Pre-Conference

From Vision to Action: Leveraging Community for Competency-Based Transformation

Join the Mastery Transcript Consortium for a dynamic, practitioner-centered conference dedicated to advancing your journey to competency-based learning. At this year’s forum, innovative schools will share real-world stories, problems of practice, and breakthrough successes in competency-based learning. Bring a team of 3-5 key people to dive into hands-on workshops, get personalized consulting, and master MTC’s tools. 

Whether starting fresh, refining your approach, or exploring higher ed alignment, this one-day event will showcase how a Portrait of a Graduate can be a tool for school-wide transformation.

• Master MTC’s powerful tracking tools to showcase student competencies with impact
• Connect with peer schools at all implementation stages to solve real challenges together
• Discover how competency-based education opens doors to college and career pathways
• Get the college admissions’ perspective on how MTC tools create standout applicant profiles
• Leave with actionable strategies to accelerate your competency work immediately

Mastery Transcript Consortium® (MTC), an ETS company, is a national and global nonprofit membership organization that helps make mastery learning—or competency-based education—available to all learners. MTC accelerates equitable access to and widespread implementation of mastery learning models, empowering students to showcase competencies and share evidence of their learning.

Breaking up with Grades: Shifting Mindsets toward Competency-Based Assessment and Reporting to Improve Learning

A competency-based paradigm offers a promising shift from traditional letter grades to a system that values students’ strengths and growth over time. Making this shift requires more than just new systems—it demands a process of “unlearning” ingrained beliefs and practices. This new paradigm calls for educators and leaders who deeply understand the shifts and can compellingly communicate them. This session will make visible the alternative: a competency-based approach, by looking at models of assessment and reporting structures from schools and networks including Big Picture Learning, Mastery Transcript Consortium, One Stone, Bostonia Global, and Spring Lake Park Public Schools. Participants will develop a personal assessment philosophy and prepare for conversations about assessment and grading beliefs and practices. This workshop is designed for all educators and leaders who are interested in reimagining assessment, grading, and reporting in their context. 

Learning Outcomes: 

1. Content Expertise: Participants will gain content area knowledge about grading and competency-based assessment
2. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving: Participants will examine challenges with current grading practices and analyze different solutions that many schools are currently to work towards solving this problem
3. Effective Communication: Participants will work on their storytelling and communication skills as they practice ways to bring others into these complex conversations

Building A Student-Centered High School Ecosystem – State Policy Roundtable

Join the Aurora Institute, Education Commission of the States (ECS), and the Council of Chief State Schools Officers (CCSSO) for an engaging half-day convening about the policy levers state leaders can use to build a more coherent student-centered ecosystem. This conversation will focus in particular on bringing state portraits of a graduate to life by creating alignment between high school learning experiences, graduation requirements, college and career readiness measures, and accountability systems. Hear from state leaders doing the work, learn about specific approaches to policy issues, and leave with ideas for how to shift policy to redesign the high school experience in service of all learners.

From Compliance to Commitment: Leading Change that Cultivates and Sustains Student-Centered Learning

How can we ensure high levels of learning for all in our school and a student-centered, personalized, deeper learning approach that is not just a one-hit wonder fad or initiative but rather a model that transforms our classrooms and culture? How can we shift educators from compliance to commitment in the work? In this unique pre-conference experience, authors and veteran PLC and student-centered learning practitioners Brian and Jon will unpack how to utilize a highly effective collaborative process to support student-centered, personalized, and deeper learning. They will reference various resources from both their 2024 Solution Tree book co-written with Karin Hess, Elevating Competency-Based Learning in a PLC at Work©: Actionable Assessment, Defensible Evidence, and Equitable Grading and Jon’s 2025 Solution Tree book co-written with Joshua Ray, The Foundation for Change Focusing on the Four Pillars of a PLC at Work® and facilitate guided conversations and reflection on this topic. Participants will also be invited to participate in individualized team follow-up coaching sessions with Brian and Jon and an extended virtual discussion to further network with other workshop participants after the Symposium is over. Participants will leave

From Awareness to Action: Building Culturally Responsive Systems for Impactful Leadership and Learning

Equity work takes courageous leadership. Join Karla Vigil and Michaela Pommells of the Equity Institute to reimagine what’s possible for your schools, your students, and your communities. In this pre-conference session, attendees will engage in hands-on exercises and strategies for cultivating culturally sustaining practices, responding to bias, and fostering community care. Participants will leave equipped with the mindset, strategies, and tools necessary to advance the change your learners need. By the end of this session, attendees will:

• Understand the critical importance of advancing equity in today’s educational context and gain tools to confidently continue this work despite challenges. 
• Develop strategies to design and sustain student-centered learning environments that respond to the diverse needs of all learners. 
• Build collaboration across identities and create trust within their communities to foster meaningful dialogue and lasting change. 

Learn culturally responsive strategies that promote empathy and lead to actionable solutions that address systemic inequities.

Researchers Roundtable: Informing and Improving Personalized, Competency-Based, Deeper Learning

This meeting fosters a space for researchers and other stakeholders in competency-based/personalized/deeper learning to come together for information sharing, collective problem-solving, and networking. It provides an opportunity for everyone to gain and give practical, applicable insights into research and evaluation to inform and improve the field. We will share work underway and recent findings, go deep on a small number of problems of practice, provide consultancies on ongoing work, and do some networking.

Transformational Learning Principles Meet AI in Learning Design

AI needs to be brought into schools in thoughtful ways that attend to the outcomes we want, not just the immediate efficiencies it promises. As we step back from the hype, we can see more clearly that AI can be a powerful tool to support our efforts to transform learning experiences, but only if we lead with principles, not technology. Join ISTE+ASCD as we explore how AI can support schools through the lens of the ISTE+ASCD Transformational Learning Principles. Engage with us in conversations where pedagogy leads, and AI enhances. Experience how this approach can enhance student agency, cultivate belonging, encourage learner curiosity and exploration, and foster authentic problem-solving. Participants will leave with practical strategies for how to leverage AI as a co-designer of meaningful educational experiences.

Pedagogies of Voice (PoV) Fundamentals Workshop

This foundational workshop invites educators into the heart of Pedagogies of Voice by exploring the history—and possibility—of reimagining the purpose of education. We begin by examining how traditional systems have stifled both student and educator voice, and how reclaiming our own stories and identities is essential to transformative pedagogy.

Participants engage with the 10 Toxins of Education that constrain voice, and begin to shift toward healing and possibility through the Four Domains of Agency—Identity, Belonging, Inquiry, and Efficacy. Using our signature learning design tool, educators take their first steps toward creating classroom experiences that center student voice and agency.