Learning Forward Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn how to use evidence-based approaches to inform equitable practices in your approach to selecting high-quality materials, initiating strong instructional strategies, and using informed assessment actions. Gain an understanding of what evidence-based means in relation to these three triangulated foundations of education. Delve into key resources, helpful protocols, and procedures that will empower both educators and leaders to bring this learning back to their educational communities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explore how educators can connect with students who do not view education as cool. Discuss and reflect upon student sentiment of education being cool regarding students of color. Unpack how district pillars, tools, and programs such as the Racial Equity Analysis Protocol (REAP), Affirming Racial Equity (ARE) tool, and Equity Monitoring Progress Tool (EMPT), support school systems to build communities of C.O.O.L.: Confident, Optimistic, Ongoing, Learners.

Develop an actionable understanding of how to leverage the inclusive excellence principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice to build and sustain a culture of belonging. Discover how a peer-led professional learning model cultivates the strengths of various members of the organization around a collective goal of addressing the needs of each learner. Examine best practices in honoring identities and addressing acts of exclusion.

Discuss how professional learning is a critical lever to achieve equity. Unpack the relationship between equity and educator learning using Standards for Professional Learning. Engage in collaborative activities to explore what it means to have equity in professional learning. Discover how standards support leading, teaching, and learning to achieve equitable outcomes for students.

Learn how curriculum-based professional learning is being leveraged to deepen teachers’ and leaders' content knowledge and impact student literacy as evidenced by benchmark data. Explore a model that centers students’ instructional experience, teachers' content knowledge, and the related leadership moves needed to implement and sustain these practices. Leave with a template for engaging a district and school coalition to create a vision and identify resources for curriculum-based professional learning.

Consider how educators use Learning Management Systems (LMS) every day, but they are not using the functions and applications to differentiate and engage learners. Design LMS lessons that differentiate using content, process, and products to add rigor in the digital classroom. Plan ways to use digital resources in your LMS to address the varied learning styles and strengths of your students.

Engage in the experience of applying autoethnography that will lead to identifying and analyzing participants' pivotal lived experiences in managing, leading, facilitating, and/or participating in professional learning. Extract and share the individual and collective constructed knowledge about professional learning. Propose a draft of the synthesized knowledge for an article or paper to be submitted for publication.

Reimagine learning for leadership teams at all levels with an engaging project-based professional learning (PBL) model. Discover how PBL structures can shift the focus to collaborative inquiry, learner-centered experiences, and authentic work infused with the spirit of continuous improvement. Expand your capacity to affect change and reignite your own passion for adult learning.

Explore how 90-day plans, as an extension of a continuous improvement model, help schools identify the right drivers of the work, create opportunities for short-term wins, and ultimately lead to improved student outcomes. Review the foundational thinking about the benefits of 90-day planning and elements of an effective 90-day plan. Engage in the process of formulating a simple 90-day plan you can bring back to your campus or district.

Consider what happens when you ask people to reconsider everything they've ever believed about schools, learning, and themselves. Learn practical strategies to sustain yourself and your organization during extreme levels of value-based conflicts. Hear one school district's 20-year journey to achieve equity of opportunity for all its students. Develop an understanding of the principles of adaptive, distributive, and transformational leadership theories meticulously applied by one superintendent over two decades, resulting in exemplary academic outcomes for all students.

Discuss how reflection on your practices, processes, and systems can lead to enhanced performance at all levels. Unpack how creating a safe and effective culture of collaborative inquiry starts at the top and results in regular and authentic examination of performance indicators in all areas of district and school systems. Explore how to support informed decision-making, action planning, and learning through inquiry.

Discuss how to support overwhelmed educators, who are constantly struggling to do one more thing. Consider how the constant churn of initiatives, programs, and compliance issues have become a distraction, weakening the foundation of sound educational practice and moving educators away from their primary focus – student learning. Explore the Connected Action Roadmap, a framework that helps instructional leaders build collective efficacy while creating a cycle of continuous school improvement through authentic collaboration and systems thinking.

Consider how schools that shift to collaborative cultures of learning focused on student impact through consistent feedback (including peer-to-peer), collaborative inquiry, and targeted professional learning, build teacher efficacy, wellness, and support all learners. Learn how one urban middle school shifted mindsets from compliance to feedback for continuous learning and growth, creating a culture of learning and improving student achievement for their multilingual and English language learners.

Discuss the importance of supporting principals, who play a critical role in affecting students’ academic achievement in the schools that they lead. Examine a job-embedded, asset-based, and sustainable coaching framework with a focus on equity that is essential for leading a high-performance school. Participate in a reflective analysis of your context to identify levers for creating a robust coaching program focused on excellence, equity, and efficiency.

Learn to connect the right leader with the right school by building a Leadership Tracking System (LTS). Hear how St. Lucie Public Schools (FL) developed a LTS to identify the qualifications of applicants, align professional development needs, share effective leadership preparation programs, and much more. Participants will explore ways to develop and customize a LTS designed to collect information that meets the needs of their district.

Consider the steps a district takes to implement a principal pipeline to ensure a well-prepared cadre of school leaders. Experience how Memphis-Shelby County Schools implements a pipeline that builds aspiring leaders. Hear about the components of the pipeline program including intense support, practical application opportunities, and tailored coaching to prepare fellows for a rigorous principal selection process. Leave with strategies and best practices to implement a leadership pipeline.

Learn how to develop and implement a systems approach for operationalizing data-driven professional learning resources to ensure equitable access of all critical content. Collaboratively explore modalities for delivering centralized research-based resources to support deeper understanding of specific district and/or school needs to increase student learning. Plan for monitoring processes to determine effectiveness on return on investment and impact on teaching and learning outcomes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feedback is a key component of continuous improvement. Examine the attributes of effective feedback as well as the various types, purposes, and sources of feedback. Gain a deeper understanding of the feedback process and how to apply it to continuous learning. Learn how to create a culture in which educators routinely engage in the feedback process. Participants will receive a copy of The Feedback Process: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning, 2nd edition by Joellen Killion.

The term coaching matters suggests that an effective coaching program can impact student learning in a positive way. Examine the essential characteristics of effective building-level instructional coaching programs. Leave with examples and practical tools from a variety of districts, including protocols for building relationships with teachers and principals, ways to assess the impact of coaching, sample documents defining the roles of coaches, ways coaches can improve the culture and climate of the school, and much more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear how Durham Public Schools (DPS) and UNC Chapel Hill College of Education have established an ongoing partnership in which preservice teachers are invited to join DPS's robust beginning teacher program and have access to district mentorship. Explore the idea that if education prep and districts put preservice and beginning teachers together, we could increase retention and recruitment while decreasing transition aches and pains.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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