective curation, vetting, and implementation of rigorous open education resources that help enable deep collaboration and knowledge building for educators. Learn about a variety of OER content and tools that support student engagement and personalized learning to consider in your classroom. 

Join Crystal Gonzales, Aida Walqui and Renae Skarin to understand the research base and receive concrete guidance for embedding effective English learner supports in core English language arts and math curricula. English learners deserve access to grade-level rigorous content, but what does this actually look like in instructional materials? Leave with tools and resources to evaluate and refine your current materials.

Hear how schools in two states achieved their highest state assessment scores using writing as a tool for learning, along with student-led discussions and close reading. Learn latest evidence-based approaches for teaching writing, student-led discussions, and close reading. Receive tools that you can use immediately. See data from district and state assessments that show gains made by students after they learned with this approach.

Translating new professional learning into action means teachers take risks to help students learn. Investigate the learning walk process, which showcases how carefully crafted questions can highlight the implementation effectiveness of the new professional learning teachers employ. Explore the process (how to gather information from what students can be seen and heard doing with a 5- to 7-minute walk-through), the protocol, and the procedure for formative collaborative feedback.

Use three simple strategic tools to analyze a structural or cultural need in your school. Design a framework and action steps that leverage and connect with existing resources. Learn how to use individual strengths to build team capacity and develop a peer coaching practice.

Discover how the ninth largest school district in the nation implements and supports a districtwide vision of instruction through a series of professional learning and distributive leadership processes. Experience the multifaceted and systematic supports that deepen instructional capacity through a reciprocal leadership pathway. Leverage your existing systems for professional learning and leadership pathways to support instructional expertise.

Learn the secrets to champion transparency and put students at the center of the learning process. Explore what happens when students are able to identify and set individual learning targets, self-assess their progress, and adjust to achieve their performance goals. Leave ready to clarify learning expectations for students and use the secrets to lead a seismic shift from a culture of ambiguity and student compliance to a culture of learning.

Learn how a statewide mentoring program helped teachers become teacher leaders and built a tight-knit community across districts and parishes. Explore the impact of the program on the mentors and the teachers they work with. Analyze ways to form strong networking bonds within the education community across schools and districts to support teacher leaders, especially those in isolated roles.

One of the critical components of a successful learning team is the strength of the learning team facilitator. Explore ways to invest in the professional capital of  teacher leaders that do the work of moving learning teams to a place where the focus is on student success as well as ways to increase the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of team members. Examine the tools, protocols, and  technical and adaptive structures that aid in the development of this important role.

The most effective response to intervention frameworks bring professionals together to use the conversation about students as a mechanism to enhance teacher instructional capacity and maximize distributed coaching. Come examine the essential elements of a framework that values purposeful collaboration, action-focused responses, data-informed discussions, and timely intervention to ensure all students can experience success. Explore the lessons learned in inclusive organizations where educators are empowered through collaborative processes that enhance professional capacity and honor the collective wisdom of those working directly with students.

Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) is a framework in which data-based problem-solving and decision-making is practiced across all levels of the educational system for supporting students. Learn how one school district partnered with a university consultant to create a systematic approach to implementing the MTSS process. Take a closer look at the data within your own district to identify interventions. Leave with tools to help move your process forward.

Give your online professional development the makeover it’s been craving. Learn how to design online courses to engage participants in collaborative learning communities. Explore strategies to develop relationships, create meaningful assessments, and set goals to strengthen the instructional practices of your team. Leave with the spark needed to redesign online courses for maximum engagement.

Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems, or scenarios rather than simply presenting established facts or portraying a smooth path to knowledge. Explore how teachers can take an inquiry stance through a set of principles that create an inquiry mindset. Engage in discussions focused on constructing strategies around “What do effective inquiry teachers do?”.

This interactive session showcases a Problem-Based Learning model that empowers teachers to design and facilitate engaging learning opportunities that are connected to their local community. Participants will experience the launch of a problem-based learning unit and discover how to design authentic learning environments in which students apply content knowledge while practicing key skills to demonstrate a high level of mastery. Problem-based learning examples will be shared from core content areas.

Size doesn't prohibit quality professional learning. Learn how an observation protocol strengthens the peer-observation model and maximizes the effectiveness of low-cost, in-house professional development. Examine how the model empowers teachers, fosters a districtwide culture of collegiality and collaboration, and translates to increased teacher effectiveness and student learning. Create an action plan for implementing or improving the effectiveness of job-embedded professional learning.

Microcredentials have been trending in recent years as a competency-based form of professional learning and certification. Learn how microcredentials work and — and just like a true microcredential — you’ll be learning by doing. Follow the process of completing a microcredential on how to introduce your best self following the same learning cycle as a microcredential. Understand how microcredentials work and why they are such an effective form of professional learning.

Identify critical strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to observation-based feedback by exploring three recent collaborative research and development projects. Focus on content-specific and content-neutral instructional rubrics and interpret evidence about implementation and impact. Join colleagues to discuss ideas about new approaches to observation-based feedback that support teacher professional learning and identify approaches for further development that will support your coaching efforts.

Experience how one school district creates a culture of continuous improvement based on research and application of best practices for 80+ secondary instructional coaches. Learn how to sustain and deepen the learning of instructional coaches with varying skill and experience levels. Leave with multiple tools to design personalized learning for instructional coaches that meet your district’s unique needs.

Use an implementation road map to plan instruction of research-based intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies, embedded within content-area curriculum, supporting positive in-school and post-school outcomes for all students. Examine implementation examples at the teacher, school, and district levels, as well as various approaches to measuring impact. Set personal and schoolwide goals through self-assessment.

In this session, participants will get a look under the hood at how two cutting-edge professional learning designs are tinkering toward excellence and sustainability through the collection and use of data on implementation. Researchers from American Institutes of Research will share examples of measures and processes for providing collaborative evidence-based feedback that’s informative and actionable, including missteps to avoid. How to leverage research/practice partnerships from the standpoint of a provider or school or district professional learning leader will also be explored.

An effective assessment system is one that incorporates formative, interim, and summative assessment to provide meaningful information for different stakeholders in the educational system. Enhance your understanding of the purposeful design and data limitations of each type of assessment within your local assessment system to gain greater insights about where students are and where they need to be in their K-12 learning journey. Evaluate the effectiveness of your assessments to ensure they are producing informative and valid evidence of student understanding, from the very individualized information of formative assessment to the broader view of summative.

Learn how one school district's professional learning team is building a culture of continuous improvement to close the opportunity achievement gap and elevate student success through district-led professional learning. Explore ways to measure the success of district-led professional learning through a coherent system of design, facilitation, and participatory follow-up to measure shifts in teachers practices and student outcomes over time. Create your own professional learning impact plan.

Research across the decades has confirmed that effective school leadership is associated with better outcomes for students and schools. But how can school districts develop and sustain a large corps of highly-qualified leaders? [LP1] A recent RAND report evaluates six large school districts’ efforts to build “principal pipelines” by better preparing, selecting, evaluating, and supporting principals, and finds that these efforts were feasible, affordable, and effective. This presentation will provide an overview of the key findings from the report, including how building principal pipelines produced positive effects in student outcomes and principal retention.

When students are in control of their own time and have a voice in their learning, they are more likely to be successful. Learn how flexible modular scheduling can be effective in your school and how to start, implement, and communicate this type of scheduling with all stakeholders to ensure its success and validation. Study ways to measure and record students’ skills in different academic subject areas while also documenting these skills on student transcripts to ensure high school graduation and post-secondary entrance.

Explore the components and shifts that high-performing residency programs have made to develop highly effective teachers and teacher leaders. Examine ways to structure and support teachers to be instructional leaders in your district. Learn how to use data from teacher leaders to refine your professional learning.

Identify key leadership principles that promote excellence and equity for every student. Examine a tool to reflect on your practice and identify actions and commitments. Create an action plan for how this learning could be implemented in your setting.

Experience how educators in one school district use a team meeting protocol to communicate effectively and remain focused on their goals for school improvement, ensuring that initiatives are on track by collaborating on high-yield strategy. Observe a live instructional leadership team meeting, hear from the leaders using the protocol, and examine your approach to team meetings.

Explore how to build a formative observation protocol around your organization’s initiatives. Examine ways to streamline feedback processes for maximum effectiveness and work with teachers of varying skill and will levels. Leave with strategies to build systemwide expectations for feedback that are focused on a growth mindset for everyone.

Engage in rich conversations about how one state’s implementation of urban district and state-level equity focused leadership academies resulted in improved leadership practices. Examine the learning designs, implementation processes, and evidence of impact on leadership and teaching practices of two co-designed leadership academy models that built capacity for enacting effective equity-focused leadership practices in turnaround and urban schools. Explore the tools, frameworks, strategies, feedback loops, and leadership principles that guided leaders' learning, ownership, implementation, and impact.

Explore a district's comprehensive job-embedded coaching framework and how teacher leader professional learning builds knowledge, skills, and dispositions to work with teachers and teams at their schools. Learn about the framework that grounds the comprehensive coaching program and how professional learning for teacher leaders is customized to meet the needs of a diverse school district.

Identify the tools, skills, and dispositions needed to move from student-centered to student-owned learning. Learn to support teachers in this shift by refining how you observe instruction and provide feedback. Focus your interactions with learners within a five-step process to drive ownership.

Learn how one district’s professional learning for administrators and mentors builds collaboration and respect among colleagues from various generational groups. Identify generational biases and recognize how different work and communication styles affect the school or department environment and culture. Examine real-world scenarios and explore how leaders can effectively bridge the multigenerational gap, resulting in a stronger sense of community.

Delve into the dimensions of collective teacher efficacy and its critical impact on student achievement and school improvement. Analyze expressions of professional behavior in schools and develop principal supports for high-impact professional learning. Apply learning leadership tools and protocols to identify specific school-level supports to foster and promote collective teacher efficacy in schools.

Leaders striving to develop culture, relationships, and program changes face resistance. Explore the nonverbal and verbal patterns you might consider using to open a meeting or professional learning when you know resistance is in the way. Create and practice an opening to a professional learning experience or meeting where you know resistance will be present.

Explore one district’s efforts to transform its classrooms into more culturally responsive environments to ensure its teachers meet the needs of all students, particularly those in the achievement gap. Learn how to use an evaluation tool to grow and support teachers in their implementation of culturally responsive teaching and how can leaders use the data to drive future learning in their school. Study the research behind culturally responsive teaching and how it can inform work across all facets of a district.

Identify the extraordinary constituent groups in your school and collectively work through a process of how we can better recognize, understand, and serve these students. Explore the obstacles they may face and consider possible responses. Gain insights and avenues for increasing success for all students.

By starting with an equity-based mindset from leadership through all levels, all educators can bring in a “language lens” for multilingual populations in any classroom. Discover how proactive, embedded professional learning can transform the whole school to respond to increasing cultural and linguistic diversity. Explore hands-on tools for developing or refining your priority practices for pedagogy and professional learning to support your school cohesively and proactively.

Engage in dialogue around educational equity while deeply examining beliefs and practices that impact instructional practice. Participate in an interactive approach that blends visual tools and culturally responsive instructional strategies to accelerate student learning. Feel empowered by learning and using new strategies that connect to youth culture and incorporate rhythm to engage and deepen learning.

Learn about an innovative professional learning model in which teacher and student learning are developed within the actual work of teaching. Understand equitable practices and how they can be developed through instructional routines in this classroom-embedded professional learning model. Participants in this session will have a chance to unpack and practice instructional routines and identify ways they can be leveraged to support change in teachers’ beliefs, knowledge, and practice. Participants will have time to plan for integrating routines into professional learning in their schools.

Hear about one school district’s shift from a focus on formative assessment lessons to embedding powerful mathematics practices into everyday instruction. Learn how to organize and create a coherent message that blends district initiatives with the practices used in math instruction. Interact with models for instructional frameworks, professional learning, and sustaining the shifts needed to improve student outcomes within math classrooms.

Learn how assessment and creativity live hand-in-hand in everyday classrooms. Explore the four stages of the creative process and the assessment processes essential for creativity to flourish. Learn how to successfully unlock creativity in every classroom and empower all learners to navigate their own creative learning stories.

Explore dramatic methods that can be incorporated into all content in grades 3-12. Learn how these methods can facilitate student learning for critical content that students, particularly underachieving students, would otherwise not master or be interested in. Practice creating a drama-based lesson and learn how to create workshops for your staff.

Build more productive collaborative relationships with the teams that contribute to great teaching and learning: educators, students, parents, and community members. Practice proven strategies for improved communication and engagement, and brainstorm together how to overcome specific situations at work, grounded in a culture that values the worth of each person. Learn the secret to transforming the most challenging person in any group.

Explore five drivers of change that will impact learning over the next decade. Consider a new landscape of choices for transforming teaching and learning through a highly effective professional learning framework. Shape a future of learning in which all students can thrive.

Assess your current professional learning against Learning Forward’s Standards for Professional Learning and learn about a statewide pilot of microcredentials as personalized professional learning. Explore a process of evaluating professional learning connected to Response to Intervention (RTI), leading to the development of customized RTI microcredentials. Develop next steps for your professional learning system.

Understand the unique challenges in onboarding teachers into next generation models. Learn how school districts and charter management organizations are onboarding teachers into their innovative personalized and blended learning models. Reflect on their models and develop your own school’s onboarding road map.

Identify key components of a high-quality pre-K-3 learning system. Examine critical competencies for early learning leaders, and analyze a process to establish a strategic vision for pre-K-3 alignment across systems. Create an action plan for applying this learning in your setting.

Learn how a large diverse urban school district mobilized district resources and reorganized for collaborative work to build pivotal principal instructional leadership capacity. Develop an understanding of how to recognize and eliminate random acts of principal support. Learn how to break down organizational silos and foster collaboration.

Learn about one school district’s efforts to design a professional growth system to improve the quality of teaching at all levels. Examine the systematic, job-embedded support provided to all participating teachers. Leave with plans to develop any or all components of the system to increase teacher efficacy at your district.

Learn the difference between a culture of crisis and a culture of learning. Analyze your actions in a typical school day to create structures that develop a culture of learning. Leave with a plan of proactive strategies to use in your school.

Learn how a model in which expert teachers organize local professional development has resulted in changes in instructional practice and student learning. Identify the potential benefits and challenges in such a model. Understand how the model supports structures that foster instructional change and strategic relationships that support deeper, more widespread professional learning.

Discover the benefits of working with a colleague to observe each other’s lessons and provide feedback. Study the steps for successfully launching and implementing this effective peer partnership practice and plan for how to overcome typical challenges. Learn how to use tools for planning, observing, analyzing, and providing feedback with your colleagues.

Explore the ingredients for building high-functioning teams. Analyze breakdowns in team dynamics, relationships, and productivity, and identify strategies that will meet the needs of specific teams and team members. Plan for future team meetings using strategies and collaborative processes.

Learn how district and school leaders and instructional coaches work side by side to ensure continuous improvement of teacher effectiveness in a community of practice. Examine tools, protocols, and resources used to collect data, analyze patterns, and identify actionable next steps for improving instructional implementation and monitoring teacher growth. Brainstorm ways to transfer this knowledge into action.

Delve into the actions necessary to build effective professional learning communities (PLC) as a vehicle for improving academic and social behavior outcomes for all students. Learn how to use Response to Intervention (RTI) to ensure every student’s success. Apply essential academic and social behavior standards, processes, tools, and resources to help your school function as a PLC for each tier of needed supports.

Learn skills and strategies that address the specific needs of pre-K-8 school principals. Probe the essential pillars of effective principal practice and assess your current leadership level. Explore lessons learned from pre-K-8 principals.

Examine the connections between emotional intelligence and the effectiveness of teachers and leaders. Learn how coaches, teachers, and school leaders in one school district are leveraging reflection practices to boost emotional intelligence. Explore and apply video learning strategies as a tool to deepen reflection and amplify educator learning for the benefit of the learners you serve.

Explore how to increase student creativity by weaving it into your existing fabric of research-based best practices. Learn how research-based creativity classroom practices benefit learners of all ages and backgrounds to increase student’s self-efficacy, mindset, and achievement. Design instruction that promotes creativity in the classroom and professional learning that helps teachers increase creative practices.

Learn how personalized professional learning supports developing learning cycle pathways that allow for innovation, analysis using multiple data metrics, and revision with purposeful feedback to enhance student learning and empower educators to take risks in a well-planned system for growth. Leave with tools to make content for adult learners more relevant, authentic, and driven by individuality and voice.

Learn how middle school science teachers engaged in a two-year process to co-design a STEM project-based learning curriculum that ensures every student has access and opportunity to STEM careers. Study the design process and determine what constitutes high-quality STEM project-based learning. Leave this session with clarity on how you can impact your system by creating and sustaining systemwide, equitable STEM teaching and learning.

Follow a National Blue Ribbon School’s efforts to build assessment capable learners. Learn how to implement assessment capable learning strategies to increase teacher and student efficacy and achievement and create a school culture that promotes feedback, learning, and collaboration. Understand how developing assessment capable learners supports an effective model of Multi-Tiered System of Support.

Learn how one school redefined coaching support to improve instruction and create engaging learning opportunities for all students. Examine how the leadership team carefully crafted interdisciplinary coaching roles to strategically assign initiatives and duties to facilitate this model of layered coaching support. Create your own action plan to provide opportunities for teacher and student success through your coaching program.

Learn how investing in coaching capacity results in improved teacher practice, program quality, and student outcomes. Explore a coaching model that is rooted in a partnership approach and promotes culturally responsive practices, facilitates data-driven decision-making, nurtures ongoing critical reflection, and models a parallel process for providing effective feedback. Examine artifacts from a competency-based certification program and learn how states are using this as a strategy to address issues of equity.

Explore strategies for aligning structures designed to support new teachers. Learn about current practices for programs, including new hire orientation, teacher induction, job-embedded mentoring, and professional development specifically designed for novice teachers. Leave with a plan to implement systems for new teacher support in your school or district.

Explore how one school district transformed its culture through coaching and collective efficacy. Hear from principals and instructional coach supervisors to learn what the research says about instructional coaching, specific strategies to increase success, and lessons learned along the way. Leave with an action plan for implementation of a successful campus or districtwide coaching model.

Gain a deeper understanding of social and emotional literacy and why it is critical to connect students to each other and to academic content. Identify the three core competencies of enriched literacy and how they can shape teaching and learning. Experience and take away research-based strategies that will help you create a community of learners in your school.

Gain insight into the prevalence of trauma in schools today and recognize its impact on learning and behavior. Identify assessments and data already in use in your school that can assist and track the implementation of trauma-informed practices. Leave with specific strategies for creating trauma-informed classrooms and schools.

Apply research-based strategies for implementing systemic, schoolwide social and emotional learning to promote educational equity. Coordinate and build on evidence-based practices and programs by understanding and initiating a process for schoolwide implementation. Identify and examine indicators of high-quality implementation as well as strategies for addressing challenges.

Hear how a large urban district conducted a nine-month study to inform comprehensive district reform. Learn the steps they took to gather stakeholder feedback, assess needs, and analyze data spanning finances, staffing, and student performance to understand their challenges and set goals for improvement. Reflect on how to assess needs and take action toward improving teaching and learning at scale in your district.

Learn how one school district implemented a comprehensive English as a Second Language program review to assess impact and make data-based decisions on future directions. Examine multiple data collection methods. Create an action plan for implementing a program review.

Creating the right internal infrastructure is necessary for states and districts working to achieve equitable outcomes for all students. Without the right staffing, stakeholder engagement, and data framework, even the best strategies around equity are not sustainable. This is particularly true for increasing the racial diversity of the teacher workforce, one of the most important and beneficial strategies for all students. Learn about an ambitious effort to provide equitable outcomes for all students in one of the largest and most diverse districts in the country and walk away with the right framework and best practices for increasing the racial diversity of the teacher workforce. Obtain model strategies that can inform state and school district policies and practices to achieve greater racial diversity in the teacher workforce.

Fordham University's Graduate School of Education is creating an Institute for Equity and Effective Governance. Learn about the institute, why mindset matters, and what superintendents, school boards, and union leaders can do collectively to improve system-wide mindsets, collaboration, and performance.

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

Learning Forward has long led the charge to define effective professional learning and to connect and support those responsible for leading learning in districts and schools. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, join the organization’s first executive director Dennis Sparks, who led then-NSDC until 2007. Pull up a chair for a conversation about key moments in the field’s history and the role NSDC-Learning Forward played. Share ideas about what may come next and hear Sparks’s insights from a career’s worth of experiences in educational leadership and professional learning.

Examine the process and success behind a time-sensitive model of professional learning and how to eliminate the variable of time. Learn how teacher leaders can contribute successful instructional strategies that build teacher capacity and impact classroom instruction within and outside of their school. Leave with resources to develop a plan for your school or district.

Hear an overview of text-mining techniques and results of an analysis of journal artifacts to understand teacher professional development. Gain an understanding of the importance of evaluating nonstructured data using text-mining techniques. Identify the general workflow of text-mining analysis for journals from professional learning sessions and teacher professional growth patterns through tables and graphs.

Discover the traps school districts consistently repeat in their efforts to achieve greater equity in their schools. Learn about the cycle of inequity and the steps needed to break the cycle. Gain a clearer picture of those elements getting in the way of equity.

Learn how 70-plus school districts come together in an organized consortium focused on school improvement and best practices in curriculum and instruction. Explore how the lessons learned can be applied to your own district to leverage resources and best practices. Hear about innovative professional learning for school leaders on a variety of topics relatable to every kind of demographic.

Explore what you can do to support and retain your newest teachers while they are in the midst of trying to survive their first year. Examine a video library that offers targeted weekly support around the needs of the beginning teacher created by one district's classroom teachers and staff. Walk away with a video timeline, resources that drove the timeline, and access to the district's video library.

The Learning Forward Foundation offers scholarship opportunities for individuals and teams interested in attending the Learning Forward Academy to receive coaching and support in solving your problem of practice. Explore how to submit an application for a scholarship. Learn about the Academy experience from previous scholarship winners and hear how they have made changes in their own systems to enhance learning for teachers and students.

See how Learning Forward partners with states, districts, and schools to provide comprehensive professional learning and ongoing support for educators at all levels. Explore the learning designs for our work with district leaders, principals, coaches, and school-based learning teams, and earn how our consulting services impact teaching and learning in schools. Get sample tools and protocols from our consulting work and speak to our consultants about how we can turn your school or district into a true learning system.

Learning Forward’s networks are grounded in the Standards for Professional Learning. Learning teams design and implement professional learning interventions using continuous improvement concepts, and disciplined inquiry and problem solving that lead to improved practice. Learn about the cycles teams use to address their defined problems and conditions that contribute to successful teams. Receive a protocol used in the networks and speak to network members and consultants about how network membership might benefit your district or school.

Learn about the work being done in one state to support school district leaders in evidencing leadership and school board standards. Engage in activities that will expand your understanding of the importance of facilitated conversation around ethical decision-making. Consider how to replicate this work in your setting, with a focus on rural schools.

Examine three dimensions of personalized learning, applying to both students and teachers. Gain an understanding of the nuanced relationship between individualization and personalization. Identify action steps for enacting personalized professional learning in your school.

Learn how to use arts integration for middle school math and science as a way to differentiate instruction and keep students engaged. Identify common struggles for low-income gifted students, such as perfectionism and an inability to connect what they are learning to career pathways, and share ideas on how to address these hurdles in the classroom and through collaborative partnerships. Leave with ideas to improve learning opportunities for low-income gifted students.

Learn how an elementary school created a culture of unity and togetherness with a very diverse student population. Experience the system the school used to motivate and inspire students to learn and achieve while incorporating character education to support the academic and social needs of all students. Leave with ideas and strategies for you to incorporate similar programs in your school or classroom.

Explore how culture, inequity, and unconscious bias inclusive of — but not limited to — race impact our decision-making processes, lead to inequitable practices, and unconsciously taint our school culture. Examine individual biases and gain tangible strategies to adjust them. Engage in activities that focus on identifying biases and brainstorming solutions that will improve school culture.

Learn how to implement culturally responsive teaching methods in math for gifted African American students. Explore ways to classroom environments that engage diverse learners with culturally based student activities and math tasks. Examine strategies that will engage students in meaningful tasks while also addressing the standards of mathematical practices.

Examine how a coherent and viable standards-aligned curriculum advances equity. Learn how one school district set long-term goals with scaffolded yearly actions to build the collective efficacy of leadership and teacher teams that align professional learning community (PLC) work on curricula-based high-quality instruction for all students. Leave with a sample implementation plan focused on systematic and scaffolded learning to ensure delivery of a common curriculum.

Learn about a program focused on massive change management in a short period of time and what it takes to ensure that all students are provided with a high-quality and cutting-edge technology-rich instructional ecosystem. Discuss the research, outcome, and methods of providing an instructional environment to our highest-need students that is on par with their more affluent counterparts.

Learn about one district's demonstration teachers and classrooms. Examine the process created to identify these teachers and how they are accessed throughout the district. Leave with information on how you can implement these opportunities in your own district.

Examine characteristics of effective, research-based teacher induction programs. Explore the components of a partnership between a university and school district to launch an induction program. Evaluate the impact of the program, and discuss ways to establish or enhance new teacher induction programs in your district or state.

Examine actions by district and building-level administrators that correlate with increased positive impact on teacher mindset, motivation, self-efficacy, and empowerment. Reflect on which actions might most benefit your own setting, and design an action research plan for testing one of these best practices. Report back to the group at a follow-up webinar one month later to share and learn from one another’s post-conference experiences.

Explore how one small district used instructional rounds to collect data to assist with school improvement plans and create a systemic approach to meeting the professional learning needs of teachers and administrators using collaborative practices. Leave with an instructional rounds protocol and samples of how to use the data in school improvement plans and for systemic professional learning needs.

Learn how an innovative professional learning design process fosters a systemic districtwide approach to transforming teaching and learning. Explore one district's commitment to differentiated professional learning and its transformational learning framework designed to build teacher and administrator capacity. Engage in the critical dispositions necessary to transform learning and select professional learning focus areas relevant to your school or district needs.

Learn how one school district designed and implemented a digital ecosystem with microcredential badges to create professional learning. Analyze the benefits of constructive feedback and teacher reflection on the use of online professional learning. Explore how to diversify online professional learning to meet the skills and needs of all educators.

Learn how one state engages teachers in meaningful asynchronous online professional development. Explore techniques for increasing engagement, promoting reflection, and assessing learning. Walk away with tools to guide course design, review, and management.