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OBJECTOR (choose one)

Sessions that challenge assumptions and help leaders name what needs to change.

Jessica Diana – Slowing Down to Lead: Trust, Dignity, and Sustainable Practice
This session invites leaders to pause and examine the hidden patterns of over-functioning, urgency, and constant availability that quietly erode trust and sustainability in leadership. Through reflection and dialogue, participants will identify leadership tensions in their own contexts and leave with one small shift they can test to strengthen relational trust.

Chad Evans – Pointing the Needle: Finding Your Leadership Orientation When the System Pulls You Off Course
Participants explore the Human School Compass framework to examine how their leadership orientation interacts with the pressures of compliance-driven systems. Through reflective exercises and dialogue, they will analyze real dilemmas and identify a leadership commitment rooted in deeper self-awareness.

Alvert Hernandez – More Than a Seat at the Table: Reimagining Student Success Through Connection, Culture, and Courage
This interactive session challenges deficit narratives about students by examining culturally responsive structures that foster belonging and success. Participants will explore institutional practices that either support or hinder equity and identify actions they can take to co-create more inclusive systems.

Brianna Young – Good Conflict: Moving through Tension in Trauma-Informed Ways
This session reframes conflict as a normal and necessary part of leadership rather than a problem to avoid. Participants will explore trauma-informed mindsets that help leaders navigate tension with empathy, curiosity, and stronger decision-making.

Leah Nasso – Building a Culture of Institutional Care for Employees
Participants will examine why organizations often prioritize student care while overlooking the well-being of employees who sustain those systems. The session invites leaders to explore practical ways to build cultures of care that strengthen belonging, engagement, and institutional sustainability.

INVENTOR (choose one)

Sessions focused on designing human-centered systems and new possibilities.

Lauren Doherty – Relational by Design: Adapting Systems to People
Drawing from research with new Career and Technical Education teachers, this session explores how systems can be redesigned to better support the diverse needs of real people. Participants will reflect on structures in their own contexts and experiment with small design shifts that make systems more relational and adaptable.

Benjamin Heiserman – Operationalizing Your Transformation Opportunity
This interactive workshop helps leaders slow down and clarify how they want to show up during moments of organizational change. Participants will develop a concise strategy and identify the relationships needed to activate and sustain transformation.

Deborah Pickens – From Weekend to Monday: Supporting Transitions That Improve Behavior and Learning
This session reframes student behavior and school transitions through a compassionate, human-centered lens. Participants will explore how systems can better support children’s emotional and relational needs and identify one transition they can redesign in their own context.

Gabrielle Smith – Community + Connection = Communication
Participants will reflect on how communication structures shape belonging, voice, and shared responsibility in learning communities. Through dialogue and collaborative reflection, they will explore ways to redesign environments to invite participation and deeper collective meaning-making.

Dinner and Connections

Evidence Gallery - Step into an interactive Evidence Gallery that brings each researcher’s journey to life—showcasing not just what they discovered, but how their thinking evolved through challenges, decisions, and real-world impact. Explore dynamic displays, engage in meaningful conversations, and leave inspired to reflect on your own practice and possibilities for change.

CURATOR (choose one)

Sessions that help leaders notice, interpret, and gather human-centered evidence.

Rachel Girman – Surfacing: What Becomes Visible When We Redefine Data
This session invites participants to reconsider what counts as “data” in educational leadership. Through reflection and collaborative dialogue, participants will examine the gap between the information they prioritize and the deeper signals that reveal what truly matters.

Wendy Elvin-Thomas – Leading When the System is Saturated
Participants will explore how exhaustion, disengagement, and silence in organizations can be interpreted as signals rather than failures. Through shared sensemaking, leaders will learn how slowing interpretation can lead to wiser and more sustainable responses.

Sherie Miller Cunningham – Trust Before Tools: Leading Ethical AI Conversations in Public Schools
This session explores how teachers’ hesitations about artificial intelligence can reveal deeper concerns about trust, professional identity, and ethical leadership. Participants will analyze real teacher perspectives and reflect on how leaders can foster safe, thoughtful conversations about emerging technologies.

Megan Strella – Leadership, Joy, and System Design: An Experiential Session
Through reflective protocols and experiential activities, participants will explore how emotion, relationships, and pacing influence leadership and system design. The session introduces the Joy-Informed Systems framework after participants have already experienced its core practices.

STORYTELLER (choose one)

Sessions focused on reflection, narrative, and meaning-making.

Sarah Bodnar – Listening with the Heart: Exploring Human-Centered Leadership Through Story, Art, and Reflection
This session invites participants to explore leadership through storytelling, art, and reflection on emotional experiences in learning communities. Drawing from classroom action research, participants will examine how relationships and empathy shape meaningful leadership.

Laura Strattan – Beyond the Notes: Storytelling as the Score of Transformational Leadership
Using the metaphor of musical performance, this session explores storytelling as a central leadership practice that shapes culture and meaning in organizations. Participants will reflect on the narratives shaping their own contexts and experiment with retelling a leadership story they want to conduct differently.

Christopher Hassay – Wor(L)dbuilding: A Speculative Framework for Community Building
Participants will explore how language, metaphors, and stories quietly shape the communities we inhabit. Through playful reflection and dialogue, they will experiment with reframing common narratives to create more inclusive and imaginative possibilities.

Matthew Asti – Intertwined: A Somatic Narrative Approach to Educational Exhaustion
This experiential session invites participants to explore burnout through somatic reflection, mindfulness, and narrative mapping. Through gentle movement and storytelling practices, leaders will reconnect with the deeper wisdom and wholeness often lost in demanding professional roles.