Preconference Sessions

Learn how one district developed ongoing professional learning for all assistant principals using research-based best practices on classroom instruction, teacher retention, and positive climate in schools. Explore how the district developed and implemented a division-wide action research model. Collaborate with others to create coaching protocols and develop an action plan for your context.

Explore ways to develop women leaders within your organization. Examine current research and engage in hands-on activities that inspire women leaders to impact organizational success. Learn strategies for developing a development program for women in leadership with perspectives from leaders representing two Colorado school districts involved this work.

Explore how central office and school leaders can center student experience to set their leader professional learning agenda. Learn processes and tools for engaging with students and using student experience to create visions for student learning and instruction. Examine the important role of leadership reflection on racial equity as a key part of personal and professional development.

The principal as an effective instructional leader is an essential necessity to drive professional learning. But who supports principals in this deep and meaningful learning? Learn how principals can navigate the instructional landscape and develop their instructional leadership capacity while connecting the learning of multiple organizational learning systems. Experience the journey of Santa Fe Independent School District's development of the senior principal model. Leave with a blueprint of a model supporting principal development through mentoring, organizational systems of instructional accountability, and ready-to-use instructional tools.

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.

As school and district leaders strive to design and implement improvement strategies to meet the needs of their educators and students, tools steeped in improvement science can prove beneficial to their success. Explore real-time strategies for the effective use of logic models and theories of change to undergird improvement efforts.

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.

Learn how one district used an eight-step evaluation process to assess the impact of its English learner program and make data-based decisions on future directions. Examine multiple data collection methods. Gain understanding of the challenges your district may face and how to overcome them. Reflect on your context to identify potential stakeholders. Create an action plan for implementing a program review.

Explore the components of the Districts Advancing Racial Equity (DARE) tool, which brings together what is known about district actions that can support racial equity. Practice using the tool to build staff capacity, use data-informed decision-making, and track progress toward more racially equitable opportunities and outcomes. Strengthen capacity to address key areas of district practice to build on the strengths and respond to the needs of students of color.

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.

What if making an intentional shift in the way you lead change in schools could greatly increase the likelihood of success? Learn a simple three-step framework to integrate self and team development in designing your next change effort. Apply this to map out a high-level timeline, begin self-reflection, and sketch out an initial assessment of the situation. Leave energized with a clear road map for productive change.

During a year of evolving needs, coaches and mentors provided constant, timely support to strengthen educators’ instructional practices. Learn how a district amplified this precious resource with coach-mentor triads in their new teacher program and applied data-driven practices to illuminate the impact, open dialogue among stakeholders, and respond to ongoing teacher needs. Examine how a coaching program is planned, evaluated, and improved using the Assessing Impact methodology.

Examine strategies for school leader induction that overcome obstacles in a large, mostly rural state, such as remoteness, turnover, and variation in school size, structure, and achievement. Explore promising practices for developing a well-functioning community of practice virtually for school leaders. Learn about the Logic Model for the Alaska School Leadership Academy and the outcomes and challenges based on four years of implementation.

Learn some of the most common traps and tropes that thwart school equity work. Examine the traps and tropes in action and learn ways to identify, unpack, and disrupt them. Leave this session with new ideas for recentering equity in your day-to-day work.

Consider how schools can move beyond one-shot equity professional learning and develop robust teams that create context-specific plans to dismantle racism. Explore how the use of equity improvement cycles builds capacity for school teams and cross-school collaboration and support. Learn from four principals of color about the process and teamwork and leave with protocols, resources, and materials to begin your context-specific team journey.

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.

This session will address the importance of transformational leadership. School culture provides the context for all good strategies. A transformational leader understands how to motivate, develop talent, and build consensus. Today’s era of constant change requires leaders who understand the development of human capital. We will examine four leadership competencies: communication, trust building, professional support, and accountability.

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.

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.

Increase your effectiveness as a school leader and your ability to lead ongoing professional learning in your organization. The work is grounded in research by The Wallace Foundation on the impact of effective principals on student learning and provides participants strategies and approaches to assist in leading high-achieving schools. Through lively conversations, sharing experiences and strategies, and focusing on increasing success for students, all participants will engage in meaningful learning that matters in their service to others.