Learning Forward’s 2016 Annual Conference in Vancouver, B.C., Canada will not only provide you with meaningful and relevant content, but will connect you with other people who will continue to push and refine your thinking around the most pressing issues for our work and our students.
For example, you can meet up in the session titled, Transforming Professional Learning: A System’s Approach before heading into From Policy to Practice: Leveraging Policy To Build Professional Learning Systems That Get Results orDeveloping and Supporting Online Professional Learning Facilitators.
Here are a few tips for central office leaders who are planning to attend:
1. Introduce yourself by your first name. Teachers and principals will often defer to the superintendent or central office leaders when working in small groups. If they choose to remain silent, the central office leaders lose a valuable opportunity to learn from people who are in classrooms every day and affected by the decisions that are made from central office.
2. Consider how you want to remain connected to the people you meet.Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, Voxer or traditional email, an international PLN is a powerful tool to have at your fingertips when addressing the challenges of leading school systems.
3. Don’t answer any emails while you are in a session. In fact, schedule an away message on your email that says, “I am engaging in my own professional development at the Learning Forward Conference so that I can be a better educator and leader for you and our students.” When we model that professional learning is important to us, that attitude will spread throughout our districts.
The best part about the annual Learning Forward conference is that there will be opportunities for you to engage with and learn from like-minded colleagues from around the world — conversations that will no doubt lead to positive outcomes for the students and teachers in your districts.
See a list of conference sessions of interest to central office leaders here.
