Leadership EDIT 2026

Tony Wagner (1993) said, “The real methodology for systems change begins and ends with ongoing, authentic conversations about the important questions.” For staff, this may be strategic planning, policy decisions, or how to support students. For students, it may be school, state, or national policy; making sense of current events; or maintaining healthy relationships with their peers. With few quality models for talking across differences on the national stage, let’s build skills for communicating and living together and heal along the way.
We’ll examine research on the benefits of discourse, offer structures and strategies for use in classrooms and staff meetings that include a values orientation, and experience conversations to feel the impact of this approach on our bodies and minds.
Leave this session ready to plan for and facilitate a group discussion and build capacity for humanizing discourse with templates and resources for support.

This session is designed to empower educators to embrace and define their role as leaders. It begins by establishing why educator leadership is imperative for creating systemic change within a school and how that leadership evolves from a practitioner to a system-level influencer. The core of the session focuses on helping participants identify their personal leadership philosophy by reflecting on their core values, which serve as an internal compass to help them stay focused despite the daily "noise." Participants will learn practical strategies for integrating feedback without derailing their vision, and how to intentionally plan for collaborative growth with other leaders. The session culminates in developing a plan to effectively communicate their vision to staff (and possibly students), fostering a sense of shared leadership to ensure a collective commitment to the school/district goals.

In an era of rising student needs and escalating professional demands, many educators find themselves asking: Is this level of output sustainable? While traditional professional development often focuses on self-care as an individual responsibility, this session shifts the lens toward systemic sustainability.Moving beyond the self-care myth, this interactive presentation explores trauma-informed practices through the Parallel Process, which is the idea that a regulated school environment begins with the wellbeing of the adults within it. Through a blend of scholarly literature and high-engagement activities, participants will analyze the impact of collective stress and evaluate their own Window of Tolerance. Participants will walk away with a practical, systemic sustainability plan ready for immediate implementation.

Learning objectives: 1) Participants will be able to describe the differences between burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress (STS). 2) Participants will be able to examine current individual, peer-to-peer, and systemic regulation strategies. 3) Participants will be able to design a personalized sustainability plan that incorporates one institutional boundary and one peer-support strategy. 

Equity is often framed as a student-centered issue, yet many inequitable outcomes are driven by adult stress, rushed decision-making, and dysregulated systems. This session reframes equity through a neuro-informed leadership lens, examining how schedules, policies, meeting structures, and discipline practices can unintentionally reinforce harm—especially for historically marginalized students. Participants will explore how bias, culture, and nervous system states influence adult responses and institutional norms. Using real leadership scenarios and guided reflection, attendees will engage in dialogue about where dysregulation shows up in their systems and how it impacts trust and accountability. Leaders will leave with a practical framework for identifying system-level stress points and actionable strategies for redesigning conditions that support regulation, cultural responsiveness, and equity. Learning extends beyond the summit through reflective prompts and leadership moves that can be immediately applied to policy review, team conversations, and discipline decision-making.

This session combines ideas from Real Self-Care by Dr. Pooja Lakshmin with a proactive approach to well-being in schools. We will talk about the difference between surface-level self-care and real self-care that centers boundaries, choice, and sustainability. Attendees will leave with realistic, doable strategies they can use right away and a healthier way to think about self-care as part of doing this work well.