Our training team of parents will share stories and perspectives on how school structures, mindsets, and biases can impede strong home-school partnerships. Participants will be asked to reflect on how identity, beliefs, and long-established systems inform their personal and school-wide family engagement mindsets and practices. This session aims to build an understanding of these dynamics in order to work toward authentic partnerships with students’ families. Participants will consider how their identities and personal histories inform their interactions with families, engage in dialogue to build understanding of how schools’ policies and practices impact families’ experiences with education, and practice having challenging conversations about race and equity in education.

For over a decade, Gateway to College (GTC) programs have served Massachusetts’ most vulnerable students in immersive, full-time, dual enrollment partnerships. This session will offer a deep look at program outcomes and best practices from the three original GTC sites in Massachusetts. These sites have served over 1,000 disconnected high school students since 2007. Gateway students typically enter the program at seventeen with an average high school GPA of 1.5 and less than half of the credits needed for a high school diploma. At the end of the program, 75% graduate with an average of 20 college credits. This session will provide an overview of the model and the strategies that Gateway program leaders use to ensure student engagement and success. Gateway partners will share the lessons learned over a decade of work and the strategies they have developed, which include holistic student support, identity-based motivation, and college and career readiness coaching.

Participants in this session will deepen their understanding of what is possible for struggling, disengaged high school students and learn more about the ways that rigorous instruction, holistic student support, intrusive advising, and collaboration between districts and community college partners can lead students to succeed in high school, college, and their careers.

In this workshop, participants will learn how a community mentor program breaks down barriers to equity for under-performing students and students returning to school after dropping out. Participants will also learn how leveraging community resources provides essential social-emotional support for students. Students and mentors will tell stories of the mentor-mentee experience and its impact on their lives: Everything from the experience of feeling lost and disconnected from their education and community to a place of empowerment, as well as how mentoring has enriched the lives of mentors.

The workshop will also provide participants with a road map to develop a mentorship program in their own school. Topics will include how to identify mentors, the mentor application process, mentor training, and ongoing mentor support. National and school data will underscore the profound immediate and long-term effect a mentor has on student success.

In this interactive workshop, we will orient district- and school-based practitioners to the new IES-funded Toolkit. The toolkit is designed to help district- and school-based practitioners engage in a continuous improvement effort. It provides an overview of continuous improvement and focuses on the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle. It includes tools and resources that practitioners can use to implement a continuous improvement effort in their own schools, districts, or agencies. During the workshop, we will focus on setting up for continuous improvement, assessing readiness to engage in continuous improvement, and orient participants to some of the tools and resources available to help them be successful.

Participants will hear from staff and students about their experience planning, launching, and participating in the first district-wide Superintendent’s Student Cabinet. Together, we’ll share information about our goals, plans, pitfalls, and the course-corrections we made to ensure deep and meaningful participation for all students, including English learners and students in alternative programs. Student members represent all grades 9-12, and seven high schools/programs. Participants will learn first hand from students about their interest in the cabinet (Why did I run for a Cabinet seat?), as well as their concerns (I’m not sure I can do this!), the challenges with participation, and finally, the work students are doing together to not only tackle global issues, but also help our district get better at sharing power.

Participants will be energized by students sharing their stories and make correlations between their own efforts and those undertaken in Lawrence, with the ability to consider and adapt lessons learned from our experiences. Participants will also leave with new strategies they can employ in most types of collaborative forums.

In this student-led conversation, hear from students what it was like to develop and deliver an equity training for school district leadership staff. Learn from staff how to best recruit students equitably, how to design equity and facilitation training for students, and how to prepare them to deliver to a room full of adults. Find out ways this team braided funding from various sources to bring in teacher voice and trained consultants to ensure that students had the skills they needed to deliver an equity training. Learn how, even in the midst of a superintendent transition, a new office of equity and community engagement helped to empower students and drive action items resulting from the training.

Participants will learn key successes and challenges our students faced in developing and delivering student-led equity training for senior district central office staff; explore opportunities to scale across all schools; hear students talk about their take-aways; and discover what student-centered policy changes the equity training helped influence and shape.

Map Academy, a new charter high school in Plymouth, Massachusetts, provides a reimagined student-centered teaching and learning model intentionally designed to serve marginalized students, including youth who have previously dropped out of other high schools. Built on a trauma-informed foundation, Map Academy provides comprehensive wraparound support by integrating in-house clinicians, community-based partners, and family support networks to empower students to meet their individual goals. This workshop will explore key elements of Map Academy’s trauma-informed approach, including personalized, blended, and asynchronous instruction; competency-based advancement;  flexible pathways; and individualized student success plans that create unique learning opportunities centered around the individual student, their interests, and ambitions.

Participants will learn about our model as well as explore ways to replicate a student-centered teaching and learning model with comprehensive social and emotional support. Participants will also begin to develop a personalized action plan for their own schools or districts.

At the heart of personalized learning is an increase in student voice and choice in their own learning as they strive toward proficiency as outlined in content area standards. What are the classroom instructional practices that support student choice and voice and thus also student engagement? In this session, high school math teachers will share the strategies they are implementing that have supported increased student engagement. Examples of instructional strategies shared will include digital portfolios, playlists, learning progressions, learning menus, project-based learning and performance tasks (such as homemade three-act math tasks), retest and revision policies, and sharing clear expectations with students. Participants will explore resources, examples, and tools that support the instructional strategies while considering next steps for implementation in their own setting.  Although the presenters are math teachers, anyone can benefit from attending this session on personalized learning. 

Participants will learn specific strategies to increase student engagement through choice and voice as implemented in math classrooms. Participants will also get specific examples of student engagement through the use of digital playlists, portfolios, learning progressions, performance tasks, and assessments.

New Bedford Public Schools (NBPS) takes an individualized approach to shifting culture and mindset throughout our district. In this session, you will hear the story of NBPS and the path we have taken to engage, educate, and empower our school community one family at a time. NBPS has emphasized creating multiple access points for family and community participation, and increased the focus on improving two-way communication and cultivating student leaders. NBPS has also begun to look at the historical construct of racism and its impact on public education and how we engage families and other systems that service families. By looking at our own inequities, we have begun to collaborate with community partners to begin an important conversation:how to address the inequities in our community and provide better outcomes for all families.

Participants will learn about the approaches taken by NBPS—including a shift in focus from cultural competency to racial inequity, as well as using data to inform our work—and explore how to replicate them in their own districts or schools.

Across the country, new learner-centered schools are opening each year. However, can a large, traditional, open-enrollment school ever provide the same personalized and high-agency experience for all students? In this session, you will hear the story of TechBoston Academy, a Boston public school, which is trying to do just that. Presenters will speak candidly about their journey, which is filled with misconceptions, bumps, shifts, and successes; participants will get a true behind-the-scenes view of school transformation. If you heard last year’s presentation by TechBoston Academy school leaders, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to hear about the successes and lessons learned over the past twelve months!