2019 Innovative Institute 🙌

Join professional educators and community leaders to explore, discuss, and spotlight innovative ideas and techniques that provide equitable, rigorous, and personalized learning for all students.

Schools are recommended to bring teams of five to eight educators to engage in collaboration and discuss best practices.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

LeDerick Horne

LeDerick Horne, a dynamic spoken-word poet and a tireless advocate for all people with disabilities, defies any and all labels. The creative force behind two spoken-word poetry albums and co-author of Empowering Students with Hidden Disabilities: A Path to Pride and Success, Horne uses his gift for spoken-word poetry as the gateway to larger discussions on equal opportunity, pride, self-determination, and hope.

Horne will be available to sign copies of his book at a specified time during the conference.

Dr. Robert Balfanz

Robert Balfanz is a research professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education Center for Social Organization of Schools, where he is director of the Everyone Graduates Center and the Cross-State High School Redesign Collaborative. He is the founder of Diplomas Now, an evidence-based school transformation model for high-needs middle and high schools that combines whole-school reform with enhanced student supports guided by an early warning system. He has published widely on secondary school reform, high school dropouts, early-warning systems, chronic absenteeism, school climate, and instructional interventions in high-poverty schools, and he specializes in translating research findings into effective school improvement strategies.

Ben Owens

One Way Learning consultant, and co-author of Open Up, Education! How Open Source Learning Can Transform Our Schools , Ben Owens helps schools and education stakeholders around the world create the necessary cultural conditions in their own learning communities to reach new levels of excellence for every student, especially those who have been marginalized by the status quo. Owens uses school-wide, cross-grade/cross-curricular project-based learning in an intensely personalized, competency-based education framework that blurs the lines between what happens in school and the real world.

Owens will be available to sign copies of his book at a specified time during the conference.