45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Educational leaders are increasingly navigating environments impacted by leadership turnover, fragmented communication systems, organizational distrust, initiative fatigue, and reactive decision-making. These challenges often create school cultures that operate in survival mode rather than through intentional, mission-aligned systems. This interactive workshop presents a practical leadership framework that supports organizational coherence through systems thinking, reflective leadership, relational accountability, and restorative organizational practices.

Participants will explore a coherence-building leadership model focused on clarifying organizational systems, strengthening communication structures, rebuilding trust, and developing psychologically safe environments for staff and students. The session will examine how these strategies were implemented through intentional leadership practices, including reflective decision-making structures, collaborative problem-solving processes, distributed leadership development, and consistent communication systems in complex educational settings.

Attendees will also examine why these approaches support organizational effectiveness by reducing fragmentation, increasing staff engagement, improving relational trust, and promoting sustainable systems change. Through reflective discussion and practical application activities, participants will leave with actionable tools and leadership strategies that they can adapt within their own schools and organizations to move from reactive leadership practices toward coherent, collaborative, and mission-aligned systems.

This session explores practical strategies to enhance ethical
leadership in action to establish a safe, respectful school culture,
model integrity, and directly influence an environment of equity and
trust, which empowers staff and reduces burnout, fostering a
supportive teaching and learning environment through teacher and building leadership.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This session presents a practical, classroom-tested framework for shifting from student compliance to student ownership by intentionally centering student voice.

The core strategy combines two key elements:

The Voice & Choice Continuum – a tool used to help educators identify where their current practice falls (from no voice/compliance to full ownership)
The School Voice Model (Listen → Learn → Lead) – a simple, repeatable process for increasing student voice in structured, meaningful ways

What was implemented:
In classrooms and across instructional initiatives, student voice was embedded into daily practice through intentional structures—student input in lesson design, choice in how learning was demonstrated, and opportunities for students to lead discussions and reflect on their learning. Rather than adding new programs, existing lessons were adjusted to include voice and choice at key points.

How it was implemented:
Educators first reflected on their current practice using the continuum to identify gaps. From there, they selected one “small shift” (e.g., offering structured choice, incorporating student feedback loops, or redesigning a task for ownership). This shift was implemented consistently, refined over time, and supported through reflection and collaboration.

Why it worked:
This approach worked because it was focused, sustainable, and rooted in real classroom conditions. Instead of overwhelming educators with multiple strategies, it emphasized clarity and consistency. As student voice increased, so did engagement, accountability, and investment in learning—resulting in stronger classroom culture and more meaningful participation.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Schools cannot build strong student culture on top of fragile adult culture. When trust is strained, communication is fragmented, and care feels inconsistent, staff often carry truths that remain unspoken or unresolved. This interactive workshop shares a structured professional learning process designed to help a school community name hard truths without shame or blame, identify patterns in staff reflection, and move toward shared responsibility for culture, clarity, communication, and care.

The session is based on a multi-part professional development process called Trust & Truth Studio. Staff engaged in station-based reflection, sticky-note truth-telling, a silent museum walk, and table team commitments beginning with “We Choose To…” Their reflections were later synthesized across four stations: Trust & Transparency, Expectations & Equity, Support & Accountability, and Communication & Care. Responses were coded as pain points, hopes/ideas, and tensions/gaps, which surfaced five schoolwide themes: Psychological Safety is Fragile, Words ≠ Actions, Clarity & Consistency Gaps, Care Must Be Structural, and Shared Responsibility: Modeled from the Top.

In Part 2, staff engaged the results as data, reflected on leadership and staff actions, and used impact, doability, and ownership to identify high-leverage priorities. Participants in this workshop will examine the design behind that process and practice using a simplified version of the protocol to move from adult truth-telling to clearer schoolwide focus. The session will emphasize how Black and Brown educator leadership can create conditions where truth, repair, accountability, and care are not treated as separate from instruction, but as necessary conditions for teaching and learning to thrive.

20-Minute Lightning Talk

African American English is often misread in schools as error, defiance, or lack of ability. These interpretations are not neutral; they shape how adults respond to Black children, how children are assessed, and how they come to understand themselves as learners. In this 20-minute lightning talk, participants will be introduced to a structured, reflective process grounded in raciolinguistic research and classroom practice. Through a brief classroom example, participants will examine how deficit-based interpretations emerge in everyday interactions and how to shift them. Participants will practice noticing assumptions, naming underlying beliefs, reframing African American English as a rule-governed linguistic system, and identifying more affirming responses. They will leave with a clear, immediately usable approach to support student belonging, participation, and academic identity.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Equity work is often reduced to visible representation: diverse books on the shelf, a new text added to a unit, or a one-time classroom conversation. This session goes deeper.

Drawing on her experience as a District Equity Officer and Culturally Responsive Teaching specialist, Alexandria Rhoden will guide participants through concrete equity-centered instructional moves that shift student experience: auditing curriculum for representation and rigor, reviewing assessments for access and bias, and building classroom resources that reflect students' identities without reducing them.

But this session does not stop at instruction. Equity-centered teaching is not a technique; it is a stance. And when that stance is practiced consistently through planning, decision-making, coaching, advocacy, and resource-building, it becomes leadership.

Using the Equity to Impact Audit, participants will examine one instructional, curricular, or assessment practice from their own context and identify how to strengthen it through the lenses of representation, rigor, cultural relevance, and access. They will then connect that classroom-level move to a broader leadership action they can take in their school, team, or professional journey.

This session draws from Alexandria's work supporting curriculum audits, teacher-facing coaching, assessment review, and the development of diverse classroom resource libraries for elementary educators. It treats equity as an instructional discipline, not just a value statement, and helps educators recognize the leadership already embedded in the equity work they do every day.

Participants will leave with a practical audit tool, concrete revisions they can make within two weeks, and a clearer sense of who they already are: educators who do equity work are already leading. They just need someone to name it.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Deficit-based narratives continue to shape how schools interpret outcomes for educators and students of color—particularly Black staff and Black boys—when institutional barriers go unexamined. Too often, inequitable conditions are mischaracterized as individual shortcomings related to resilience, mindset, or “wellness,” obscuring the organizational practices that marginalize people of the global majority and other historically excluded communities.

This session confronts that misframing head-on and calls leaders to act. Grounded in research and field-tested implementation, the session equips participants with concrete strategies to rewrite deficit narratives at the institutional level. Participants will examine four identity-affirming practices that disrupt deficit thinking and intentionally position educators and students of color as intellectual, cultural, and leadership assets within their school communities. The session makes clear that centering cultural knowledge and affirming the identities of Black boys and Black staff are not competing priorities—they are mutually reinforcing imperatives. Leaders will leave with actionable institutional practices and resources to operationalize this work with clarity, rigor, and accountability.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This session will present flipped learning as a student-centered instructional framework designed to increase engagement, independence, and academic ownership in diverse classrooms. In this model, direct instruction is shifted outside of class through short teacher-created videos, allowing classroom time to focus on collaboration, discussion, guided practice, and differentiated support. The strategy was implemented in Spanish classrooms using tools such as Google Classroom, instructional videos, guided notes, and interactive follow-up activities. Students accessed vocabulary, grammar, and foundational concepts prior to class, then used class time for conversation practice, small-group activities, peer collaboration, and teacher conferencing. This approach created greater flexibility for students to learn at their own pace, revisit instruction as needed, and engage more actively during in-class learning experiences. The framework proved effective because it increased student participation, supported varied learning needs, reduced overreliance on lecture-based instruction, and allowed for more meaningful teacher-student interaction during class time. It also supported educator sustainability by creating reusable instructional resources and maximizing instructional time for deeper learning and relationship-building.

45-Minute Panel Discussion

This session presents a leadership framework centered on relationships, equity, and purpose-driven decision making. It highlights strategies leaders can use to strengthen culture, build strong communities, and improve student outcomes.

30-Minute Roundtable

This session will present a structured instructional framework using the Question–Answer Relationship (QAR) strategy to improve reading comprehension among college transition students with learning and developmental disabilities. The study implemented a single-case design with four participants over a four-week period, involving individualized 20-minute instructional sessions.
The intervention focused on explicitly teaching students to identify different types of question–answer relationships (e.g., “Right There,” “Think and Search,” “Author and You,” and “On My Own”) and apply them to texts. Instruction was delivered through a combination of modeling, guided practice, and scaffolded support. Two baseline assessments and two post-test assessments were conducted to measure progress.
To enhance strategy use, the intervention incorporated both visual and verbal prompts. Visual support helped students categorize question types and locate information within texts, while verbal prompting provided real-time guidance to support comprehension and strategy application. Instruction was individualized, allowing prompts and support to be adjusted based on each student’s needs.
The approach was effective because it combined explicit strategy instruction with targeted scaffolding. Findings indicated that QAR strategies significantly supported reading comprehension when paired with structured prompts, with verbal prompts emerging as particularly effective in helping students interpret text and answer questions accurately. Visual analysis of student performance demonstrated clear improvement patterns over time, highlighting the value of systematic, scaffolded instruction for learners with disabilities.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This session introduces an integrated leadership development approach designed to help participants deepen self-awareness, align intentional leadership behaviors, and take greater ownership of their professional growth. The approach has been implemented with high school students, college students, emerging leaders, and experienced professionals through workshops, facilitation experiences, and individual consultations. Using reflective and action-oriented practices, participants develop individualized professional development plans aligned with their strengths, values, leadership goals, and evolving career aspirations. The effectiveness of the approach lies in its self-directed structure, which positions participants as active designers of their professional and leadership development while providing a practical framework for sustained growth and application.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This session presents a PBIS-aligned student economy system that integrates financial literacy, student leadership, and school culture into one cohesive framework. This model, known as Future Leaders Lab, has been implemented in school and afterschool settings through Building Young Leaders (BYL) to shift traditional behavior systems from reward-based compliance to real-world skill development.

Students earn a form of classroom or digital currency by demonstrating core values such as responsibility, engagement, and integrity. These earnings are tracked using simple tools (such as Google Sheets or app-based systems) and used within a structured student economy where students learn to save, spend, and make decisions. The system also incorporates student leadership roles, allowing students to take ownership of responsibilities and contribute to a positive school environment.

Implementation begins with aligning school-wide expectations to specific behaviors that generate “earnings,” followed by staff training and consistent tracking practices. Schools can begin at the classroom level and scale to a school-wide system with strong alignment to PBIS and SEL goals.

This approach has proven effective in increasing student engagement, improving behavior consistency, and strengthening school culture. It also supports educator sustainability by providing a structured, proactive system that reduces burnout and creates clarity across classrooms

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This session presents a research-informed, practice-grounded approach for using stakeholder perception data as a driver of equity-centered school improvement. The framework brings together three connected strands: student survey research on equity, belonging, and inclusion; the Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement, especially Practice 4.2: Solicit and act upon stakeholder input; and applied coaching practices that help school leaders gather, interpret, and respond to stakeholder voice.

In my work coaching school leaders, I have used the Four Domains as an evidence-based framework to support school improvement planning, root cause analysis, and adult action planning. Within that work, stakeholder input is gathered through tools such as surveys, focus groups, classroom observations, and leadership conversations. This session will show how leaders can use these data sources not as compliance activities, but as meaningful evidence of how students, families, and educators are experiencing school climate, belonging, access, and trust.

This approach works because it expands school improvement beyond outcome data alone, such as achievement, attendance, and discipline. When stakeholder perception data is interpreted through an equity-centered lens, it can surface patterns that are often missed in traditional improvement processes. The Four Domains then provides a practical structure for turning those insights into concrete leadership actions that strengthen school culture, student engagement, and educator sustainability.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Cultivating a session experience where school builder leaders, teachers, support staff, and other valuable stakeholders holders feel seen, heard, validated, and equipped is the goal of this session. The session aims to become a beacon hope and a catalyst for sustainable wellness evolution. The SEVEN Framework: A Healing Circle for Educators was birthed from a project called “Tuesdays At Seven: The Healing Circle, where women from different walks of life shared their journey of healing. 

The SEVEN Framework: A Healing Circle for Educators, a framework for educator wellness and sustainability that integrates seven core tenets: slowing down and centering oneself, encouraging open dialogue, valuing collective care, embracing reflective practice, nurturing psychological safety, embodying purpose, and navigating change with resilience. The framework draws on lived experience of the visionary and her community of learners as well as research in adult social-emotional learning, psychological safety, and reflective practice.

This transformational experience and full framework is in early stages of implementation, the first tenet, Slow Down and Center Yourself has been applied through targeted 1:1 coaching with educators, consultants, and professionals in other fields. Implementation included embedding structured pause routines, guided reflection, and stress-regulation strategies into professional interactions and day to day real life practices.
Initial outcomes indicate that this approach supports educators in regulating emotional responses, intentional recalibration, engaging in reflective decision making practices, intentional physical and mental health practices, increase in self-awareness, and learning the value of alignment. These findings align with research suggesting that intentional pause and reflection are essential for reducing burnout and supporting sustainable personal and professional growth. It worked and continues to work because it is practical and sustainable.  

I believe there is an urgent call to action to create healing-centered communities for educators that move beyond self-care and build sustainable conditions that speak to the whole caring adult. 

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This workshop will highlight proven strategies used within GSNENY to support the academic, social, and emotional growth of girls across the Capital District. Participants will explore:
•        Identity affirming leadership development that centers the lived experiences of Black and Brown girls
•        High impact, hands on learning models that increase engagement and motivation
•        Community based partnerships that expand access to STEM, civic engagement, and entrepreneurship
•        Data informed approaches to tracking student growth, confidence, and leadership outcomes
•        Wellness and sustainability practices that support both youth and the adults who guide them

Attendees will leave with practical tools and adaptable frameworks they can bring back to their schools, classrooms, and youth programs.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

            Participants will engage in interactive station activities to engage in strategies that support the development of relationships, knowledge-building about students' academic, social-emotional, and behavioral needs, and strengthen collaborative systems that foster inclusive, responsive, and student-centered learning environments. Through hands-on discussions and practical leadership tools, participants will examine how intentional structures for communication, collaboration, and shared decision-making can build teacher capacity, enhance student support systems, and contribute to positive school culture.                                    
            Professional Learning Communities: A collective approach that utilizes student data from assessments and classroom tasks (quantitative), supported by qualitative anecdotes about students’ lives and experiences, to positively impact their school experiences. Through sustained inquiry, the professional learning community implemented a data-informed approach to understanding and addressing students’ needs using a comprehensive database, anecdotal conversations, students' reflections, and focus groups. This process was successful because it created the space and opportunities for educators to collaboratively and meaningfully develop a holistic understanding of students’ identities and to design supports for those students.   
           Attendance team: A practical and strategic approach to relationship-building with educators. Collaborating with interdisciplinary teams—including attendance teachers, social workers, school psychologists, and classroom teachers—to develop comprehensive supports that strengthen both student and family engagement within the school community. Through the implementation of targeted strategies such as individualized social stories, family-centered outreach, and connections to community-based agencies, families are provided with access to critical social, behavioral, and community resources. These coordinated supports help students overcome barriers to engagement, build stronger home-school partnerships, and increase consistent attendance. 

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45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Threats to cut access to unsubsidized loans, mass deportations, cuts to funding for Medicaid and Medicare, legalization of discrimination, mass layoffs, cuts to funding for SNAP, and challenges to programs designed to reduce harm, and more, have devastating effects on our communities. In this presentation, participants will move through the radical hope framework (Mosley et. al, 2019) where they will outline the tools necessary to process these issues while simultaneously finding the emotional and psychological coping mechanisms needed to stay focused on the work. Participants will dive into four domains of the framework. First, they will remember that those who came before us and have navigated these systems. They did it in their context, and we can gather their tools and their successes and recognize them for what they are: proof that we always rise and there is victory at the end of this, through collective action. Participants will remember, name, and reconstruct these actions throughout the session. At the end of the session, participants will be prompted to develop a collective vision to utilize in their work. This presentation is my commitment and belief that we can dream up the futures we have been denied: true freedom and safety for all marginalized communities. This presentation brings theory, Radical Hope (Mosley, et. al, 2019), into action, interactive workshop designed to provoke thought and community building. 

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

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45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This session introduces a financial wellness framework specifically designed for educators who are earning a stable income but still feel financially stretched, stressed, and uncertain about their future. The framework addresses the gap between what educators earn and what they feel and gives them a clear, judgment-free path forward.

Educators are already operating in high-stress environments, managing student needs, navigating limited school budgets, and often reaching into their own pockets for supplies, snacks, and the small moments that make classrooms feel like communities. That financial drain is rarely acknowledged. When personal financial stress gets layered on top of it, it doesn't stay at home. It walks into the classroom. It affects how educators show up for their students, how long they can sustain the work, and ultimately whether they stay in the field at all.

This session walks participants through three core areas:
1. Clarity — Participants identify where their money is actually going and what their financial picture really looks like. Most educators have never done this without shame attached to it. This step creates an honest baseline without blame.
2. Strategy — Participants learn how to build a spending and savings plan that works on an educator's salary, accounting for the irregular rhythms of school-year income, summers, and benefits decisions that most financial advice ignores entirely.
3. Sustainability — Participants leave with a framework for making financial decisions that support staying in education long-term, rather than being financially forced out. This includes reframing their relationship with money from one of scarcity and survival to one of intention and possibility.

This framework works because it meets people where they are emotionally, not just mathematically, and that is what actually changes behavior.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

This is an interactive workshop that embraces the dynamics of literacy through movement-based learning, storytelling, and restorative practice designed to increase student engagement. Drawing from experiences of over 100 workshops in K-12 education, to higher education and community organizations, participants will experience hands-on strategies that will integrate poetry, play, storytelling, and social-emotional learning into literacy instruction.

This session is designed to impact classroom culture through culturally responsive, identity-centered literacy activities that build student confidence in reading, writing, and self-expression. Exercises will focus on programming that can be easily implemented in the classroom, from quick icebreakers to long-term interactive writing sessions, guaranteed to keep students engaged and thinking actively.

Grounded in restorative practices, SEL integration, and community storytelling, this workshop highlights how play, creativity, and student voice can become powerful tools for improving literacy outcomes and classroom engagement for Black and Brown students.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Teacher retention is an instructional quality crisis — and it is not equally distributed. Black and Brown educators leave the profession at disproportionate rates, and the schools that lose them most are the ones students of color need most. What if the solution wasn't a recruitment campaign or a stipend, but a practice? One rooted in community, joy, and belonging — built into the regular rhythms of school life?
This session presents Healing Circles as a proven, replicable retention infrastructure and invites participants to experience one firsthand. Drawing on 2024–25 outcome data from  Healing Schools Project, which served 240+ educators across 9 schools in Newark, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, this workshop combines rigorous evidence with lived experience. Participants won't just learn about Healing Circles, they will sit in one, feel the connection it creates, and leave with a concrete practice they can bring back to their school on Monday.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

In Quick to Listen, Slow to Speak, Alex Clark challenges educators and school leaders to reflect on how they listen to, connect with, and support Black students. Through storytelling, reflection, and honest conversation, this session explores how Black male educators can build trust and meaningful relationships with Black male students through authenticity, mentorship, representation, and culturally responsive practices.

Participants will examine how current events, miseducation, and community experiences shape the way students view school, educators, and their future while gaining strategies to create more inclusive and student-centered learning environments.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

My objective is to explain how the topic of classroom management should be viewed in the same sense as a person's home values.  A home is an extension of one's self. With this in mind, the first step of building a home is to establish the foundation. In the same way, building relationships with students and fellow educators is the foundation of an environment that values classroom management strategies. Without a firm foundation of relationship building, the house will inevitably collapse. Once the foundation of building relationships is complete, the "house" or the essential values such as trust, sharing of ideas, sense of community,  meaningful experiences, student engagement, collaboration and many others can be established. This workshop will be interactive and will encourage the participants to share their ideas and experiences.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

I have taken a data driven approach to guided reading and my literacy centers. After spending many nights and weekends researching best practices, I have wet from have 16% of my scholars reading proficiently to 84%. The first round of testing was in October and the second round was in February. If the kindergarten and first grade teachers implement this strategy, it’ll make that gap easier to close and allow for rigor and critical thinking in the upper elementary grades. 

1. Guided reading practices that work.
2. How to incorporate literacy into all aspects of the classroom. 
3. Access to resources and strategies that are proven to work and align with many different curriculums. 

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Every leader in this room has a story. Not a polished, press-ready story with a clean arc and a triumphant ending. A real one. One that includes struggle, confusion, environments that did not affirm them, and moments where they had to choose between shrinking and standing. This session is an invitation to stop treating that story as background noise and start treating it as the foundation of the most powerful leadership tool you carry.

The research is clear and the lived experience confirms it: adversity does not simply test us. It equips us. Those who grew up navigating instability developed the ability to read a room with extraordinary precision. Those raised in cultures of service carry that impulse forward into every organization they lead. Those who were unseen in their youth pay the closest attention to whoever else might be at risk of going unnoticed.
These are not coincidences. They are superpowers, forged in difficulty and deployed in leadership.

This session also confronts the reality of exclusionary work culture and offers a radical alternative to waiting for permission: create your own table. Hold space for yourself and others. Transform your energy from waiting into manifesting. Prioritize relationships above everything else, because people who are thought about, think about you. And finally, move through your leadership with the unwavering curiosity and confidence of a child, bringing your experiences, your ancestors, and your full self to every room you enter. There is value in all things. Define your destiny.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Educators and school leaders are navigating sustained levels of stress, burnout, and cognitive overload that directly impact staff retention, school culture, and classroom performance. This interactive workshop introduces practical, science-backed tools to support resilience and self-regulation in high-demand school environments.

Participants will experience a guided introduction to breathwork and nervous system regulation techniques that can be immediately applied throughout the school day — before a difficult conversation, between classes, or in moments of stress. The session will also explore how small, consistent practices can shift individual and team capacity over time.

This approach is grounded in direct classroom experience. As a former New York City public school teacher for 14 years, these practices were implemented daily with Kindergarten through 5th grade students — beginning each class with brief breathing and grounding exercises, as well as integrated into personal prep and transition periods throughout the day. 

Over time, this led to noticeable improvements in student focus, classroom tone, and personal sustainability as an educator. 

Designed for school leaders and teams, this workshop bridges the gap between wellness and performance by focusing on tools that are simple, scalable, and relevant to the realities of high-performing, high-stress environments.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

The Socio-Ecological Model of Resilience
Traditional wellness programs fail because they treat burnout as an individual flaw rather than a systemic symptom.

The Strategy: Utilizing the Socio-Ecological Framework (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; updated for 2026 contexts), we move from "Self-Care" to "Supportive Environments." 

Innovation: Participants will learn to audit their organization at the Macro (policy), Exo (district culture), and Meso (interpersonal) levels to identify where the system is actively depleting the educator's energy.

Grounded in research on racial battle fatigue (Smith, 2004), the emotional tax (Catalyst, 2019), and chronic code-switching, participants build a research-backed case for why isolated wellness perks are insufficient responses to structurally produced harm — and leave with talking points and data ready for leadership conversations, board presentations, and policy advocacy.

Using OUFSD's ecosystem as a replicable case study, participants examine the conditions — not just programs — that sustain Black and Brown educators: Breathe for Change as permanent capacity-building, Community Circles as normalized collective healing (this strategy is emerging), mentorship/check-ins and professional development opportunities alongside collaborative teaming, and the Equity Committee and CR-SE Writers as structures that give educators power, not just presence. 

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Arts education has long been a powerful tool for self-expression, self-control, cultural preservation, and social transformation—particularly within Black and Brown communities. This interactive workshop explores how arts-based teaching practices can positively impact Black and Brown classrooms by fostering cultural affirmation, academic engagement, social-emotional learning, and community connection.

Participants will examine how culturally responsive arts education can disrupt inequitable learning environments, elevate student voice, and support identity development. Through discussion, reflection, and hands-on activities, attendees will leave with practical strategies for integrating the arts across subject areas in ways that honor students’ lived experiences and cultural wealth.

45-Minute Interactive Workshop

Equity work is often reduced to visible representation: diverse books on the shelf, a new text added to a unit, or a one-time classroom conversation. This session goes deeper.

Drawing on her experience as a District Equity Officer and Culturally Responsive Teaching specialist, Alexandria Rhoden will guide participants through concrete equity-centered instructional moves that shift student experience: auditing curriculum for representation and rigor, reviewing assessments for access and bias, and building classroom resources that reflect students' identities without reducing them.

But this session does not stop at instruction. Equity-centered teaching is not a technique; it is a stance. And when that stance is practiced consistently through planning, decision-making, coaching, advocacy, and resource-building, it becomes leadership.

Using the Equity to Impact Audit, participants will examine one instructional, curricular, or assessment practice from their own context and identify how to strengthen it through the lenses of representation, rigor, cultural relevance, and access. They will then connect that classroom-level move to a broader leadership action they can take in their school, team, or professional journey.

This session draws from Alexandria's work supporting curriculum audits, teacher-facing coaching, assessment review, and the development of diverse classroom resource libraries for elementary educators. It treats equity as an instructional discipline, not just a value statement, and helps educators recognize the leadership already embedded in the equity work they do every day.

Participants will leave with a practical audit tool, concrete revisions they can make within two weeks, and a clearer sense of who they already are: educators who do equity work are already leading. They just need someone to name it.

30-Minute Roundtable

The framework I will present is an equity‑centered mentorship framework, which guided my development from a classroom teacher, entering the field with a non‑traditional background in criminal justice, to my transition into a school building leader. This framework prioritizes professional growth, instructional equity, and culturally responsive practices. 

The framework was enacted through ongoing formal and informal mentorship, targeted professional development, and consistent feedback. These structures helped build staff capacity, strengthen instructional practice, and anchored decision-making in equity-focused principles  This approach was effective because it cultivated leadership from within, empowered teachers through meaningful and responsive support, and  elevated teacher efficacy, which fostered a successful and sustainable transition from classroom teaching to building leadership.

Special Guest Panel