2024 Agenda

Are you a coach who is interested in learning how to add rocket fuel to your instructional coaching program or process? Then join this session to dive into the power of using video to focus on teaching and enhance instructional coaching. Participants will explore how video can elevate one-on-one coaching partnerships and ignite a team’s learning process. In this pre-conference gathering, coaches will have a chance to learn, discuss, reflect, and plan how video can be used within their contexts.

Effective coaches, leaders, and educators communicate their message clearly, build healthy emotional connections with others, and maneuver through emotionally complex situations in ways that allow them to speak the truth so they will be heard. This workshop introduces 6 beliefs and 10 habits that promote healthy and productive relationships.“Effective communication is an essential skill for a fulfilled life, and we can’t teach it to students if we don’t know how to do it ourselves.”

This session will examine the earliest days of being a new instructional coach. Participants will examine foundational coaching principles and skills and also various elements of coaching in action: coaching cycles, data gathering, strategies, leadership support, and new coaches’ greatest fears. If you’re a new coach or you support new coaches, this session is for you.

The quality of the conversations in an organization can critically influence the organization’s effectiveness. This session explores how a coaching orientation, together with a strong coaching process and key coaching skills, can make a significant and immediate difference in the conversations in which school leaders and coaches engage every day.

Sometimes, when learning to coach or be more coach-like as a leader, we presume that listening and questioning are the two most important skills. Initially at least, practicing coaching can seem like a simple process of questioning and listening with the coach nodding and acknowledging the responses to each question and perhaps taking a few notes as the coachee talks.

In this workshop, we will go beyond the basic building blocks of asking questions and active listening. What does a deeper level of listening to encourage thinking look like? How can we use questions to reframe thinking and how can we use scaling techniques more powerfully to help people make progress? Paraphrasing and summarizing techniques can be the ‘sleeper skills’ that are every bit as powerful as questioning in supporting the thinking and progress of our conversation partners. How do we do this well? And, finally, if Sharing Knowledge and Perspective is a key skill of an Instructional Coach, how and when should we do this in order to best serve our conversation partner’s thinking and progress?

One of the seven success factors of instructional coaching, and an often overlooked one is data. Data is the way in which we set goals and monitor progress. Data is a way we keep track of important aspects of teaching. For an instructional coach to succeed, they have to understand data. Join Jim Knight in this session as he unpacks important elements of data from his soon-to-be-released book, Data Rules.

Attendees will learn how “Data Rules” can focus their coaching efforts, facilitate goal setting and progress monitoring, and ensure coaching drives unequivocal improvements in both the quality of students’ learning and their well-being and engagement.

Many coaches and onsite professional developers are finding themselves in high-stakes, critically important roles expected to lead school reform efforts with little or no professional preparation for successfully performing such tasks. Having worked with more than 100,000 coaches from around the world for close to two decades, ICG experts have identified seven factors that must be in place in order for coaches to flourish. Based on Jim Knight’s newest book The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching: Seven Factors for Success, this workshop provides an overview of those seven factors.

More often than not professional development focuses on teaching practices. Research identifies strategies that are then shared with teachers for implementation. However, our 20 years of research suggest the reverse approach is more effective. We propose beginning with the needs of students, identifying required strategies afterward. This presentation advocates for prioritizing students and explains why starting with strategies can result in wasted time and ineffective development. Let’s keep kids first!

Listening is something we all do (or don’t do) every day. How well we listen, to whom and under what circumstances determines who we are and the paths we take in life. It is fundamental to any successful relationship-personal and professional. During this session, Jim will discuss the importance and strategies of listening with renowned author, Kate Murphy, based on her book You’re Not Listening.

What would delight an educator’s heart more than seeing a learner finally “getting it”? The emerging smiles, perhaps even high-fives, and the fulfilling connection of witnessing their progress. But how do those moments come about? What intentional and attentional choices do we make to create conditions that more readily afford such moments?

In this session, Dr. Haesun Moon introduces heutagogical principles and practices that value, rather than evaluate, one’s progress. Heutagogy, a learner-centered approach, underpins the practice of coaching by assuming humans are naturally inclined toward growth and optimal actions. As educators, we curate experiences of curiosity and wonder that fuel mastery and meaningful progress in education.

Dr. Moon’s groundbreaking meta-model, the Dialogic Orientation Quadrant (DOQ), will be introduced as a practical framework guiding our intentional and attentional choices during conversations, highlighting how meanings are co-authored between conversational partners. The DOQ serves as an influential tool for various conversations—coaching, counseling, performance reviews, and team discussions—making the invisible process of meaning-making both visible and trackable.

This session will demonstrate how to facilitate conversations that prompt individuals to reflect, articulate, and actively experiment. By transforming traditional problem-solving into a generative design process, these conversations reveal hidden possibilities and potentials. Through real-world examples, live demonstrations, and videos, you will learn how to curate stories of purpose, possibilities, and progress—the foundational qualities of transformative learning.

Teaching as Performance Art is an approach to teaching and learning that centers on the performative aspects of teaching. The approach helps educators to understand the ways that understanding the arts and performance are central to being an effective educator. Furthermore, it centers dimensions of teaching that deconstructs performances from musicians, artists, and performers and connects them to the art of teaching and learning. Aligned with a centering of performance art is the focus on activating the imagination to explore what can be possible in teaching and engagement with students.

This talk will involve a training of seeing students as art and engaging with them like one would with a work of art. The 7 components of Teaching as a Performance Art are 1. Use of metaphor and analogy 2. Exhibit moral conviction/collective sentiments 3. Communicate confidence 4. Communicate confidence 5. Use rhetorical/open-ended questioning 6. Use your body and facial expressions as co-teachers 7. Use voice and tone as co-teachers.

In this keynote, Prof. Christian van Nieuwerburgh will be sharing the insights from his latest writing project: Your Essential Guide to Effective Reflective Practice. This methodology, designed to enhance professional practice, starts with the identification of the motivation for reflective practice. As educators and administrators, you will be asked to specify the positive outcomes for students and learners as part of this process. In contrast to existing models of reflective practice, this process takes into account the wellbeing of the professionals engaging with it. In this keynote, you will get a sneak preview of the model and an opportunity to start engaging with Effective Reflective Practice.

The impact of coaching can be cast as a mathematical equation, one that explains the return on investment in coaching. Engaging in professional learning outside of their daily work, particularly when it involves travel, especially for coaches, can be a hard sell to those who manage budgets and to colleagues who are not afforded similar opportunities. How do those who have benefitted from an investment in them to attend TLC show the profits of that investment? When coaches and their champions leave TLC, what is the equation they can write to describe both the benefits and their impact? In this keynote, TLC participants will explore how to use a mathematical equation to explain how they can transform what they learned at TLC into positive results for students, teachers, and the schools they serve.