Learning Forward Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explore what anti-bias/anti-racist education is and why it is essential. Learn why it is critical for all schools to engage in and support social justice work. Identify programs and practices you can put in place to support students and teachers, and determine how to take steps in engaging the community in becoming partners in this work.

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

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

Explore core competencies that are vital to the development of school improvement coaches as they work with educators in today’s complex school environment. Practice using tools that bring the core competencies to life, highlighting the importance of the soft skills of coaching. Compare your district’s approach to the core competencies framework and discover how to apply the framework, and tools associated with it, in your context.

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

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

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

This session is driven by a belief that strong curriculum is just one factor in improving literacy outcomes.  Achieving your vision for literacy requires coherence across multiple systems and practices.

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

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

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

Explore how white-majority settings present unique challenges to professional learning on diversity, equity, and inclusion and how to mitigate limitations that exist in these settings. Learn how the CARE Framework for Antiracist Education can support DEI efforts and build racial literacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflect on your own racial experiences and the impact that racialization has had on your instructional practices as a way to foster your understanding of students’ historical, cultural, and societal contexts. Gain instructional skills that will support the development of students as informed, empathetic, inclusive, racially, and historically literate global citizens who value diversity and actively engage in interrupting inequities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avanti, a Solution Tree education technology product, is the first of its kind: a teacher-first, self-paced, subscription-based professional learning platform that helps teachers at the elementary, middle, and high school levels gain ideas and actionable strategies for teaching and honing their craft. Content includes short inspirational videos made by teachers, for teachers, on a variety of relevant, timely topics.

Learning Forward’s vision is: Every educator engages in exemplary professional learning so every student excels. In most education settings, this professional learning begins with a book. Join a panel of authors who will share their writing experiences and the impact their books are making on educators and, ultimately, student success. Ask questions of the panel and pitch your own book ideas.

Review the big ideas of mastery learning and gain practical guidance on its implementation across the range of grade levels or subject areas. Develop a working knowledge of the principles of mastery learning, including responding to learner differences and frequent use of feedback on learner progress. Apply this working knowledge to implementing mastery learning in both in-person and online settings. Harness mastery learning principles to the work of helping nearly all students become successful learners and gain the many positive benefits of that success.

Learn ways to create learning communities that work together through a collectivist lens of shared accountability with a focus on equity, and discover how these learning communities are empowered to explore how their collaborative actions and decisions propel learning forward. Explore the Visible Learning research that supports the identified pathways and pavers for designing fortifying learning communities.

Explore what it looks like to use professional learning, coaching, educator perception, and walk-through data to ensure that professional learning leads to impact. Learn how Fargo Public Schools designed a cohesive set of tools that would capture the instructional needs of educators and the areas in which coaching and professional learning time are being spent, adopted protocols and processes to set data-informed coaching goals, and examined data to determine the impact of professional learning on classroom instruction.

Wilson Language Training's fully virtual professional learning, launched in 2009, is designed to certify teachers to teach students with dyslexia in a Tier 3 instructional setting. Wilson has since expanded the program to include a virtual implementation support program that helps teachers improve their literacy teaching practice for students in Tier 1 and 2 settings. Learn how these programs support an engaged community of educators, provide easy access to instructional resources, and offer ways to connect teachers to expert literacy specialists and coaches for individual support.

Learn how to help educators face the world we live in and respond to it. Explore professional learning developed by the Harvard Graduate School of Education to address this challenge, including Schooling for Critical Consciousness of Racism and Racial Injustice, which draws on the research of Harvard Professor Daren Graves' work in applying Paolo Freire's concept of critical consciousness to work with high school students, and Moral Leadership in a Troubled Time, which uses foundational work in moral development done at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Examine the current research around how video can be a powerful tool to support educator self-reflection as a job-embedded professional learning strategy. Experience how Rockdale County Public Schools uses video technology as a way to promote reflective practices to support teacher growth and collaboration. Learn the advantages of using video as a best practice for coaching and mentoring. Hear how Rockdale discovered that providing structured feedback drastically improved classroom practices. Additionally, Rockdale principals and coaches have data-driven proof that job-embedded professional learning directly impacts teacher retention and student outcomes.

Examine the connection between school climate and teacher effectiveness, satisfaction, and retention. Explore ways to develop and leverage teachers’ leadership skills to build a more positive school culture. Engage in an exploration of concrete steps leaders and teachers can take to increase trust, build collective efficacy, and produce positive schoolwide change. Walk away with specific ideas and routines to jump-start this effort in your school community.

Examine the research that informed the recent revision of Standards for Professional Learning. Learn about the findings of a literature review and a meta-analysis of studies focused on the impact of professional learning on educator and student outcomes conducted by American Institutes of Research. Engage in conversation with Elizabeth Foster, vice president, standards & research at Learning Forward, and Rachel Garrett, principal researcher at American Institutes of Research, about the studies cited, emerging areas of scholarship such as social and emotional learning and equity, and what is on Learning Forward's agenda for future research related to professional learning.