Beyond Diversity is a powerful, personal transforming two-day seminar designed to help administrators, staff, and stakeholders understand the impact of race on our lives, our work, and our learning. Interactive and stirring exercises strengthen participants’ critical consciousness of race and leads them to investigate the role that racism plays in deinstitutionalizing achievement disparities. Most importantly, it models and teaches a protocol for discussing race in ways that are productive, insightful and generative. We cannot solve the problems created by racism without discussing race, and Beyond Diversity with a 25-year history and over 100,000 alumni, imparts a method for having a Courageous Conversation.

Implement high-impact, equity-minded systems and site-based reforms by listening first and designing second. Experience and internalize the five modes of design thinking as a continuous improvement strategy. Reflect on the power of each mode and strategize potential applications of design thinking for a change effort in your local context. Build capacity to cultivate a culture of collaboration and power cycles of team learning when solving big problems.

Join Crystal Gonzales, Aida Walqui and Renae Skarin to learn high-quality, educative curriculum is a fundamental component of an educational program that helps students access rigorous content and prepares English learners for college and career. Learn fundamental design principles and guidelines for selecting or adapting high-quality materials that will support educators in improving educational outcomes for English learners. Examine sample lessons featuring specific scaffolds that simultaneously promote access to language and content. Practice reviewing learning materials and making suggestions for improvement.

Learn how your beliefs can be reinforced or undermined by a rigorous multimethod approach to research. Explore a variety of methods, including quantitative analysis, case studies, qualitative methods, meta-analyses, and syntheses of meta-analyses. Engage in a case study addressing a problem of practice through the lens of alternative research methods. Discover how you can become better advocates for the best available research and, along the way, be willing to challenge some of the prevailing myths of education.

Learn about an innovative model of professional learning in which mathematical content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and knowledge of student thinking are developed within the actual work of teaching. Understand equitable practices and how they can be developed within the model of professional learning. Investigate instructional routines and consider the affordances of teacher learning and student learning through engagement in the routines and analysis of lesson artifacts. Leave prepared to integrate components of the model of professional learning in your own setting.

This workshop will expose participants to a powerful three-pronged whole-school model for advancing equity in our schools: Social and Emotional Learning, Restorative Practices, and Brave Conversations about race. The foundation of the equitable school is social and emotional learning for all members of the community. SEL skills enable both young people and adults to build meaningful relationships – and research tells us that young people both need and crave such connections, and that adults are not given adequate preparation in these skills prior to assuming their roles in schools. Restorative practices, and circles especially, offer a powerful container in which to practice these skills and build a deep sense of community. Participants will gain tools and strategies for framing cross-racial conversations about race and racism and engage in an interactive experience of a brave space, through enlightening, meaningful and supportive conversation.

Teacher leadership as a means to improving schools is a powerful strategy to promote effective, collaborative teaching practices that lead to increased student achievement, improve decision-making at the school and district level, and create a dynamic teaching profession for the 21st century. Explore steps to improve teacher leadership in your schools and districts. Identify and challenge assumptions that interfere with the goals of teacher leadership. Foster a collaborative culture with the ability to manage and lead change.

Effective educators in schools today must be culturally responsive in practice to effectively support educational equity for each student. Learn key practices for developing educators’ culturally responsive practice through co-constructed school-community learning experiences. Experience through simulations learning opportunities anchored in community engagement experiences that support the development of culturally responsive practices among teachers and leaders. Develop plans for implementing school-community learning experiences for developing culturally responsive educators in their home schools, districts, and programs.

Transform your school with instructional excellence, collaborative professional learning, reflective culture, and collective leadership. Build strategic, intentional systems of supports to strengthen principal and teacher leadership, goal setting, sustained professional learning, coaching, and data analysis. Identify the areas in your schools that need to be strengthened, and learn specific strategies for improving them within a system of continuous improvement.

Teaming and collaboration catalyze learning today in schools and systems. This session will provide guidance and tools to help educators engage effectively in teams and turn toward difficult conversations and situations to enhance collaboration. Explore 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.

Increase your effectiveness as a presenter and facilitator. Learn ways to promote your presentations, manage groups, effectively give directions, scaffold strategies for interesting presentations and effective facilitation. Extend your personal skills and repertoire for delivering important content and navigating group dialogues and discussions.

Engage with a story of educational transformation - informed by the knowledge of our teachers, students and community; grounded in the wisdom of our indigenous people; weaving together a global education conversation, an empowering curriculum, and learning sciences. Explore the role that school and district leadership play. Experience the frameworks and processes used to support and sustain the work and explore the possibilities for applying them in your context.

After years of pushing relentlessly on tested achievement, there is a growing realization that young people now need to focus more on leading lives of meaning and purpose, develop self-confidence in who they are, and have a sense of belonging to other people and to something bigger than themselves. Discover how we as educators can support students to succeed and thrive. Learn how to expand your definitions of learning, promote students’ well-being, and help them grow in confidence and joy. Examine inspiring cases of schools that strengthen students' learning, engagement, identity, and well-being. Reflect with peers on their own efforts to move beyond a preoccupation with achievement and effort toward a wider commitment to learning and development.

Explore the Global Education Innovation Initiative, a research-practice collaborative that supports the transformation of public education to empower youth to participate civically and economically in a rapidly changing world. The initiative conducts research, engages in informed dialogues, and develops curriculum. Dive into the results of three studies examining the contributions of ambitious curriculum in guiding the development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills that enable students to become self-authoring individuals in a complex and uncertain world. Examine how highly effective teacher professional development programs in 10 countries support teachers in gaining the competencies to lead students in powerful learning. Learn about a professional development approach that is anchored in the development of project-based curriculum aligned with real-life challenges, as reflected in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Systems can be difficult to describe. All of us know the respiratory system exists, but few can explain its essential roles and responsibilities in sustaining living organisms. Effective learning systems are no less difficult to describe. Join this session, based on the book Becoming a Learning System, and focus on the essential attributes of a learning system, roles and responsibilities of key players, strategies for building district- and school-based learning agendas for learning teams, and how systems thrive in a cycle of continuous improvement. Hear how one district made the journey to become— from district leadership to school-based leadership teams—a model system of learning. Learn about the successes and the challenges; leave with strategies you can use to apply to an issue in your own district for which professional learning is an appropriate response.

Based on the latest book in Learning Forward’s “learning series,” this session focuses on the actions of the professional learning team in the application of a five-stage cycle of continuous learning. Participants will explore case studies and learn about ideas and actions that support the development of learning teams that experience and model professional learning that is long term, sustained, and standards driven; grounded in a cycle of continuous improvement; and capable of inspiring all to take responsibility for the learning of every adult and student in the school.

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 among teachers. Learn how to create a culture in which educators routinely exchange feedback, engage in interactions, and assess the effectiveness of feedback. Gain a deeper understanding of the feedback process and how to employ it to promote increased educator effectiveness.

Participants will receive a copy of The Feedback Process: Transforming Feedback for Professional Learning, by Joellen Killion.

All students deserve excellent foundational skills instruction that sets them on paths to college and career. But just what does equitable, standards-aligned, high-quality foundational skills instruction in a K-2 classroom look like? This session will focus on the components of a strong foundational skills experience for all students, including turnkey resources to build content knowledge and an observation tool that supports improvement of teacher practice though coaching, reflection, planning, or professional learning.

Bridge the gap between the current state of mathematics instruction and your vision of success for all students. Explore how Innovation Configuration (IC) maps can serve as tools to support the work of instructional leaders in your efforts to promote deep mathematical understanding in students. Learn about ways IC maps, rooted in research-based mathematics teaching practices, can provide opportunities for purposeful reflection on progress, inform action plans based on teacher and student learning needs, and support dialogue and ongoing learning designed to build a stronger instructional program.

Many schools have not been able to pivot from developing cultural proficiency to using culturally responsive practices to raise achievement scores. This session will focus on designing learning experiences for teachers that help them use culture as a cognitive scaffold rather than as multicultural "window dressing" in lessons and units. Examine tools and scripts to shift negative deficit thinking about student learning ability. Learn coaching strategies for designing lessons, units, and instructional activities that are cognitively demanding and engaging for students in ways that expand students' ability to carry more of the cognitive load.

Educators know that collaborative professional learning strengthens instructional practice and enhances student learning, but the reality is that collaborative learning does not always lead to improved practice. Explore a transformative professional learning model that uses continuous improvement cycles, teacher-led video study of classroom practice, and student-facing rubrics to strengthen instructional practice and enhance student learning. Learn key practices to step up site-based collaborative learning, including guidance for how to integrate classroom video and strategies that promote teacher and student agency.

It seems like everyone is talking about curriculum these days, particularly as districts across the country are finding more and more aligned products on the market and a variety of materials that could work for their students. Ultimately, however, the responsibility for creating a rigorous classroom environment rests with teachers, and far too often they have not been engaged in curricular decisions in meaningful ways. Learn how two districts have moved past engagement lip-service into real, thoughtful discussion and feedback to ensure the right decisions are made and that there is lasting ownership distributed throughout the teacher community. Learn from leaders from Baltimore City Public Schools (MD) and Orange County Department of Education (CA) about their successes, challenges, and recommendations for others. In this interactive session, participants will gain hands-on practice with planning tools and protocols while collaborating with the facilitators, curriculum adoption experts, and each other.

Today’s schools must strive to ensure every student can succeed. Indeed, most are not currently designed to ensure equity. Come question your assumptions about the role of teachers as leaders who can partner with principals to advance the individual and organizational learning needed for equitable schools. Examine schools’ use of an equity framework to transform educators’ beliefs, practices and policies, and collaborate with colleagues to create a powerful plan.

Learn how to effectively implement anti-bias instruction in your classroom. Explore practical strategies for accomplishing academic and social and emotional goals. Discuss learning conditions that honor all identities and reflect diversity, equity, and justice. Explore ready-to-use materials, apply rigorous standards, and plan ways to incorporate research-based teaching practices, and leave with ideas and tools for transforming your classroom and school.

Imagine consistently presenting with purpose and intention in any setting with a choreographer’s mindset. Learn how communicative intelligence can enhance your ability to communicate with greater congruence and authenticity in any setting, including one-on-one, committee, and entire staff meetings. Explore the essential abilities of effective presenters, including credibility, rapport, reading a group, listening, acknowledging, responding, and recovering with grace. Practice strategies for handing challenging questions and comments from participants with dignity while maintaining a positive group dynamic.

Visualize the worst presentation that you have ever been a part of as an adult learner. Now visualize the best. No doubt there is a considerable difference between the two. Examine six principles of adult learning theory that should be considered when interacting with faculty, staff, and professional learning communities. Experience 10 characteristics of quality professional learning that should be applied when implementing professional development. Plan your next professional learning incorporating some of the 20 brain-based strategies that take advantage of the ways adult and student brains learn best.

Much of our joy and sorrow in life, and our success and failure at work, are the direct result of our relationships. Our relationships flourish or fail depending on how well we communicate. Learn how to listen and communicate with empathy, find common bonds, and build emotional connections. Develop the beliefs and habits that lead to better conversations and more life-giving conversations.