Custom Workshops

How has Artificial Intelligence already shaped the world? How can it transform our education? What is the impact on student learning? AI and the Future of Education is an introduction to the what, why, and how of AI in our schools. It offers a level-setting experience for teams, schools, and learning communities on the ways AI is shaping today’s educational landscape. Participants will leave with a shared understanding of the fundamentals of AI in the classroom and practical starting points for implementing AI tools to support deeper learning.

Middle leaders in schools are often charged with executing strategic plans despite the fact that they are rarely included in the development of those plans. This session offers participants a “strategic plan decoder” to practically help middle leaders translate strategic plans into initiatives and prioritize and organize initiatives to support effective implementation and community support.

How do you know your students are learning? And, how do your students know they are learning? This one-hour workshop offers a clear, accessible definition of and approach to student-centered assessment. Through classroom and course examples, the workshop introduces the look-fors that teachers can identify in their own practice and potential shifts they can make to ensure that assessment is directly impacting student learning. Participants will apply those look-fors, engaging in a collaborative conversation to self-assess their own practice. Participants will leave the workshop with a shared understanding of what it means to assess for learning, an outcomes-based rubric for ongoing reflection, identified areas for growth, and impactful strategies to try out.

When students are engaged in meaningful work together, they grow in both their connection and their learning. They develop essential collaboration skills that apply across classrooms and beyond school. But effective collaboration requires intention, and all too often “group work” becomes a divide-and-conquer approach with imbalances in contributions and inequities in shared products. What if collaboration looked different? What if collaboration skills were explicitly taught? What if group work led to deepened relationships and deeper learning? In this one-hour workshop, we’ll explore GOA’s educator competency, “Build Collaborative Communities”, defining the what and why of collaboration. This workshop prioritizes moving from theory to practice, exploring how communities built on trust, care, collaboration, and high expectations connect and empower learners. We’ll explore a range of strategies for co-curating norms, building collaboration skills, and engaging students in authentic processes. Participants will leave with an outcomes based rubric for reflection, an identified next step they want to take, and a toolkit of resources and strategies for ongoing support in building thriving collaborative communities.

Effective communication matters more than ever and is changing more than ever. Using principles of user experience design, this session asks leaders to consider how they can diversify their communication strategies to be more impactful, inclusive, and satisfying to a variety of stakeholders. Specifically, we emphasize two skills worth developing: creating effective videos and using visual thinking to communicate complex ideas. Developing the ability to use different media at different times for different audiences is a skill that allows for sustainable and inclusive leadership practice.

Cultivating belonging is an intentional process; it requires awareness and deliberate action. In this one-hour workshop, educators are introduced to a common understanding of what it means to cultivate belonging, why it matters, and how to get started. Participants will examine examples of moves to look for in their own practice and will self-reflect on a rubric that names outcomes to work towards in schools and classrooms. This is an ideal experience for starting a school year: participants will clarify and elevate what matters most--students being known and experiencing psychological safety--and leave this interactive workshop with a shared understanding of what it means to cultivate belonging, identified areas for growth, and impactful strategies to try out.

Assessments that are rooted in robust cycles of feedback have the single most significant impact on student learning. To ensure that we, as educators, can maximize the effectiveness of our feedback while managing our feedback workload, we need to employ the use of a feedback ecosystem. When educators design feedback ecosystems, they plan for students to exchange, receive, and apply meaningful feedback in an integrated, sustainable way. As part of our Assess for Learning series, this one-hour workshop explores the what, why, and how of providing students with ongoing, timely, and actionable feedback, leaving with a plan for launching a school year or learning experience with a feedback ecosystem in place.

Designing for student voice is not a checklist; it’s a process we revisit over time to ensure that all of our students experience belonging and have pathways for engagement in our schools. As part of our Cultivate Belonging series, in this one-hour workshop, participants are introduced to a variety of actions they can take to begin actively designing to include and leverage student voice. With a focus on strategies supporting representation, affirmation, and participation, participants will explore a range of ideas they can put into practice right away that invite and empower all learners. From how we greet students, to protocols for discussion, to how we plan diverse content playlists, each participant will walk away with a small next step for making a big impact.

This workshop experience focuses on how to prioritize psychological safety in the context of how we design team meetings. Using Amy Edmonson’s research on psychological safety as a base, participants will consider how to design meetings for perspective sharing and learning as well as consider how meeting design should change depending on tone, desired outcome, and audience. Participants will leave with human-centered strategies and frameworks that invite participant voices.

When we prioritize student-led learning, we prioritize skills that hold relevance far beyond our classroom walls. But, student agency doesn’t grow on its own. Through the intentional design of systems and small courses but deliberate shifts in practice, we can empower learners to lead their learning in our classrooms and to grow in skills that support a lifetime of learning. In this one-hour workshop, participants will explore the what and why of student-led learning, examining strategies for empowering our students to take an active role in their own learning journeys. We’ll explore how to scaffold learning experiences, prioritize reflection routines, and incorporate more student voice and choice. Participants will leave with an outcomes based rubric offering “look-fors” in our own practice and a toolkit of resources and strategies for ongoing student-centered learning design.

There’s never a better time for uniting as a community in purpose and priorities than the launch of a school year. In this one-hour workshop, participants will experience a series of exercises that invite them to draft purpose statements, make meaning from priorities, and set a focused, purpose-driven goal. Ideal for supporting alignment in a community this hour provides opportunities for both personal reflection and crafting a shared vision. There is power and affirmation in educators joining to make our thinking visible and to share why the work we do with students matters. Experience an hour that moves you from reflection to goal setting, and elevates the bigger purposes behind the daily actions that we take in schools.

As educators we spend a lot of time thinking about assessment: How do we (and students) know that they’re learning? How can assessment serve as information for ongoing learning? The rise of generative AI presents a unique opportunity to design assessments in a way to support greater student agency in the assessment process. In this interactive, one-hour workshop, we’ll explore starting points for using AI in the assessment design and implementation processes to empower students. Participants will leave with concrete takeaways on how AI can inform student-centered assessment design.

The disruptions of the past few years in education have renewed interest in competency-based learning (CBL), a system designed to promote agency, equity, and transfer in schools. But what is CBL? Why does it matter? How might schools begin working towards it? In this hour-long workshop, a GOA coach will help your team understand the core elements and impact of CBL and, through a series of simple exercises, introduce five key shifts for moving towards CBL in classrooms and beyond. Participants will leave this workshop with a deeper understanding of CBL as a framework for school design as well as concrete approaches to bring competency-based learning into their classrooms.

This session introduces polarity management, an approach to organizational challenges developed by Barry Johnson. Participants will learn the difference between “problems to be solved” and “polarities to be managed” and using a replicable framework will practice identifying and mapping polarities at their own schools to better understand how to achieve balance in some of the most complex issues we face as leaders.

Students learn deeply when we use technology to expand our notion of when and where learning happens. We know from the shifts of the last few years both in pandemic responses and in AI developments that learning is not limited to synchronous, in-the-classroom experiences; the potential to offer students multiple ways to approach course content and to engage in community are boundless. This one-hour workshop unites a learning community in a shared understanding of what we mean when we talk about rethinking time and space for learning and introduces “look-fors” that teachers can identify in their own practice. These include leveraging both asynchronous and synchronous modes of engagement, designing for flexible pacing, and using technology to connect students to communities and experiences beyond the classroom. Participants will engage in collaborative conversation and self-assess their own practice leaving the workshop with an identified next step to try in their own courses, an outcomes-based rubric for ongoing growth, and a strategies playlist to support future shifts in practice.

Participants will be introduced to the concept of systems thinking via systems mapping, a strategy that allows leaders to see the systems in which they operate, which in turn empowers them to improve and even transform those systems. Following a process that can be applied back in schools, participants will have a chance to map a system and reflect with on how to bring systems thinking into their roles.