4:00-6:00 PM
Registration & ReceptionExhibit Booths Open
7:30 AM-6:00 PM
Exhibit Booths Open
7:30-8:30 AM
Breakfast
8:30-9:30 AM
Keynote | Symphony Ballroom
Speaker: Dr. Emily King, Child Psychologist
Before we dive into a day of expanding our toolkits for supporting all learners, Dr. Emily King will center us in the importance of understanding how anxiety impacts a student’s ability to learn and how we can use the power of our relationships with students to create a safe space for them to take risks, make mistakes, and try again.
Many neurodivergent students have asynchronous profiles, which means that they may be gifted in one area but struggle in another. This leads many neurodivergent students to experience a higher level of anxiety when learning compared to their neurotypical peers.
This session walks us through understanding of how variability within a child’s cognitive, memory, language, and sensorimotor development can impact their emotional regulation, behavior, executive functioning, and academic achievement. You will learn how to spot, prevent, and respond to anxiety in your students and help them emotionally regulate to ready their body and brain for learning.
9:30-10:00 AM
Break & Exhibits
10:00-11:00 AM
Breakouts
Speakers: Heidi Tringali, Tringali Occupational Therapy Services, and Heather Wynkoop, The Fletcher School
Boost cognitive connections with purposeful movement. Join this session to learn routines and tips to maximize your space for effective, movement-based learning. By incorporating purposeful movement into the curriculum, educators can enhance student engagement, boost cognitive development, and support the holistic achievement of each student’s potential. This approach not only strengthens academic outcomes, but also aligns with the forward-thinking goals of curriculum design, ensuring that schools remain innovative and responsive to the diverse needs of learners.
Participants of this session will gain a deeper understanding of how and why purposeful movement enhances learning outcomes and overall student growth, practice safe and effective movement activities that can be easily integrated into their classrooms, and leave with a practical toolbox of ideas and strategies to implement movement-based learning activities right away, enhancing student engagement and success.
Speakers: Lane Abrams and David Johnstone, Christ Church Episcopal School
Discover how Christ Church Episcopal School transformed its approach to student support in the lower school through a reimagined tiered intervention model. This session will delve into the strategies and collaborative efforts that have reshaped how we address the diverse needs of our lower school students. Learn about our three-tiered system, designed to provide targeted and effective support—from universal classroom practices to intensive, individualized interventions.
Participants will gain insights into the implementation process, challenges faced, and the measurable successes that have emerged from our commitment to fostering an inclusive learning environment for our lower school students.
Collaborating effectively with parents is one of the most powerful tools a school administrator has to promote student success. Parents are the expert on their child in the home, and community and educators are the experts in the classroom. Bridging parent and teacher expertise of student strengths and needs is paramount to designing the optimal environment for neurodivergent learners.
In this session, administrators will come to a better understanding of the student behaviors related to a child’s diagnosis of ADHD, autism, and/or learning differences and how to effectively engage in collaborative conversations with parents that balance high expectations while also honoring the individual needs and strengths of students.
Speaker: Dr. Jenna Taylor, Playful Pathways Counseling
Twenty percent of youth in schools have a diagnosable disorder. Mental health challenges create barriers for engagement for 40% of adolescents and 17% of children. With students spending an average of 40 hours a week at school, schools are urged to support mental health concerns.
Child-Teacher Relationship Training (CTRT) is one mental health approach that can fill the gap of mental health services in schools. CTRT is a counseling approach that is developmentally appropriated for youth. In CTRT, teachers implement play therapy skills to build relationships with students and facilitate the learning environment. The purpose of this workshop is to highlight student wellness and how CTRT can meet the increasing needs of youth.
11:00-11:30 AM
11:30 AM-12:30 PM
Speaker: Dr. Carrie Willmore, Boyd-Buchanan School
The role of homework in student learning has been debated among educators for years. While some argue that homework is essential for reinforcing classroom learning, others raise concerns about its potential to cause stress and negatively impact student well-being.
This session offers a deep dive into the latest research on homework, focusing specifically on middle-grade education. Participants will explore findings from a recent qualitative study that examines middle-grade teachers’ perceptions of homework and its impact on student achievement. The session will highlight how teachers can design homework that enhances learning and supports student well-being. Educators will gain strategies for creating meaningful homework assignments that contribute to all student’s success.
Speaker: Dr. Erica Carswell and Katie Walker, LMFT, Fort Worth Country Day School
A narrative about what students “cannot do” has slowly become louder than their epic potential and opportunities for growth, as competitive college admissions and a hyperfocus on GPAs take center stage. Often, to the potential detriment of students, support can be mischaracterized as removing challenges or believing that students cannot do “hard things”. While the intent of support (both providing and seeking) is genuine, the impact of “oversupport” can have unintended consequences. We must find a balance.
Join this session to focus on how to empower students and encourage self-advocacy, enabling students to take charge of their learning. We’ll explore how we can define support through the lens of interrupting deficit thinking and fostering a growth mindset that promotes resilience and self-efficacy. Participants will learn to navigate the delicate line between providing support and inadvertently fostering learned helplessness. Additionally, we will discuss a collaborative, vertically aligned approach to student support, ensuring that strategies are age and developmentally appropriate across grade levels to create a nurturing environment that promotes student agency and growth.
Speaker: Marra Smith, Miami Country Day School
This session will showcase how implementing collaborative communication structures in a PK3-12 school setting can significantly improve the flow of information and keep the entire community well-informed day-to-day and year-to-year. We will start with a case study of the creation of the Center for Academic Success and Well-Being (CASW), which serves to facilitate these effective communication frameworks across the school. Following this, you will have the chance to engage in an interactive workshop alongside peers to identify and reimagine communication and support systems in your own school, regardless of its size or existing structure. Together, in this shared environment, we will explore and exchange strategies for enhancing school-wide support by improving communication and documentation practices.
Speaker: Dr. Scott Hamilton, Understanding Minds, PC
“Working memory” is a familiar term to most learning specialists, though it is often difficult to understand exactly what it is and ,more importantly, what to do to support students who struggle with it.
Dr. Hamilton will discuss the shortcomings of working memory assessment in psychoeducational evaluation, and he will present a model of working memory that is practical for identification and intervention. Participants will gain a more nuanced understanding of the concept of working memory, learn how it “moderates” other executive functions, and discover practical strategies to utilize in supporting students with working memory challenges.
12:30-1:30 PM
Lunch
1:30-1:45 PM
1:45-2:45 PM
Speakers: Luciana De Benedictis and Eileen Pinero Rodriguez, St. Thomas Episcopal Parish School
In this session, we will show how we invite and schedule students to participate in a pragmatic skills developmental playgroup. The emphasis of these small groups is to support the development of social communication and social skills through play. In the playgroups, students will refine key components of successful social interactions:
Students will acquire and refine essential skills that work as a foundation for executive function skills. Well-developed executive functioning skills during preschool and kindergarten years are an indicator of academic, social, and emotional achievement and are target skills for the playgroup sessions.
Speaker: Dr. Heather Ramsey, The Fletcher School
Dive into the transformative world of AI-powered assistive technologies and their potential to revolutionize academic support in independent schools.
This session will provide the following:
Speakers: Kathleen Bukowski and Sophie Daniels, The Westminster Schools
Learn about our committee-based model for determining student accommodations and strategies.
This session will cover how we:
Discover how to develop a dynamic, inclusive approach to supporting diverse student needs.
Speaker: Shaylyn Carey and Lee Yonika, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Discover how Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can transform teaching and learning for both students and professional learners. We will start with an introduction to the most recent UDL guidelines, offering educators a foundational understanding of this inclusive educational framework. Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their experiences with UDL in their professional learning settings, then, we will share practical examples from Harvard Graduate School of Education programs UDL: Explore & UDL: Apply, illustrating how educators have successfully integrated UDL principles to enhance learning environments.
2:45-3:15 PM
3:15-4:15 PM
Roundtable Discussions | Symphony Ballroom
5:00-6:00 PM
Reception & Exhibits
7:30-10:00 AM
Exhibits
Speaker: Dr. Shelley Moore, Outside Pin Consulting
In this session, we will look at how the goals of inclusion have continued to shift and evolve as we learn more about diversity and identity. Participants will reflect on their own contexts and consider next steps for advocacy and action.
Speakers: Jill Gough and Mary Jacob Harris, Trinity School
In Upstream, Dan Heath teaches us to prevent issues before they start. What if we formatively assess to gain insight and proactively plan to teach where students are in their learning journey? By looking at how students attack unfamiliar words, we gain insight into a child’s ability to decode fluently. Is the child struggling at the phoneme level? Do they need support tackling within word patterns? Are they ready to move into meaning morphology instruction?
Grow student independence in learning by growing fluent readers. In understanding individual students’ abilities, teachers can meet learners with diagnostic and prescriptive instruction to bolster all levels of reading within the classroom.
In this session, we will understand how to analyze data to learn more about what students know, and how to collaborate with a team to plan targeted, differentiated group work sessions that support what students need.
The Inclusive planning process is aiming to situate disability as an identity, not a deficit, and so to determine what supports and strategies students require, teams are shifting to look at needs, instead of disabilities, as a reference point. In this way, planning for inclusive classes can be universal and anticipate needs of everyone in a community.
In this session, we will connect to Universal Design for Learning principles and look at how we can plan for a student with a disability in ways that can support many students in a classroom.
Speaker: MaryBeth Spencer, Woodlynde School
The Science of Reading has become a topic not only of teacher training, but also far-reaching research, investigative journalism, and even legislation, but how does it affect the teachers of subjects other than reading? This presentation provides teachers of content areas a background in the Science of Reading, but also real strategies and practices to support evidence-based reading instruction outside of the reading classroom.
Speaker: Dr. Diane Milner and Sara Quesinberry, Key School at Carolina Day School
Join this session to learn how Key School, a school dedicated to teaching bright children with dyslexia and language-based learning differences, developed and evolved over its 27-year history within the larger Carolina Day School campus. Discover how “Brain Rules” rooted in Orton-Gillingham principles can be integrated into multisensory math lesson plans to support dyslexic and neurodivergent learners’ long-term success in mathematics.
Break
Speaker: Jessica Kulp, Cannon School
As independent schools increasingly adopt research-based strategies in mind, brain, and education for teaching and learning, questions often arise about how these new practices align with the concept of rigor. Administrators, faculty, and families may worry that these relational approaches could produce a generation of learners unprepared for the “real world.” How accurate is this concern? How can we assess the validity of this narrative from a student’s perspective? Moreover, how can independent schools reconcile these differing views and strike a balance between providing support and fostering independence?
Discover the power of auditing classes to gain a deeper understanding of the student experience. In this session, we’ll explore how independent schools can use class auditing to balance research-based teaching strategies with academic rigor. By stepping into students’ shoes, you’ll uncover how relational approaches affect their readiness for the real world and challenge the idea that these methods compromise rigor. Through reflective discussions, participants will learn how auditing classes can provide valuable insights into fostering both support and independence in your students. Participants will leave with practical strategies they can implement in their own schools to ensure collaborative approaches that support students and faculty while also challenging them in meaningful ways.
Speaker: Meg Goddard, The Galloway School
This session is critical for independent school leaders as they aim to foster collaborative relationships with families to support the whole child. Executive functioning challenges can significantly impact academic achievement, and the home-school partnership is key to creating consistent and effective support.
School leaders will gain insights into building lasting family partnerships that support not just academic performance, but also student well-being and independence, aligning with broader goals of holistic education and parent engagement. Through meaningful partnerships, schools can help families understand the importance of EF skills—such as organization, time management, and self-advocacy—and how to reinforce these skills at home.
Participants will explore strategies for building strong communication channels between families and school support teams, ensuring that EF interventions are tailored to each student’s needs. The session will also address common challenges in these partnerships, offering practical solutions for maintaining family engagement. Attendees will leave with actionable plans for fostering collaboration and co-creating a supportive environment that empowers students to succeed academically.
Speaker: Taylor Knight, St. Christopher’s School
Many schools and teachers rely on conventional assessments and grading methods, which often fail to capture students’ true understanding. Meanwhile, students express their desire for engaging, hands-on work at school that they find meaningful. Can we use student interest to inform our assessment model? YES! It is time to rethink our schools’ approach to assessment—how we evaluate evidence of learning and achievement.
Discover how to assess learning that demonstrates true comprehension and make changes accordingly. Changing your perspective on assessment and evidence of learning can help transform these attitudes about learning and achievement, and it will shift the emphasis to measures that matter for neurodiverse students.
Speakers: Porter Burgess and Maggie Simms, Christ Church Episcopal School
Discover strategies to integrate executive functioning skills into daily instruction, equip students to understand themselves as learners, and prepare them for success beyond the classroom.
In this session, you will learn how to support executive functioning needs within your classroom through research-based methods and equip students with strategies to understand themselves as learners. This session will demonstrate how strong executive functioning skills are crucial for future success. Educators will leave with tools to create a more supportive learning environment, fostering skills that help all students thrive.
12:30 PM
Adjourn