What if the key to higher achievement isn’t more pressure—but more connection?
This engaging session explores the powerful link between students’ social-emotional well-being and academic success. Grounded in research and real-world practice, participants will examine how emotional safety, positive relationships, and intentional “love-first” leadership create classrooms where students thrive.
Through interactive activities like relationship mapping, case studies, and strategy modeling, attendees will gain practical tools to build emotionally safe, high-expectation learning environments. Participants will leave with actionable strategies to increase engagement, reduce behavioral challenges, and strengthen school culture—ready to immediately apply what they’ve learned.
This session aims to showcase the multitude of ways community can not only be taught, but experienced and ENSTILLED through engaging musical lessons that build from Kindergarten, all the way to fifth and sixth grade. Get ready to get up, get moving, sing, dance, and play through the lens of a general music classroom as we not only learn music, but EXPERIENCE it and all of the delicious hidden gems that come along!
This session is an overview of How To Know A Person by David Brooks. We will discuss the book at large but also how the concepts in the book can relate to schools and classrooms.
Strong family–school partnerships don’t happen by chance—they’re built with intention. In this interactive session, educators and leaders will explore the powerful impact of meaningful family engagement on academic achievement, social-emotional growth, and school culture. Through hands-on reflection, communication revisions, and guided event planning, participants will identify barriers, design inclusive strategies, and create a personalized action plan. Leave with practical, ready-to-use tools to strengthen relationships and elevate student success.
Limited Capacityfull Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
This session helps K-12 educators and top-down leadership recognize and respond to neuroregulatory stress in gifted students to help reduce burnout rates and improve school culture and climate. Participants will leave with practical, developmentally appropriate strategies to differentiate stress responses from common symptoms of student behavior (e.g.: ADHD/anxiety) and to shift classroom practices toward healthier, more sustainable expectations. Through case studies, reflective prompts, and small-group planning, participants will practice screening for stress patterns and design one possible change to implement in their environment.
Limited Capacityfull Adding this to your schedule will put you on the waitlist.
This is a story of how one school, Mountain Brook Junior High, took practical steps to involve students, staff, parents, and community members to make MBJH "The Most Welcoming School in America." From macro-level work in identifying beliefs to aggressively teaching those beliefs, all the way to very specific steps taken to turn the hallways into vibrant spaces full of community, come hear the story and strategy behind one school's journey.
The purpose of this session is to share best practices to help students be successful. We will identify barriers to student success, effective engagement strategies, and support strategies.
Students don’t engage deeply when they don’t feel seen, and they can’t develop meaningful interests without purposeful design. In this dynamic, interactive breakout session, we’ll explore two powerful frameworks: Jan Tønnesvang’s Four Quadrant Model, which helps us understand the whole learner, and the Four-Phase Model of Interest Development, which maps how curiosity evolves into sustained, self-driven interest. We’ll translate these frameworks into practical classroom strategies — from designing tasks that activate situational interest to creating conditions where long-term engagement and personal purpose can thrive.
