Conference Sessions

Do your school turnaround efforts start strongly only to fizzle out or become filled with challenges that can’t be overcome a few months later? Are you relying on hero leadership to drive school reform efforts? This session examines strategies and techniques to power school turnaround by focusing the work from a team-centered approach. Through the use of action boards and daily stand-ups, your school leadership team will break down annual goals into manageable sub-goals, action steps, and definitions of done that are directly connected to improving student achievement. A focus on metrics and how to measure progress on a daily basis within 15 minutes will be shared with real-world examples of effective school turnaround. Escape the daily “to do” list! Note: Participants are encouraged to have either a current year school improvement plan or one that is being developed for the 2021-22 school year.

Hybrid instruction is a new model of teaching that combines face-to-face and virtual teaching into a cohesive experience. Spend time exploring classroom and teaming structures and task development to ensure a rigorous learning experience for both “brick” and “click” students.

Learn to make your classroom truly student-centered. This means giving students the authority, capacity, and responsibility to own their learning. Developing student ownership builds academic motivation that, in turn, leads to increased student achievement. Walk away with a variety of methods to implement the most effective and efficient, research-based strategic learning practices in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and climate that foster this ownership.

Many people get caught up on the title of leader or manager. Whether you are a district, school, or classroom leader, educators can lead or manage from any place or any position. Regardless of their position or status, everyone in almost any situation has an opportunity to help manage situations and influence others in a way that makes a positive difference. Sometimes leaders must manage, and at other times, managers must lead. But what is the difference between leadership and management? And how does this apply to leading and managing within the educational setting? Thankfully, the science of human behavior can clearly define and anchor all leadership and management theories and approaches into 5 scientific laws that can be easily applied through simple and deliberate coaching interactions.

In this talk, the presenters, who have been fortunate enough to use science to help thousands of children with disabilities, parents, students, educators, managers, and leaders across the country achieve various valued outcomes, will share the practical application of the science of human behavior for improving valued outcomes across educational settings.

Imagine yourself on the highest mountain in the world. You have to deal with the physiological effects of extreme altitude–along with bone-chilling temperatures, battering winds, and a climbing team that’s counting on all of its members to make smart decisions. There’s simply no room for poor judgment — one mistake or misstep can result in an “unrecoverable error.”

In any situation where lives on are the line or the stakes are exceptionally high–there’s no better training ground for leaders than settings where people are pushed beyond their perceived limits. Drawing on her experience as team captain of the first American Women’s Everest Expedition, Alison Levine makes a compelling case that the leadership principles that apply in the world of extreme adventure also apply to today’s rigorously competitive business environments.

Does wealth and race define the type of education children receive? Why are students of color and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds often overrepresented in academic and behavioral interventions and underrepresented in gifted classes? Systemic instructional inequity means that often, advantaged students stay advantaged and disadvantaged students stay disadvantaged. Schools can become the great equalizer that children need them to be.

“Restorative Student Agency” is an instructional equity framework that explains the critical relationships between agency, equity, and academic rigor. In this interactive keynote presentation, award-winning education author and LSI’s founder and CEO Michael D. Toth will share his own experience as a student from a low socioeconomic background, as well as the four instructional equity mindsets of educators and the classroom indicators of low vs. high student agency.