Preconference Sessions

Learn how to leverage asynchronous coaching to develop teacher practice. Explore how using technology tools for asynchronous coaching can deepen curriculum-based professional learning. Experience the asynchronous coaching progress, and hear about the impact on teacher practice.

Stuck in a rut with coaching? Wondering how other systems are engaging teachers in meaningful, job-embedded professional learning and coaching? Explore challenges facing coaches and other instructional leaders. Use the principles of human-centered design along with the expertise of your fellow participants to connect, inspire, and learn from one another through the problem-solving process.

Establish an anti-racist leadership philosophy and integrate anti-racist practices as teacher leaders and emergent/new school leaders. Evaluate how your beliefs about education align with your practice as an anti-racist teacher or leader, and implement actionable steps to bring your anti-racist philosophy to life. Explore your philosophy of education in practice, then reflect on changes that need to be made in your daily practice today to become actively anti-racist tomorrow.

Hear results of primary research from a team of early childhood educators and researchers. Engage in roundtable discussions focusing on the issues of equity, elevation, and access within various early childhood education settings. Learn to elevate your voice and your profession as you contribute to ongoing research to spur change within the realm of early childhood education.

Take a deep dive into what drives student acceleration in literacy, using five research-based “literacy accelerators” that support all students toward college and career readiness, especially those who have been marginalized or underserved in schools. Learn why equity must remain at the center of all literacy efforts, and examine how personalized learning approaches, including culturally relevant teaching, can drive acceleration. Leave with useful tools for evaluating core and supplemental instruction, and learn how you can apply the learning to your own setting.

Culturally responsive practice goes far beyond a curriculum, from the individual interactions between students and teachers to the systemic context of a student’s community. But traditional curriculum has not only hindered the development of this practice, it has also reinforced a focus on a singular perspective and experience. Analyze how curriculum can move beyond a textbook model to support teachers in engaging the lived and historical experiences of all students.

Everyone leads sometimes, few lead all the time. At the core of leadership is the ability to effectively communicate. Explore five communication skills that build efficacy, a collaborative culture, and stronger group relationships. Learn how to impact credibility, assign status to group members, redirect energy and focus into issues and away from relationships, open with impact, and create a safe environment when posing questions.

Supporting beginning educators matters and deserves careful planning. Examine the diverse needs of beginning educators and explore how professional learning must include a variety of topics, including overall health, emotional wellness, technology tools as well as support around building a healthy learning environment. Explore principles and features from research that impact professional growth, teacher retention, and teacher job satisfaction.

Evolve as learners and shift from an overreliance on “spray-and-pray” workshops to personalized professional learning. Examine ideas and strategies that empower educators to learn from kids, peers, and the world in a cycle of continuous improvement. Leave empowered with a plan grounded in research on effective professional learning models, aligned with Learning Forward’s Standards for Professional Learning, and focused on inquiry-based learning to increase educator effectiveness and results for all learners.

Do you find yourself relying on the same old routines and activities? Looking to spice up your learning sessions? Gain insight on how to design professional learning that matters. Fill your toolbox with highly effective engagement strategies that make a difference face to face, in person, or online. Explore 25 strategies that can overlay any content, any grade level, and any school or district context. Get your adult learners engaged so that the content sticks.

Improving student engagement means more than beating back boredom with gimmicks that entertain but don’t educate. Examine original research findings that can lead directly to your students’ learning and success. True engagement is about mystery and magic, meaning and purpose, and focus and mastery. Gain an understanding of the five enemies of engagement blocking our paths and how to defeat them. Explore clear paths to student engagement that will enable you not only to improve your teaching but also change your school so engagement becomes less elusive and more achievable.

Is your district supporting the social-emotional development and self-care of educators and staff? We can’t serve our students well if we aren’t taking care of ourselves. Explore how to strengthen the SEL capacity among your staff through tribal leadership and collective teacher efficacy. Walk away with ideas, protocols, strategies, and resources that are ready for you to use in your efforts of growing your school culture.

The shift to remote learning has been particularly disruptive for students with individualized education plans in integrated co-teaching classrooms. Learn how you can support co-teachers to meet students’ individual needs even as district budgets for professional learning and special education services tighten. Explore a year’s worth of lessons learned about effective virtual coaching and virtual co-teaching. Leave with a tool kit of best practices for virtual professional learning to support virtual integrated co-teaching classrooms.

Providing a predictable structure of professional learning (in person or virtual) for instructional coaches fosters adult learning and allows for meaningful planning. Differentiating for coaches with varying levels of expertise and experience can be challenging. Meet your coaches’ learning needs while fostering a positive coaching culture. Experience our predictable structure while reflecting on your process for planning coach professional learning. Collaborate with others as we work through the three components of this structure. Design learning for your coaches using a predictable structure. 

The ultimate purpose of coaching is to impact student performance by changing educator practice. Explore and identify different coaching stances within a learning-focused continuum to promote role release and build sustainable practices. Learn different coaching tools to plan for systematic role release. Examine the process for developing an Innovation Configuration (IC) map and how to use it evaluate impact on educator practices. Develop next steps to apply learning in your context.

Learn how coaching new teachers through an “all in coaching program” and a structured non-tenure cohort academy supports non-tenure teacher performance, development and teacher retention over time. Hear testimony from recent non-tenure teachers, evaluate your current practices, and leave with a coaching plan for new teachers that supports their professional growth and retention.

Experience key aspects of an intensive video case-based, analysis-of-practice science professional learning program and leadership development program that has been tested in large and small districts and across the K-12 system. Learn about the Science Teachers Learning from Lesson Analysis (STeLLA) professional learning program and our significant impact on teacher practice and student learning as well as how we are sustaining the program through teacher leadership development.

Addressing cultural trauma in the current context of COVID-19 and social unrest is a priority for educators. Explore what cultural trauma is, how it affects adults and children, and why refining existing pedagogies to include trauma-sensitive and social-emotional/mental wellness supports can be useful in broadly meeting the needs of education stakeholders. Develop a plan for addressing cultural trauma using a four-step model.

How do district leaders, administrators, and school leaders approach the ever-evolving obstacle of inclusion and equity? Experience evidence-informed practices and approaches to tackle equity and inclusion (specific to LGBTQ identities) while developing your capacity to approach these challenges through exposure and analysis of real scenarios and case studies. Leave this session with a concrete action plan that embeds professional learning and accountability into your organization’s vision while developing strategies for sustained implementation and accountability policies.

How do great leaders create the conditions necessary for everyone in their school to learn, grow, and move forward in a productive direction? Learn about a framework with practitioner-proven strategies that great school leaders across the country are using every day. Become familiar with the two domains of effective leadership and the corresponding dimensions these leaders employ. Experience the framework and learn how you can employ its ideas, strategies, and reflections to become the best leader you can be for your school community.

What does it mean to ensure that every student has equitable access to high-quality teaching and learning, and how can we be more equity-minded school leaders? Unpack concrete strategies and develop a clear road map for leading your teachers, students, and school community to address instructional inequities and strengthen learning. Collaborate with national experts on effective leadership practices that will equip you to be the lead learner in your school.

Award-winning New Brunswick principal Heather Bell-Williams has an unusual habit: She visits classrooms more than 500 times a year. Now in her fourth year of the practice, Bell-Williams has made it her primary means of impacting student learning. Learn how to overcome the external and internal barriers to regular classroom visits, develop a plan for getting started, and anticipate the concerns and reactions of staff.

Build a school community of trust and collective efficacy through norms, structures, and administrative support. Cultivate high-impact teacher teams that include specialists, related service providers, special educators, English learner staff, and administrators who learn together, plan together, reflect, and assess impact on student learning together. Create organizational structures and schedules that lead to sustainable improvement, increased educator effectiveness, student achievement, and school turnaround, both in person or remote.

Learn how to develop and cultivate community in a constantly changing environment. Hear what happened when two teachers from different schools and two staff developers engaged in action research to address a serious problem of practice: What does it take to build community in the virtual and hybrid worlds? Explore what we learned, how we learned it, and what impact it had on students, the curriculum, and systems.

Video technology has the power to transform all aspects of your professional learning system, from teacher coaching to teacher-leader development to building libraries of instructional models to principal pipelines. Explore district strategies for launching, implementing, and supporting the use of video-based professional learning to create reflective and responsive practitioners and identify effects realized. Develop plans to integrate video-based professional learning in your own context.

Inspire teachers to become comfortable with video-based learning and commit to engage in the process. Empower teachers to take risks and stretch their growth potential. Amplify professional learning networks for increased impact. Leave with strategies to use video-based learning as a tool for personalized professional learning

Hear from a team of 34 instructional coaches grades K-12 who one year ago began a mission to partner with teachers to impact their instruction for the better and take student learning and achievement to the next level. East Aurora School District 131 believes that a strategic focus on instructional best practices coupled with purposeful planning for ongoing higher-order questioning and complex student thinking will positively impact student growth so that all students can reach their full potential. Learn about common districtwide models and language around instructional coaching definitions, data collection, main roles, and examples of supports. 

Transformative coaching focused on standards, student equity, and effective instructional practices has aligned our system to push our shared core beliefs and student achievement forward in Aurora Public Schools. In this presentation, we will model this process for coaching towards equity through collaboratively engaging in a case study. Participants will consider how analyzing student learning in instructional and coaching conversations can establish a culture of equity within a school. Further, participants will have an opportunity to try on the process to consider how various stakeholders can prioritize an equitable learning environment through planning for instruction. The following question will guide our session: “How does analyzing student learning place equity at the center?” 

How do effective instructional leadership teams organize and act to change the experience students are having in school? Engage with research-based tools designed to help you envision a student-focused team with equity-driven teacher efficacy, analyze your current state, and name an actionable step. Consider insights and artifacts from practicing school leaders as they focus teams on what matters most: students’ experiences.

Explore how districts overcome the challenge of identifying targeted professional learning tied to student outcomes. Experience how a case study school district used the Data Equity Walk to build leaders' capacity to identify targeted professional learning from data-driven decisions. Leave with a data protocol and process and a sample SMART plan focused on the systematic collection of balanced data to inform ongoing professional learning.

Our human nature is to seek coherence! Our brains remain hardwired to identify interconnections to establish meaning, yet we unintentionally create silos and competing priorities for teachers. Join us to empower and increase efficacy and well-being by building understanding of causal and interrelationships through transformational feedback practices and professional learning design. Learn from a state and district creating cohesion through an integration of habits, dispositions, social, emotional, and academic learning.

Given the novel and challenging circumstances of teaching during a pandemic, the issue is not whether teachers will make mistakes, but whether mistakes can serve as instruments to enable learning. Learn how to support teachers to grow comfortable and confident in their mistake-making by helping them develop the skills and competencies to recognize, react to, and repair them. Explore how you can help faculty embrace and leverage mistakes for the purposes of professional growth.

Leading school change that advances its status from being lowest performing to one with the highest growth scores in the state requires effective leaders who establish systems and structures that result in significant improvements. Examine the leadership efforts to establish a school climate based on trust, collaboration, and collective responsibility to effect these changes, and leave with practical examples of protocols and procedures that ground a school in enduring change.

The Texas Network for School Improvement has been using math as an entry point to address inequities across middle school student groups. Learn how the network creates a safe environment for leaders in the classroom, school building, and district to learn and collaborate through the use of a structured continuous improvement process. Explore the use of empathy interviews and other processes to gather student input to support root cause analysis. Practice the empathy interview protocol, including data analysis. Examine and use Innovation Configuration maps for effective math teaching practices to generate possible change ideas. Reflect and consider how it applies in your context.

Do you see cracks in the implementation of new initiatives at your school? Repair these cracks and build a solid blueprint for change by learning through a process partnered with quality indicators for each step. Leave with an action plan to support your school.

How can preschool function in an online world? Learn how to create a preschool program that extends into your community in person and online with engaging, culturally sustaining, and research-based methods. Using Zoom, Canvas, and extensive professional learning, this early childhood program has made the leap into virtual learning with online home visits, literacy development, and relationship building while preparing students for kindergarten.

See how partnerships expanded local capacity and transformed professional learning experiences into a blended learning format. By engaging teacher leaders to realign and streamline topics for use on a learning management system, the partnership incorporated culturally relevant practices and job-embedded assessment assignments into existing professional learning. Learn practical principles of asynchronous learning and adult learning theory, and apply these strategies to increase relevance and take programs to scale.

Compassionate schools promote healing and equity, support families, and build student and staff well-being and resiliency. Gain tools to assess leadership practices and build a network of compassionate school leaders. Learn how your school community can incorporate practices for improving school culture and climate, improving wraparound services, enhancing family involvement, and involving students in co-creating their own guidelines for compassionate self-care and community care.

Many schools and districts have adopted evidence-based practices to promote social and emotional learning for students, but how do you set up the right conditions and experiences for adults so they are prepared and confident to lead SEL? Hear the voices of educators in districts and schools, explore tools for adult SEL, experience simulated staff meetings, and customize a learning activity to use in your workplace.

Explore how  Miami Dade Public Schools address professional learning by developing virtual sessions of endorsements programs, professional tutorials, onboarding, mentoring, coaching, collaboration, planning, and professional learning conferences due to the pandemic. Learn how sessions were pivoted from face-to-face to virtual format to support all district personnel that serves as an exemplar for large urban school districts to model in meeting challenges presented by the pandemic.

Explore how to use transformation coaching to accelerate building teacher capacity and yield systemic change in schools and districts. Learn how to foster results-driven and collaborative conversations to enhance the coaching cycle. Leave understanding how to infuse actionable feedback that supports content building and instructional delivery.

Learn how coaches and mentors effectively support novice teachers to build and transform efficacy and increase student learning. Explore one district's induction program, which combines principles of practice and formative feedback to increase equity for learners and promote teacher efficacy that results in student learning. Experience the empowering Problems of Practice Protocol. Leave with key components of an induction program focused on teacher and student growth. 

Expand your tool kit with specific coaching strategies that support adult emotional well-being and growth. Learn professional coaching strategies for supporting people during difficult times. Leave with increased skills for empowering yourself and others to be resilient and efficacious in times of stress.

Teacher leaders are instrumental to the academic achievement of all learners. The Hawai'i Department of Education provides numerous ways teachers can pursue leadership opportunities that, in turn, support students, staff, and school-level stakeholders. From mentoring beginning teachers to implementing action research and passion projects, and finally elevating teacher voice through advocacy work, Hawaii’s teacher leaders are continuing to promote learner success through value-added initiatives and opportunities.

Identify the unique characteristics of long-term English learners and explore research-based practices to engage and support them. Using an equity lens, you will focus on oral language discourse and reading complex, grade-level texts to promote academic achievement for long-term English learners. Learn leadership practices that facilitate and sustain long-term English learners' achievement to help leaders and coaches embed the work in their everyday practice.

Increase your awareness of the relationship between cultural competence, culturally responsive education, and hip-hop pedagogy. Building on research-based best practices, learn practical strategies for engaging secondary students in literacy instruction through hip-hop pedagogical approaches. Leave with practical tips for implementing hip-hop pedagogical approaches to engage diverse learners.

Experience firsthand people-first and work-first practices used by school leaders to strategically care for the adults in their school buildings. Assess your personal resilience and explore the connection between resilience, self-care, and social-emotional learning. Use a framework for crisis leadership to position your learning and application.

Examine strategies to build teacher leadership capacity that impacts student learning outcomes. Learn and practice ways to support the work of professional learning communities (PLCs) among thought partners working collaboratively in your school. Explore how to develop the leadership capacity of teachers that impacts PLC work and school culture. Learn ways to connect professional learning to teachers’ work in their PLCs, and leave with an action plan for supporting teachers in PLCs.

Ensuring that all educators understand and implement high-quality instruction that yields ambitious outcomes for all learners requires a different model of professional learning. Analyzing live teaching practice is at the heart of one district's model, where educators create a shared understanding of high-quality instruction that provides coherence across the district. Explore the research behind the need for a shared understanding of high-quality instruction and why it is so challenging to achieve. Learn about the district’s approach to defining high-quality instruction. Examine the intent behind the professional learning design, and experience the active learning component of the district’s approach.

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 that incorporated long-range vision, an instructional coaching model, a 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.

Understand how memory works and how to create experiences that engage learners of all ages in deep learning. Learn about and experience a brain-friendly model of learning that taps into the power of curiosity, intrinsic motivation, and the science of learning to help learners master new knowledge and skills, practice and reflect on their learning, and, ultimately, extend and apply what they’ve learned so that it sticks.

There is no silver bullet in professional learning. Transformative professional learning in one setting may only lead to middling impacts in other settings. While there is limited research on effective professional learning, there is anecdotal evidence on the nuances of what types of professional learning works (and why it doesn’t). Explore what we can learn from anecdotal and emerging evidence from job-embedded professional learning such as mentoring, coaching, and teacher leadership. Consider the nuances of implementation, context, and resources that may impact the effectiveness of professional learning as well as the implications of anecdotal evidence on professional learning for research and practice.

Learn how new digital tools can be used to enhance professional learning. 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.

The intent of an effective coaching program is to create equity and excellence in both teaching and learning. For the program to influence positive results for students, a variety of conditions must be in place. Learn what these conditions are and how they impact learning for students as well as for teachers. Walk away with examples from the book Coaching Matters and practical tools from various districts, including sample documents defining the roles of coaches and the coach champion, job descriptions, agreements between coaches and others, and an assortment of sample protocols. Presenters will model virtual learning strategies to support the learning of teachers and coaches.

Explore the seven factors researchers have identified that must be in place for instructional coaches to flourish. Gain strategies to help coaches understand the complexities of adult learning, create an instructional playbook, examine data, and use video. Learn the essential beliefs and habits of conversation that instructional coaches can internalize and practice. Examine effective leadership qualities and what your system must do to support coaches.

The role of the instructional coach changed dramatically during the pandemic. With the sudden shift to remote learning, many coaches became resource providers. When this is the only role that a coach plays, it can diminish the impact of the coaching program overall. Join this session to redefine what coaching is and isn’t, reset expectations for participation, and help those you lead to realign their understanding of how coaching supports student learning. Leave this session with a vision for how student-centered coaching can transform teaching and learning in your school.

Instead of leading to school transformation, equity implementation all too often reinforces a vicious cycle of failure because the keys to success are missing and the purpose of the effort is muddled. This session will bring clarity to what equity is all about so we can address it through specific actions: behaviors, practices, and policies. To that end, participants will experience a transformative process and acquire a pragmatic framework that they can use to guide successful equity implementation by centering belonging and dignity.

Many states have developed standards focused on culturally responsive and sustaining education. Despite new standards and the popularity of culturally responsive instruction, there are too few instructional coaches trained to support teachers' ability to implement it fully. In this preconference session, we will cover the Ready for Rigor approach to culturally responsive instruction. We will look at coaching moves to help teachers go beyond superficial applications of culturally responsive pedagogy. In addition, participants will learn how a collaborative inquiry approach within a professional learning community can increase teacher effectiveness in the practice of culturally responsive instruction to help students accelerate their learning.

Teacher leadership is a powerful strategy for continuous improvement of teaching and learning to attain equity and excellence. It promotes collaborative cultures, equitable learning environments, teacher agency and credibility, improved decision-making, and a dynamic teaching force. When lead teachers take responsibility for what matters most, increased student learning, innovation and change occur. Using A Systemic Approach to Elevating Teacher Leadership (Killion et al., 2016) as a guide, we will explore steps to improve teacher leadership in your school and district.

We have learned much as a field during pandemic teaching and distance learning. Let’s use that knowledge to rethink schools. What should schools look like in the future? How can students take responsibility for their learning? It’s time to build teacher and student agency and recover learning for everyone. 

Multilingual students present opportunities to make schools more inclusive and more equitable for all students. Discover how all educators in a school can learn more about students' diversity and bring multiple perspectives into the classroom through literacy and language-rich instruction that integrates students' backgrounds, assets, and needs. Analyze ways that school leaders can set the tone for equitable schooling that is culturally and linguistically responsible while also showcasing classroom-level outcomes collectively. Examine sample lessons and text sets.

The ability to examine the link between specific mathematics teaching practices and student learning requires that teachers build new understandings, skills, and mindsets. Engage in a coaching and professional learning process that increases teacher effectiveness through formative assessment of student learning aligned with mathematics curriculum standards and research-based instructional practices. Explore ways of using this process to help teachers come to know their students as mathematical thinkers and take concrete action toward equity in the math classroom. Plan for implementation of this lab approach in your own setting to empower teachers and students as mathematicians and improve mathematics achievement.

Even though there is a plethora of research to point educators in the right direction, quality implementation of evidence-based strategies remains a consistent and widespread challenge when it comes to school improvement efforts. When educators share a sense of collective efficacy however, it results in the deep implementation of evidence-based practices. During this session, we’ll share ways to tap into the sources of collective efficacy through powerful professional learning to build support in schools and classrooms.

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. Gain a deeper understanding of the feedback process and how to employ 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, 2nd edition by Joellen Killion.

Visualize the worst presentation that you have ever been a part of as an adult learner. Now visualize the best one. No doubt there is a considerable difference between the two professional learning opportunities. Learn the answers to three basic questions: What are 20 strategies that I can use to make my professional learning experience unforgettable? What are techniques that result in sustained adult behavior change? What are 10 things that keep adults living well beyond the age of 80?

Learn how to plan, implement, and measure high-quality professional learning so you and your team can achieve success with your system, your school, and your students. Gain understanding of the value and need for effective professional learning that impacts student learning and achievement. Examine the Standards for Professional Learning in an interactive setting, and practice using them as a measure of success. Dive into a variety of strategies for engaging adult learners. Reflect on your system’s needs, and design a plan for putting your learning into practice.

While the pandemic revealed the fault lines of the education system, it has provided an opening to mobilize and transform the status quo. New forces arising from Covid-19 include more active learning for students, innovation by teachers, more participation from parents, and more opportunity for leadership to impact learning. Explore a coherence framework and strategies to deepen student learning, foster well-being, and address equity in schools, districts, and systems. This highly interactive session will use video, simulations, and case examples to highlight strategies that focus direction for collective purpose, cultivate collaborative cultures for change, deepen learning, and secure accountability to measure progress.

School leadership teams have the potential to positively impact their school community and develop collective leader efficacy as a team in the process. Collective leader efficacy develops when the leadership team works together, understands the complexities of working as a group, has confidence in each other’s ability to improve learning conditions for students, and develops the competence to do so. In this session, school leadership teams will learn the necessary driver, focus, contributor, preconditions, and practices to develop collective leader efficacy.