Learning Forward Conference

Learn how leaders in the Memphis-Shelby County Public Schools in Tennessee implemented a universal screening process to identify a more diverse student talent pool for the gifted and talented program. Examine the project, the outcomes, and best practices based on research. Consider how to implement a universal screening protocol in your district.

Explore and interact with an innovative approach to paraeducator professional learning that has a direct impact on student achievement through the effective engagement of a school’s instructional paraeducator team. Examine how your school or organization can maximize workforce engagement to benefit students within special populations. Develop a vision and action plan for your school.

Learn how Broward County Public Schools builds the capacity of teacher leaders to drive changes in instructional practice in its most academically fragile schools through professional learning that includes peer mentorship and components of a National Board Certified Teacher program. Leave with a sample plan for building the knowledge base of teacher leaders and leveraging their collective expertise to mentor teachers in urban turnaround schools.

Learn how social and emotional learning (SEL) can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving schools and contribute to safe, healthy, and just communities. Examine one district's steps to build capacity districtwide through implementation of a comprehensive and scaffolded professional learning plan to strengthen adult SEL. Follow the district's implementation of CASEL's focus area 2 (strengthen adult SEL competencies and capacity), which includes central office expertise, professional learning for all staff, adult SEL and cultural competence and alignment of initiatives, and staff trust, community, and efficacy.

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

Explore highlights of one division’s journey in moving K-8 schools from weak or nonexistent professional learning community (PLC) cultures to collaborative inquiry and reimagined practices. Learn about division goals and nonnegotiables that foster the systematic development of both leader and teacher collective efficacy for student benefit. Collaborate with others to assess your current PLC culture and determine an action plan for reigniting your schools to higher levels of teacher and student success.

Examine the research, professional learning, and strategies one district used to transform the instructional materials adoption process, reimagine the possibilities for students with highly aligned curriculum, and structure curriculum-based professional learning. Develop knowledge and resources to implement a rigorous, equitable materials review and selection process. Analyze your current system regarding possible obstacles or catalysts toward high-quality curriculum. 

Explore how Miami Dade County Public Schools elevates recruitment efforts to amplify and diversify the education profession through Project REDI: Project Recruiting, Empowering and Developing Inclusive Male Teachers and Leaders to increase and build the men of color educator talent pool. Learn how this innovative initiative is a pipeline to building teacher and leadership capacity with men of color educators.

Explore processes to prepare candidates to step into school leadership roles. Learn the essential components of a sound principal pipeline. See a model for how a principal pipeline was built for an urban school district, and brainstorm with others to apply these ideas to your own school district.

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

Learn to create a sustainable approach to schoolwide social and emotional learning (SEL) with clear goals and an aligned plan to measure and reflect on impact. Hear from practitioners who collect and reflect on SEL data in partnership with students and families. Experience a simulated SEL team meeting, shape an SEL goal and aligned evaluation plan, and leave with tools to facilitate discussions about SEL data.

Finding inspiration and guidance from Tom Schimmer's book Grading From the Inside Out and Kotter's change process, learn about one district's two-year journey to change teacher mindset from traditional grading practices to standards-based. Learn how the work has resulted in strategically implemented changes in grading practices to increase feedback and more accurately reflect a measure of student learning, not student behavior. Leave with a sample work log sequencing the work and links to resources for each step along the journey.

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

Learn how districts can overcome the challenge of providing just-in-time support for students who have fallen behind mathematically. Experience how Lenoir City Schools is capturing additional opportunities during the school day to provide support by highly effective teachers, well-trained tutors, and the use of high-quality materials. Leave with a sample of a clearly defined program structure, including a protocol for the selection of students, tutors, and materials.

Learn how Hayward Unified School District and WestEd co-designed and facilitated the work of an equity oversight committee tasked with providing feedback and policy recommendations to the school board. Explore the core processes and tools that guided the work as well as the core tools and strategies used to build the capacity of the equity oversight committee. Experience activities and gain insights to set the stage for leading equity-centered work.

Engage in a collaborative session to explore the process of a full curriculum audit to examine resources through the lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of a robust continuous improvement cycle. Connect with global colleagues to synthesize new learning and refresh current practices. Walk away with a toolbox of look-fors and processes to examine your own curriculum resources.

Learn about research-based systems and structures to implement in a school or district to drive continuous improvement cycles through learning acceleration strategies. Explore how strategic implementation of learning acceleration leads to long-term impactful results. Curate a unique, tailored checklist for yourself that will guide assessing readiness and ability to address and successfully implement learning acceleration strategies in your home school or district. 

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

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

Learn how to develop and ultimately enable a budget that will provide funding and support in an equitable manner by optimizing internal and external stakeholder collaboration. Identify areas of inequity within a school or district. Explore ways to manage multiple stakeholder groups with diverse interests. Determine how to measure success.

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

Examine how a large, urban school district reimagined its approach to new teacher induction to provide a more equitable onboarding experience for all new hires regardless of their entry point into the district or profession. Learn concrete, practical strategies to lead to deeper new teacher engagement and investment in key district priorities. Apply research-based techniques to assess and refine current induction practices in your school or district.

Learn how districts support the changing demands and decreasing prior experience levels of new administrators. Examine how Frederick County Public Schools created a bidirectional leadership coaching program to address the district’s needs for onboarding new leaders. Leave with a road map that will help you develop your own leadership coaching program using your current human capital.

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

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

Explore ways an early childhood program can build a more integrated and cohesive approach to supporting a district's pre-K-12 graduation plan. Learn how to connect an engaging and culturally relevant early childhood program to your K-12 pathway using research-based methods. Prepare to address the professional needs of early childhood educators and build an academic foundation for young children and their families to raise performance in later grades.

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

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

Discover ways to ensure that high-quality instruction is occurring in all the classrooms in your district. Take a walk with Memphis-Shelby County leaders as they share their process for building teacher and leader capacity through collaborative classroom walk-throughs focused on high-quality instructional practices to improve student academic achievement. Leave with a model and resources to support implementation of a classroom walk-through process in your district.

Learn how Rockdale County Public Schools' leadership team collaboratively built a culturally relevant leadership framework aligned to its leadership evaluation tool. Identify your school's or district's readiness to begin the process and determine a timeline. Develop an action plan to create and then systematically and systemically implement culturally relevant leadership in your school or district.

Engage in a slice of the Project I4 micro-credential experience for school leaders in which we cultivated relational trust with engaging protocols, used common tools for observation and having post-observation conversations, and supported leaders through coaching and peer networks. Leave with tools, protocols, and an understanding of the Project I4 coaching model and data on leader and teacher impact.

Learn how the Anchorage School District in Anchorage, Alaska, has transformed professional learning for paraprofessionals from individual learning experiences into cohesive and themed professional learning that supports growth in an identified focus area throughout the year. Gain insight into how organizing professional learning for paraprofessionals around a central theme each year has provided clarity and a common goal in supporting students with special needs. Explore how this approach can strengthen your mission and provide continuity and commitment to professional learning for groups of adult learners.

Explore the latest neuroscience research on executive functioning, which impacts goal-oriented behaviors that are the foundation of learning and success in life. Identify the cognitive and emotional components of executive functioning skills, and gain insight into how they impact learning and development. Learn practical and effective strategies to develop every student’s executive functioning skills.

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

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

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

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

Learn how a district has optimized its process to collect formative data and align professional learning supports across English language arts, math, and foundational literacy. Explore strategies to close the loop between what observers see and the support provided to educators from multiple teams. Leave with practical tips for building progress monitoring into your professional learning plans.

Explore the Students' Six process, which engages groups of high school students in a process designed to provide high-quality professional learning to their teachers. Interact with a panel of students who have benefited from this process. Learn how to encourage collaboration between students and educators and discuss ways to implement the Students' Six process in your district.

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

Gain insight into how investing in administrator pipelines is an evidence-based school improvement strategy shown to improve educator retention and student outcomes. Learn how a state education agency, an institution of higher education, and local education agencies collaborated to complete self-studies and create sustainable pipeline plans based on The Wallace Foundation model for developing principal pipelines. Replicate these strategies to ensure qualified leaders are in every role, from the classroom to the superintendent's office.

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

Learn how one district's instructional technology team re-established a culture for coaching with school-based coaches by creating a shared vision and assessing the strengths and growth opportunities of the coaches' skills. Identify the key components of quality coaching. Determine and interpret the appropriate data collection methods to develop a professional learning plan of support for your coaches.

Draw on research and expertise from the fields of communication and behavior science to improve communication. Increase trust and equity with effective messaging for busy families, overworked educators, and diverse communities. Explore communication theory and practice that drives effective school communication, both internally and externally, through a 5 Pillars Framework. Examine and evaluate communication and learn practical, applicable skills for improvement by applying lessons from communication research and practitioners.

Explore a mentoring program for new principals in their journey into school leadership that districts can use for new -- and not-so-new -- professionals. Learn about resources that can help all system and school leaders make the smooth transition into school leadership’s challenges found in 2022 and beyond.

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

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

Learn about the antiracist professional learning series offered to principals in the Austin Independent School District at the height of the global health crisis and racial violence in the U.S. Engage with a community of learners to reflect on your personal influence as an educator. Create a plan of action to build personal and collective capacity to disrupt systemic inequity in your school and district.

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

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

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

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

Engage with leaders of two neighboring districts as they share ways they leveraged opportunities for building a culture of professional learning through the challenges of COVID. Learn how these two districts used this disrupted environment to strengthen a districtwide culture of ongoing learning and continual improvement in key areas. Interact with fellow conference participants to share effective strategies for moving important work in times of crisis.

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

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

Examine how equity work faces resistance in politically conservative communities. Consider your local experience as you strategize with colleagues about how to increase the positive impact of equitable learning environments in the context of the political climate. Identify ways to navigate difficult conversations and actions to plan for and respond to pushback.

Learn how innovative school leaders are reimagining social-emotional learning (SEL) in a post-COVID-19 world. Explore actionable strategies for building a systematic approach to modern SEL that also address one of the biggest influences on students: social media.

Explore ways learning organizations can create a cohesive framework to sustain collaborative learning, collective responsibility, and shared accountability. Learn how Bay City Schools, supported by the Institute for Excellence in Education, used team-based leadership and organization frameworks to create aligned and sustainable improvement goals. Gain insights into how increased collaborative learning between leaders and educators improved adult learning and student outcomes in the frame of organizational change.

Explore the GATE Program, a district-based, job-embedded alternative certification program, as an innovative solution designed to address teacher recruitment and retention needs. Learn how and why this program has proven effective as an alternative pathway for successful entry into the teaching profession. Examine a model that leverages the community’s support to attract career-changers to teaching and provides the unique support needed for these teachers to thrive in the profession for years to come.