Drawing on their cutting-edge research, Andy Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley, and colleagues will show how schools can work together to initiate large-scale changes that benefit all students. Their book, Leading from the Middle provides a new model of change that ensures every child gets great teaching every year. Examine what role system leaders at the top should play to activate and energize more leadership from the middle. Leave with an understanding of how to harmonize your own approaches with other ongoing change initiatives from the top or bottom of your system.

Much has been said about creating “safe” and brave spaces to have racialized conversations.  But what happens when we are “out in the wild” beyond the confines of safe spaces and our conversations take on a racial dimension?  We will examine the skills we need to easily lead racially sensitive conversations in our classrooms with students or in professional learning spaces with adults in schools or central office. Anchoring in the neuroscience from Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, you will leave with a set of capacity-building activities to build your fluency and sense of distress-free authority in guiding challenging conversations

What efforts are involved in scaling up the Courageous Conversation throughout municipalities? Modeling the practice of adaptive leadership this panelist will contribute to the discussion by speaking to experiences that have led to healing, progression and new challenges as we navigate the complexities of achieving higher levels of racial equity at a systems level.

Research shows that fewer than 20% of teachers nationwide have access to aligned, high-quality instructional materials. This disproportionately affects our poorest students and students of color. Understand the current condition of the instructional materials market. Learn from leaders at the state, regional, district and non-profit levels about how they translate policy into action, signal the importance and indicators of quality, create incentives to “make the best choice, the easiest choice”, and support implementation to ensure quality use of materials. Gain inspiration from others’ lessons learned and identify next steps for your own work.

Gaining clarity on a district’s leadership standards, being intentional about tapping potential leaders, engaging with pre-service partners to strengthen principal preparation, and developing tracking systems to effectively document a leader’s professional journey can produce significant benefits for districts, schools, and students, new research finds. Learn how district leaders from New York City and Charlotte-Mecklenburg used these and other strategies to strengthen the principalship, decrease principal turnover, and achieved improved results for students as part of The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative.

We may not always know it, but many of our students arrive at school each day with the weight of the world on their shoulders, having experienced adversities that impact their physical and emotional wellbeing and make it incredibly difficult to excel at school. But with curiosity, compassion, and the right tools, we can create school environments where all students can thrive. This lecture will focus on how trauma and toxic stress impact student brains and what that means for school staff. Participants will learn about typical and trauma-impacted brain development, trauma-informed practices, student resilience, and the importance of staff wellness.

Assignments play a critical role in determining the degree to which students are being fully prepared for college and careers. Assignments also offer a window into instruction, teacher expectations of their students, how teachers understand their standards, and how students interact with the curriculum. Research from the Education Trust has revealed that nearly two decades after many states have adopted higher rigor standards, students continue to be given assignments far below the rigor demanded to be successful in college and careers. This session will contain a review of recent research on the quality of assignments and provide an overview of a framework for participants to analyze assignments in their schools and districts.

Research across the decades has confirmed that effective school leadership is associated with better outcomes for students and schools. But how can school districts develop and sustain a large corps of highly-qualified leaders? [LP1] A recent RAND report evaluates six large school districts’ efforts to build “principal pipelines” by better preparing, selecting, evaluating, and supporting principals, and finds that these efforts were feasible, affordable, and effective. This presentation will provide an overview of the key findings from the report, including how building principal pipelines produced positive effects in student outcomes and principal retention.

Learning Forward has long led the charge to define effective professional learning and to connect and support those responsible for leading learning in districts and schools. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, join the organization’s first executive director Dennis Sparks, who led then-NSDC until 2007. Pull up a chair for a conversation about key moments in the field’s history and the role NSDC-Learning Forward played. Share ideas about what may come next and hear Sparks’s insights from a career’s worth of experiences in educational leadership and professional learning.