During each of the six breakout sessions throughout the weekend, a large number of conversations will take place. This site will help you organize your plan for the weekend and provide the relevant information for each conversation. After signing in, search through the conversations below and mark the sessions you are interested in to populate your personal schedule on the right (or below if on your mobile phone).
And please click on the session for a more detailed description of the session!
Using a simulation based on mechanics from Buckminster Fuller’s “World Game,” attendees will create “the Tuesday Afternoon Teenager of 2040.” Conversations about the game awaken us to what we already knew about the kinds of kids we need. Participants will leave with a tool to use on Monday with staff or students.
As politicians and many educators are engaged in a collective freakout about AI and education, I cannot believe how my creativity, thinking, productivity, and achievements have been supercharged by the affordances of this computational miracle. This incredibly positive and optimistic session, rooted in timeless progressive traditions, a humane vision of AI, the Reggio Emilia approach, and personal experience is intended to inspire dialogue and consideration of exciting new learning adventures in a world of computational abundance.
This session will be a discussion of bringing creative approaches into the classroom. Some of the points we will address: What is the benefit of having kids think more abstractly in STEM? How does AI, and the need for productive struggling, play a role in the creative classroom? How can we leverage abstract thinking to support development of soft skills?
Our competency-based system tracks SEL skills like self-advocacy and collaboration alongside academics. But do those skills prepare students for college? We'll share what we found linking our competency data to National Student Clearinghouse persistence records and invite participants to question what we measure, and why.
Imagine a school where the academic and social focus is exclusively human thriving. What if thriving in relationships, material well-being, physical well-being, social-emotional well-being, mental well-being, and purpose formed the curricular inquiry of a students K-12 school career. What are the possibilities for creating a different kind of educational delivery system to achieve this vision?
International service trips, local service, and internships often live in separate silos. At South Bronx Community, we're weaving them into one pathway where students serve, work, and reflect. Join us to examine what students learn beyond the classroom and how to make those experiences count toward who they become.
This conversation began with the work of volunteers at the Institute for Infrastructure and Interoperable Data in Learning coming up with a community-based and research-backed Glossary of Digital Learning. It's expanded into a conversation about the words we use and share to describe what we do in education, technology, and the work of learning.
This conversation seeks to reimagine what third spaces for high school students look, sound and feel like, and how these spaces can be used to empower authentic student leadership. We will also explore the lessons third spaces can teach us about student voice and leadership during the school day.
Democratic classroom practices can exist in many forms. This session will examine multiple, less frequently utilized avenues for democratic experiences within classrooms. The session will explore the five pillars of Democratic Education and use content adapted from the recently published book, Democratic Schools Matter.
What if imagination were treated as a literacy practice? Grounded in imahinasyon as literacy, a framework developed from my research alongside queer Filipinx youth, this conversation invites educators to reconsider how imagination lives in our schools and explore how young people might understand themselves, question the world, and envision new worlds.
How might we use dice rolls and storytelling to transform classroom and professional learning experiences through the lens of tabletop roleplaying games? Let's build some worlds, write some rules, and toss some dice together.
Grounded in Angelo Patri’s 1917 vision in A Schoolmaster of the Great City that schools must integrate deeply with their communities, this session explores modern educational ecosystems. Participants will discuss the operational and relational challenges educators face when building, sustaining, and managing employer and community partnerships to expand high-quality experiential learning.
When students struggle, how often do we examine adult practices before adding another intervention? This conversation challenges educators and leaders to explore how instruction, expectations, communication, collaboration, and school culture influence student outcomes—and how strengthening adult practice can remove barriers and create conditions where every student can thrive.
We are a community with a deeply ingrained commitment to relationship building, socio-emotional learning and restorative practices. These characteristics are intertwined with our Portrait of a Graduate, focused on finding passion, building agency, using power and making an impact. This year, we have added a Mentor Advisory to our toolkit to empower 12th grade students to build a legacy of displaying these characteristics by mentoring incoming freshmen in need of additional peer support.
Teachers, youth, university researchers, and a museum partner explored how Black Philadelphian histories go unrecognized in schools and museums. Grounded in Black feminisms and participatory research, we center Black youth in connecting past, present, and future through a living archive and “praxhibition” that makes our collective praxis and Black Philadelphia histories visible.
As AI absorbs routine cognitive work, which human skills should schools grow on purpose, and how? ADAPTABLE is a nine-skill K-12 framework still in progress, meant to help teachers notice and support each child's growth, not grade it. Let's review, challenge and reshape it together.
What helps students pause, question, and stay in conversation when a polarizing video hits their feed? Using a social media clip and tools from the Or Initiative's Digital Discernment and Civil Discourse Toolbox, we'll experience these discussions ourselves, then talk through what it takes to facilitate them with students.
What happens when we stop asking students to fit the systems we have built and start asking whether those systems fit the learners in front of us? Using students with learning differences as a lens, this conversation will challenge participants to examine the structures schools often treat as fixed—from pacing, schedules, and assessment to intervention, executive-function expectations, and definitions of independence. Together, we will explore where student support ends and system redesign begins, asking a bigger question: What could school look like if we intentionally designed it around how students learn?
What if the teachers our students need are in our hallways? South Bronx Community is growing its own: students in education internships, alumni returning as staff, community members stepping into classrooms, and teachers becoming leaders. We'll explore how a school builds its future faculty from the community it serves.
In this interactive session, leaders from the Office of Professional Learning within SDP share the evolution of School Leader Equity Pathways PD — and how we transformed professional learning by developing our own Equity Facilitators: a purposeful community of committed, equity-centered school leaders. Grounded in “small is all” from Holding Change by adrienne maree brown and deeper learning, this work reimagines adult learning as deep, relational, and transformative. Rather than delivering traditional, one-off PD, we invested in growing facilitators who could cultivate transferable, participant and equity-centered leadership practices across the system.
Many schools purchase programs or build curriculums for social-emotional learning. Teachers often then struggle with implementation because their time is overloaded. Also, treating SEL as an add on makes it less meaningful. SEL instruction is at its best when it's integrated with ongoing instruction. How can that be done?
What soft skills will the next generation need-how do we help?
We ask eighteen-year-olds to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives before many of them are really ready to. What would it look like to give them time to choose, and what can we do to start building it?
This conversation explores our student advocacy program in schools. Currently, we have a student advocacy program in several districts across Pennsylvania including Philadelphia, Norristown, Lancaster and Reading. We will explore topics from our core curriculum.
What does meaningful support for the work of teaching look like today? Participants will examine changing demands, explore the difference between helpful support and additional work, and identify shared responsibilities and practical changes that create more room for teaching, learning, and human connection.
When AI can write the essay, what does it mean to know something? Drawing on South Bronx Community's discussion-centered mid-year PBATs, we'll look at the shifting balance between orality and literacy. Together we'll ask how assessment can prepare students to think, speak, and write in their own voices.
When AI can write the essay, what does it mean to know something? Drawing on South Bronx Community's discussion-centered mid-year PBATs, we'll look at the shifting balance between orality and literacy. Together we'll ask how assessment can prepare students to think, speak, and write in their own voices.
The world is changing faster than any curriculum can predict. School is still designed around arrival: arrive at the right answer, the standard, the grade, etc. What if our job is not to prepare children to arrive, but to help them become people capable of navigating, and shaping, what's next?
How might we design spaces that help learners, educators, families, and communities alike? How might these spaces support those who need guidance and direction, calm and focus, while also empowering building and making, designing and creating? Explore the Success & Innovation Center model with an eye toward remixing, renovating, and reimagining what innovation means in 2026.
Inquiry stands at the heart of 'progressive' and 'learner-centered' education, yet Curiosity as practice can still feel elusive. We typically ask how we might create conditions for students to become more curious. But what if we first began with ourselves, intentionally practicing Curiosity together as human beings, not simply as educators?
K-12 is debating screen time. I believe we're starting that conversation too late. I'm an edtech executive with a PhD who has spent my career advocating for the effective use of tech for teaching and learning. The first five years, before kids ever enter our classrooms, are when we build the leaders who will face adulthood in a world increasingly shaped by AI. If kids under two average an hour of screens a day, who will be leading the world in 2056?
Boys as a group hold tremendous privilege. They are also far behind in reading, writing, graduation, mental health, social, and long-term outcomes. Our labeling of boys is often a good/bad binary; most are complicated, sensitive, and missing something essential in their lives. Let's talk about what we can offer them.
The question, “What can you make?” centers the student and their expertise. Making something is a powerful, personal expression of intellect. Students welcome and embrace complexity when challenged to make something. When we remove the distinction between vocational and academic education we mirror the complexity of our intriguing world.
If AI can give students information, explanations, and interpretations instantly, what happens to the value of building knowledge for themselves? We’ve spent decades teaching and researching reading comprehension, grounded in the building of background knowledge in students. We still believe it matters. But AI forces us to ask: What is the value in the process to get to know something and how is it changing?
AI can produce more student work than ever, but what thinking, struggle, creativity, and decision-making should students still own? Participants will examine classroom scenarios and co-create a practical framework for deciding when AI supports learning and when it quietly replaces it.
As AI becomes more useful, when does help begin to become something else? Together, we’ll explore what young people seek from digital systems, how educators can recognize and critically assess when benefit starts to erode agency, and what we can do without simply taking useful technology away.
AI can answer almost any question, but what happens when we stop asking what AI can answer and start asking what learners want to discover? Through stories, reflection, and conversation, we’ll explore how curiosity, lived experience, and AI can help students take greater ownership of their learning.
EduCon 2027