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.

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.

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.

Learn how to create a systemic professional learning community (PLC) plan involving all stakeholders from the ground up. See how one district built capacity across district departments, campus administration, and teacher leaders, allowing all collaborative teams to function at high levels for improved student learning. Learn how to leverage the most important ideals of PLCs with specific frameworks and resources you can take back to your schools.

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.

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.

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.

See student ownership of learning in action. Learn the replicable collaborative teaming structure that yielded this student agency. Hear site leaders candidly share how they built their own professional capacity to lead and scale this work. Review the steps leaders took to prepare teachers for contributing on professional teams dedicated to increasing student ownership of learning. Replicate the process at your site.

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.

Learn how trauma response symptoms impact development and disrupt learning. Work through a case study to create a trauma-informed safety plan that identifies potential triggers and signs of escalation, along with calming strategies to address challenging behaviors. Develop a plan to share these trauma-informed practices with other educators and support staff working with students exposed to trauma.

Embracing community cultural wealth allows educators to see and value their students of color. This research-based model invites participants to leverage these forms of capital to strengthen students’ sense of self and learning at school and at home. Explore cultural wealth as a tool for social and emotional practice that moves teaching and learning closer to being anti-racist.

Learn how the Austin ISD’s professional learning team shifted to onboarding new hires in a virtual environment using andragogical best practices. Walk through the professional learning scope and sequence for a new instructional staff member, including a district welcome and multiple professional growth opportunities throughout the year. Leave with examples of tools and protocols that you can personalize for your own district’s use.

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.

Examining the literature clearly reveals the need to overhaul traditional grading practices, yet creating systemic change in secondary schools is often challenging. Many schools understand the "why" behind shifting grading practices but often lack practical steps to implement much-needed change. Leveraging the work of professional learning communities, learn how you can implement steps within your collaborative teams to improve grading practices at the secondary level.

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.

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.

Learn how teacher leaders from Denver Public Schools used action research to develop unique communities of practice that focus on anti-racist and culturally responsive pedagogies and result in real-time student and educator impact. Explore, through three different examples, how the action research model of professional learning can be adapted and applied across varied school contexts to drive measurable change and increase equitable, culturally responsive teaching.

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.

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.

As America continues to fracture, the humanities offer the language of shared identity and experiences. Drawing from scholarly and instructional resources developed by the National Humanities Center, this session will explore interdisciplinary approaches to finding common ground through literature, art, and music in the English language arts classroom. From the beautiful vignettes of Whitman, Alabama, to the graffiti of social movements in the Middle East, we will discover and discuss open educational resource best practices in the context of culture, identity, and history.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Investigate the elements of curriculum-based professional learning and their application to your curriculum implementation efforts. Compare and contrast your approach to planning professional learning with others who seek to ensure teachers experience the kind of inquiry-based learning they want for their students. Expand your tool kit for planning effective curriculum-based professional learning.

As students and educators cope with a pandemic, racism, and other stressors, schools need social and emotional learning with meaningful implementation, sustainability, and, most importantly, cultural responsiveness. Learn about a social, emotional, and cultural competencies framework that supports educators as they explore their assumptions and beliefs, develop and model their own skills, engage in responsive practices, and reflect to continuously improve. Examine how the framework connects social and emotional learning with culturally responsive teaching, supports anti-racist and anti-marginalization practice, and is foundational to achievement of academic standards. Gain strategies for applying it in your context, practice using it, and plan for next steps.