This session builds on the foundational strategies from the Coaching for Connection, Certainty, and Autonomy: Radical Learners course by exploring the neuroscience behind educator resistance. When teachers experience uncertainty or a loss of control, the brain can shift into protective responses. Instructional coaches will learn how these reactions are rooted in the brain’s threat response and how they can unintentionally derail a focus on students. Participants will explore how responding in ways that restore connection, certainty, and autonomy can help shift conversations back to a KIDS First mindset.

Takeaways:

• Recognizing common defensive behaviors that appear in coaching conversations and team meetings
• Understanding how stress, uncertainty, and loss of control can trigger protective responses in educators, and
• Learning practical coaching strategies that rebuild psychological safety, reduce defensiveness, and help teams reconnect to a KIDS First mindset.

See the gap between what you think you do and what you actually do as a coach. In this 90-minute session, you will learn how Current Reality Capture, videotaping your own coaching conversations, brings honest, data-driven clarity to your practice using the Jim Knight instructional coaching model. Discover how video reflection helps you ask better questions, interrupt less often, hold productive silence, align with the seven Partnership Principles, and encourage your teacher partners to do the same. Leave with practical tools, data frameworks, a pocket mirror to remind you that “your reflection is your projection,” and a journal to document your journey to see, reflect, and grow.

Takeaways:

• Implement Current Reality Capture using devices you already own to record and analyze your own coaching conversations with a simple “See. Reflect. Grow.” framework.
• Use a data collection tool (aligned with the Impact Cycle) to track specific coaching behaviors such as question-to-tell ratio, interruptions, and empowerment language.
• Apply a practical script for inviting partners into video recording that reduces anxiety, builds trust, and clearly communicates the “why.”
• Leverage video reflection to strengthen the seven Partnership Principles, especially voice, choice, and reciprocity, within coaching relationships.
• Leave with a pocket mirror and reflection journal as daily reminders that “May your reflection be your projection,” turning 90 minutes of learning into a lasting habit of intentional growth.

This session explores how Jim Knight and Michael Faggella-Luby’s “Data Rules” can be used to support student learning, engagement, and belonging while strengthening coaching and leadership practices. Participants will examine practical ways to gather meaningful data on student engagement and use it to make informed instructional decisions that drive growth for all learners. The session reframes data as a tool for reflection, hope, and professional learning rather than judgment. Through reflection and application, educators will consider how they might build systems that use reliable, valid, and teacher-driven data to improve practice and positively impact every student.

Attendees will have an opportunity to learn and discuss the following while considering what this learning means for their role and context:

• What are the Data Rules and how do they apply to supporting student learning, engagement, and belonging?
• How do I gather data on engagement?
• How might I use and apply the Data Rules to inform my coaching and my leadership?

Campus administrators and instructional coaches have the potential to function as a powerful team. However, the expectations and structures surrounding their roles often create silos rather than synergy. While both groups are committed to supporting teacher growth and improving student outcomes, a lack of alignment between coaches and principals can weaken the coherence necessary for meaningful instructional progress. This session will focus on identifying and strengthening district systems that foster collaboration, clarify roles, and build continuity between these critical partners in teaching and learning.

Takeaways:

• System structures designed to increase collaboration between principals and coaches
• Ideas for transforming traditional principal meetings into learning labs that include coaches
• Talking points from people in the field (both principals and coaches) on how they build continuity

Takeaways:

• Highlights of research on language and literacy for MLs and how it differs from general reading approaches for disciplinary literacy
• Observation and feedback protocols for vocabulary, discourse, and reading comprehension for multilingual learners and all striving readers
• A step-by-step process for teaching vocabulary and reading to share with teachers

Takeaways:

• Identifying what truly matters when defining success for your coaching program
• Use simple relevant, research based tools to evaluate coaching effectiveness
• Actionable next steps turning insights into clear decisions that strengthen coaching and student outcomes

Experience how Prosper ISD positioned instructional coaching as the cornerstone of teacher support and continuous improvement. This session reveals our systematic approach to building a coaching culture where every educator receives non-evaluative support through district-based coaches. Learn how we’ve structured coaching to ensure teachers feel heard while maintaining strong partnerships with campus administration. Discover practical strategies for helping district and campus leaders understand and champion the role of instructional coaches in supporting teacher growth.

Takeaways:

• Structure a district-wide coaching model that positions coaches as partners in growth rather than evaluators, fostering psychological safety and teacher agency
• Implement specific strategies to help campus administrators understand and support the coaching role while maintaining appropriate boundaries
• Create systems and protocols that enable coaches to build trust, facilitate teacher voice, and support continuous improvement at both individual and team levels

In this session, participants will explore what it takes to create the conditions where instructional coaching can truly take root within a culture. We’ll examine how leaders can use Partnership Principles to build trust, foster teacher autonomy, and position coaches as thinking partners rather than evaluators.

Takeaways:

• Culture before coaching — Leaders will understand that the conditions they create determine whether coaching thrives or stalls, and they’ll identify specific actions they can take to build a school culture grounded in Partnership Principles.
• Clarity about the coach’s role — Leaders will leave knowing how to position instructional coaches as thinking partners, not as evaluators or an extension of administration.
• Aligned leadership practices — Drawing from The Definitive Guide to Instructional Coaching, leaders will walk away with concrete next steps for aligning their daily leadership moves to a coaching model that keeps student and teacher learning at the center.

This interactive workshop immerses educators in real-time practice of the RIR Protocol (Recognize, Interrupt, Repair) using authentic scenarios they bring. Grounded in the Compassionate Dialogue Framework, participants build self-regulation skills and apply strategies to navigate conflict with empathy and clarity, fostering inclusive, respectful, and culturally responsive classroom and school communities.

Takeaways:

• Practice using the RIR Protocol with real scenarios
• Deeper understanding of their barriers to communication in difficult situations

Takeaways:

• Leave better equipped to engage in life-giving conversations that positively influence your everyday conversations both professionally and personally

Belonging is often treated as separate from instruction and addressed through isolated or “add-on” activities rather than everyday practice. In this session, learn practical, dignity-centered structures you can use immediately to help people and groups move from passive compliance to active participation. Explore Participation Design, a model for planning engagement, thinking, and collaboration that applies to students, colleagues, coachees, staff members, or even your own family. You’ll leave with simple, powerful strategies that strengthen relationships, learning, and performance.

Takeaways:

• Learn practical Participation Structures that increase engagement, collaboration, and overall participation in processes such as learning, coaching, etc.
• Understand how to use The Dignity Framework to intentionally design for belonging within various contexts, such as instruction, coaching sessions, and team interactions.
• Apply simple ways to link and sequence Participation Structures to create meaningful, cohesive experiences.

Coaching educators to adopt specific pedagogical practices that lead to improved multilingual learner outcomes required an intentional focus on data. Empowering multilingual students to become autonomous learners also requires data. How language related data; listening, speaking, reading, and writing, is used (or not) as part of coaching practices is the focus of this session.

Takeaways:

• Understanding language related data from the learner level, program level, and system level.
• Ask and seek answers to what data is collected and how it is used to support multilingual learners

So, you’ve built the skills and knowledge of your coaches, mentors, and/or leaders – now, how do you sustain the growth and capacity of this essential human resource? Reflective practice is more than reviewing what went well or what didn’t. It is a disciplined approach to learning from experience. It is about noticing patterns, questioning assumptions, and translating insight into purposeful action. Effectively led reflective practice sessions offer a great way to routinely sharpen practice as we develop our conversational capacity as coaches and leaders. This session will introduce practical skills and frameworks to immediately strengthen your capability to lead reflective practice sessions in your own context.

Takeaways:

• A deeper understanding of reflective practice as an ongoing developmental process
• Immediately implementable tools and strategies to bring rigor to reflective practice sessions
• Confidence to initiate and lead reflective practice in your context

Great teaching isn’t accidental — it’s intentional. In this session you’ll explore a framework for high-impact instruction that helps teachers plan meaningful lessons, use powerful teaching moves, assess learning in real time, and build strong classroom communities. You’ll unpack research-based instructional practices and walk away with clear ideas you can use right away to boost student engagement and learning.

Takeaways:

• Describe key components of high-impact instruction and how they support stronger student learning.
• Identify practical instructional strategies teachers can use to increase engagement and proficiency.
• Plan ways to support teachers in applying high-impact practices in their classrooms or coaching conversations.

Effective coaching is not defined by the strategies coaches use, but by how coaches show up for teachers and the conditions they create for growth. In this session, participants will explore the inner conditions of effective coaching; connection, curiosity, creativity, and courage, and how these shape a coach’s presence and decision-making. Dr. Curry will introduce the CARE Coaching Framework, a model developed from two decades of coaching practice that helps coaches translate these dispositions into purposeful actions that support teachers. Participants will also examine how effective coaches protect teacher agency, advocacy, autonomy, and professional advancement while keeping students at the center of coaching work.

Takeaways:

• Participants will examine the inner conditions of coaching; connection, curiosity, creativity, and courage, and how these shape how coaches show up for teachers.
• Participants will explore how effective coaches protect teacher agency, advocacy, autonomy, and professional advancement while keeping students at the center of coaching work.
• Participants will learn how the CARE Coaching Framework (Connect, Affirm Agency, Raise Thinking, Elevate Practice) helps coaches translate these dispositions into purposeful coaching moves that elevate teaching and learning.

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There are key components to initiate, build and sustain an instructional coaching program within a school or school district setting. Success requires a commitment by teachers, coaches, administrators, and school boards as collaboration and partnership are essential for unity of purpose and the intended effect on student growth and learning. Starting a coaching program that keeps kids first requires an understanding of these components with intentional and systematic collaboration and decision-making. And, in order to sustain a program, data collection and an evaluation process need to be established.

Takeaways:

• Participants will take away the knowledge and understanding of the many components of a successful instructional coaching program.
• Participants will be able to apply relevant components of what they have learned from this session to their school and/or district relative to coaching program design, practices and program evaluation.

Instructional coaches are often asked to support educators whose roles, content areas, or expertise differ from their own. This workshop explores how to confidently coach across disciplines using the Partnership Principles, Impact Cycle, and Better Conversations framework from the Instructional Coaching Group. Participants will learn practical strategies for building trust, asking effective questions, and facilitating meaningful change with “specials” teachers, special educators, paraprofessionals, and related service providers. Through real-world examples and interactive reflection, coaches will leave with tools to expand their impact beyond their comfort zone.

Takeaways:

• Coaching is about partnership, not expertise – Learn how to apply the Partnership Principles to build trust and credibility, even when you’re coaching in areas outside your background.
• A clear process drives meaningful impact – Use the Impact Cycle to stay focused on student-centered goals and guide productive coaching conversations across diverse roles.
• Better conversations lead to better outcomes – Develop questioning and communication strategies that foster reflection, respect, and growth with all educators, including specialists, paraprofessionals, and service providers.
• Expand your coaching playbook – Explore and refine a versatile set of instructional coaching strategies that can be adapted and applied effectively across multiple disciplines and educator roles.

Every day, we give ourselves in service to the students, parents, colleagues, and community members we influence. While this sacrifice can often lead to job satisfaction, it can also lead to significant stress, a lack of hope, and burnout. Also known as compassion fatigue, this state can silently erode an educators’ ability to care for their students and themselves. This session focuses on recognizing the emotional, physical, and behavioral signs of compassion fatigue before they escalate.

Takeaways:

• Participants will explore the differences between compassion fatigue and burnout, emphasizing the importance of early detection.
• Drawing on practical tools and case studies, this session highlights strategies for self-awareness, stress management, and fostering supportive workplace environments.
• Attendees will engage in reflective exercises and leave equipped with actionable steps to mitigate compassion fatigue and sustain their passion for leading and teaching.

This session serves as an engaging introduction to student-centered instructional coaching, grounded in the Impact Cycle. Participants will explore how coaching can shift from a “fixing” mindset to a collaborative partnership focused on improving student outcomes. Through practical examples and tools—like setting clear, student-focused goals and using observation or video to understand classroom reality—attendees will see how coaching becomes both purposeful and actionable. By the end, participants will have a clear, approachable entry point into coaching that centers student success and builds confidence in supporting teachers.

Takeaways:

• Effective coaching is built on partnership, where teachers maintain a sense of ownership over their decisions while coaches offer support through thoughtful questions and shared expertise.
• How to develop clear, student-focused goals that drive the coaching cycle and make progress measurable and actionable.
• Tools like video, classroom and student-level data, and student feedback help coaches and teachers accurately see current practice and identify targeted next steps for improvement.

Takeaways:

• Explore coaching skills that support effective leadership
• Examine a demonstration of the GROWTH conversational framework
• Engage in guided practice using the GROWTH framework

This session will focus on creating a learning environment where every student feels seen, valued, and included. It will emphasize the importance of building strong relationships, using inclusive practices, and intentionally designing instruction so all students can access and engage in learning.

Takeaways:

• Participants will leave this session with a clear understanding that belonging must be intentionally built into daily instruction.
• You will gain practical ready to use strategies to ensure every student feels seen, heard, and valued, such as incorporating student voice and designing lessons that reflect and affirm diverse identities.
• The main takeaway is that intentional, consistent choices in planning, interactions, and responses can greatly influence students’ sense of belonging, engagement, and success.

Meaningful change doesn’t happen through pressure, mandates, or persuasion. It happens through partnership. In this session, participants will explore the Partnership Principles, connect them to key ideas from change theory, and practice communication skills that build trust and commitment. You’ll leave with practical strategies for leading conversations that move people from resistance or compliance to collaboration and real progress.

Takeaways:

• Explain the seven Partnership Principles and how each one supports movement from compliance to commitment.
• Apply partnership mindsets and communication strategies to strengthen trust and collaboration with colleagues.
• Plan actionable next steps for leading change that honors equality, voice, and choice in their own school or coaching context.

To translate or not to translate? That is NOT the question! Instead, participants will take a nuanced look at when, with whom, how, and why to use translation strategically. Equally, if not more importantly, the session will unpack numerous ways to support newcomers’ or emergent multilingual learners’ academic, linguistic, literacy, and social-emotional development. Finally, participating educators will explore coaching and leadership practices that ensure equitable, engaging learning for all language learners.

Takeaways:

• Deciding when to translate and when not to translate tends to be a complex, multilayered process. Real learning and meaningful connections go beyond translated text. They are reflected in the way we show up for others, the instructional and leadership choices we make, and the inclusive environment we create throughout the school community. This session will support teachers, coaches and administrators in jointly creating welcoming learning spaces and supportive, yet rigorous learning opportunities for emergent multilingual learners.

Teacher reflection is a powerful driver of improved student learning, and coaching conversations should spark that reflection. Participants will explore questioning, listening, and feedback strategies that encourage teachers to analyze learning outcomes, student learning behaviors, and instructional choices. Through modeling, discussion, and practice, participants will reflect on and strengthen their own coaching practices.

Takeaways:

• An understanding of why teacher reflection is a key driver of improved student learning
• Specific coaching moves that spark meaningful teacher reflection
• A personally identified coaching move to strengthen teacher reflection in support of student learning

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In this session, we will focus on the art of coaching presence and its profound impact on fostering better conversations. As coaches, our way of being significantly shapes the dynamics of our relationship with teachers, influencing the depth of reflection and insight they attain. In this session, we’ll explore Better Conversation strategies for enhancing our coaching presence to facilitate richer dialogues.

Takeaways Include:

• Identify and explore personal communication beliefs and habits
• Gain new communication habits that will have an immediate, positive impact on your ability to communicate at work and at home
• Discover how your communication beliefs transfer into habits that lead to an authentic life

Coaches encounter mental health challenges all the time with their own students, their colleagues, and themselves. To establish a powerful coaching relationship, we must first make sure we are taking care of ourselves and our colleagues. This workshop will explore the everyday challenges to our mental health and we’ll practice 20 strategies for supporting our mental health and wellness.

Takeaways:

• Understand the Mind/Body/Brain connection.
• The everyday challenges of stress, anxiety, and trauma
• Strategies for positive mental health
• The role of coaches in supporting the mental health of teachers

Artificial intelligence is reshaping every profession, and coaching is no exception. In this session, we’ll explore what it means to be an instructional coach in an AI world, examining both what AI can and can’t do, and how coaches can use these tools to amplify their practice without losing what matters most, the human relationship at the heart of every coaching conversation. Grounded in Knight’s Partnership Principles and the research behind effective coaching, participants will leave with a clear picture of how to integrate AI in ways that keep teacher growth and student learning at the center.

Takeaways:

• Grounded in Partnership Principles and the research behind effective coaching, participants will leave with a clear picture of how to integrate AI in ways that keep teacher growth and student learning at the center.

What does effective coaching really look like in action? Grounded in the Impact Cycle, this session takes a deep dive into the day-to-day decisions, conversations, and strategies that shape 1:1 coaching. Through real examples, participants will explore how coaches guide teachers through identifying goals, learning new strategies, and improving practice. We’ll also turn the lens inward—considering how coaches themselves grow through feedback, collaboration, and being coached along the way.

Takeaways:

• Understand the Impact Cycle in action
• Participants will be able to apply the Impact Cycle (Identify, Learn, Improve) to structure and guide effective 1:1 coaching conversations.
  Identify high-impact coaching moves
• Participants will recognize specific coaching strategies—questioning, modeling, observing, and providing feedback—that drive teacher growth and student outcomes.
• Translate coaching into classroom impact
• Participants will connect coaching actions to measurable instructional shifts and improved student learning.
• Navigate the “day-to-day” of coaching with intention
• Participants will gain practical insight into balancing informal and formal coaching moments within a typical coaching day.
• Strengthen reflective practice as a coach
• Participants will explore how self-reflection and feedback refine coaching effectiveness and decision-making.
• Recognize the importance of coaches being coached
• Participants will understand how ongoing support, collaboration, and being coached themselves enhances a coach’s impact and sustainability.
• Walk away with ready-to-use strategies
• Participants will leave with concrete tools and ideas they can immediately apply in their own coaching practice.

Takeaways:

• How to design mentoring and coaching experiences that honour teachers
• How to build coaching capacity at the school and system level
• How to support, celebrate, and invest in middle leaders
• How to keep a coaching culture alive, evolving, and deeply rooted over time

In schools everyday is “game day”. Everyday, teachers need the best resources and forms of support because students deserve the best we as educators can offer. The Instructional Playbook is a coach’s support tool that streamlines the process for teachers looking for a high impact strategy that matches their learning goals.

Takeaways:

• Examine why Instructional Playbooks are important resources for Instructional Coaches
• Explore the essential features of an Instructional Playbook
• Experience how to foster partnership dialogue when explaining essential elements of a high impact instructional strategy

Too often, professional learning stops at explanation by leaving teachers to figure out implementation on their own. In this session, instructional leaders will explore the Explain–Experience–Do model, a practical framework for designing impactful professional learning. Participants will learn how to immerse teachers in strategies as learners first, building deeper understanding and anticipating student misconceptions. Walk away with ready-to-use approaches that keep students at the center while maximizing your instructional coaching playbook.

Takeaways:

• A clear, adaptable Explain–Experience–Do framework that integrates seamlessly into impact cycles, group coaching, and other professional learning formats while leveraging your instructional playbook more effectively.
• Practical next steps for implementation, allowing you to apply this approach immediately without overhauling your current systems.
• Firsthand experience with the model, with time to reflect.

As adults feedback can be uncomfortable for those who give it and those who receive it. Students experience the same emotional responses. Carol Sanford, in her book, No More Feedback, writes feedback is helpful given two conditions: 1) given with non-judgmental data, and 2) non-judgmental questions. FeedForward is focused on what the staff can do to elevate student learning. We will explore ways to help students know they are smart.

Takeaways:

• Learn to enhance student developmental plans for the future learning
• Increase student efficacy – students have the right to be intelligent
• Share the wealth of strategies with colleagues

Takeaways:

• Demystify the concept of a coaching culture
• Clarify the role that formal coaching and less-formal coaching approach conversations have in shaping culture
• Identify the conversational contexts where coaching-infused interactions make a positive difference
• Identify the signs of progress we’d expect to see as a coaching culture evolves

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