Walking Together for a More Just Education:
Equity Audits and Inquiry Cycles in Small and Mid-size Districts

Equity audits in schools or districts have become increasingly common, either because they are externally mandated or because schools choose to conduct them to understand patterns of educational inequity. While equity audits can sometimes identify important disparities that may not have been previously known, they offer schools little support or guidance for how to meaningfully transform conditions for students and families at the margins of our systems. For smaller school districts, the size of sub-populations also makes it very challenging to conduct meaningful statistical analyses to identify broader patterns. This session will present ideas on how to conduct equity inquiry cycles as a continuous and humanizing process that centers reflection and action to facilitate the process of transformative change in small and mid-sized districts.

Critically Engaging with Generative AI:
A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Case Study

In this session, authors of the General Artificial Intelligence: A Critical Engagement Toolkit use real-word examples to help participants learn how to use the Toolkit in their own practice. They start by illustrating some pitfalls of generative AI when used cursorily or without a guiding framework. Then, they walk participants through the Critical Engagement Toolkit using a real-world case study example of its power for teachers and students. While this will be presented in the traditional Ed Talk model, the session will be interactive and allow participants to “choose their own adventure” by responding to prompts using the genAI tool of their choice. By the end of this session, participants will be able to use the Critical Engagement Toolkit in a variety of ways to support their teaching and student learning, with or without the use of genAI.