This session starts with an honest question: what brought you to this work, and is it still feeding you? Exhaustion and burnout is an ongoing threat to retaining passionate, experienced leaders: this session explores research on resiliency, leadership development, and collaborative action to support participants in identifying what's depleting them, find what gives them energy, and build a personal sustainability plan they can actually use.
The hardest problems rarely get solved by one person with the right expertise. They’re solved when the right people are engaged. This session explores how to identify and engage stakeholders, including unlikely ones, in ways that generate real buy-in, surface solutions you wouldn't have found alone, and distribute the weight of complex decisions more broadly. Leaders who do this well don't just build better programs; they build a network that sustains them.
This session explores the gap between having good ideas and having the authority to act on them, and what's available to leaders working inside systems they don't fully control. Participants map their own power bases, analyze the stakeholders standing between them and a priority they care about, and practice building a narrative that can move people that data alone won't reach.
Leaders in education are increasingly being called to address problems they were never designed to solve alone, like workforce shortages, rural access, and structural inequities. In a time when complexity is high, resources are strained, and polarization threatens collaboration, leaders are being asked to do more, and move faster, than ever before. This session introduces participants to the benefits of moving beyond institutional walls and addressing issues in collaboration with diverse community stakeholders. Participants will explore individual and institutional practices that support adaptation when the path isn’t clear, with a focus on building individual’s capacity for relationship building and collaboration, the power of transparency, and the importance of slowing down and sensemaking before acting.
Leaders in education are excellent problem-solvers, but the most pressing challenges require the ability to see a system clearly, understand what's actually driving the outcomes you're seeing and build a plan grounded in those realities rather than in wishful thinking. This session introduces participants to systems thinking as a practical leadership skill that helps to diagnose your situation more accurately, allowing you to act more strategically.
Today’s IEP meeting participants have access to more information, resources, and recommendations than ever before. Social media, AI, and outside influencers are readily available and full of ideas. When team members are operating from different sources of data/expectations, collaboration and consensus building can be challenging. This session focuses on providing special education administrators with tools and strategies to support robust student-centered conversations and team decision-making when External Forces and Influences enter the IEP meeting.
