Featured Speakers

Virtual Conference January 29, 2022

#ELMLEConnect

Ewan McIntosh

Leading projects around the world for clients in education and industry, Ewan is the passionate and energizing tour de force behind NoTosh. A highly-regarded keynote speaker at events around the world, he is also author of How to Come up with Great Ideas and Actually Make them Happen and regularly writes about learning on his blog edu.blogs.com. NoTosh is a global consultancy with a passion for learning and a conviction that innovation and creativity can change the way people think, the way they learn and the way they work - as individuals, teams, organizations and communities. You can connect with him on Twitter @ewanmcintosh and @NoTosh and also sign up to receive regular provocation mailings by clicking here to register!

Ewan McIntosh's main conference session offerings:

How To Come Up With Great Ideas And Make Them Happen

Coming up with ideas is easy. Knowing what a ‘great’ idea looks like is quite another matter.

As a Commissioner at Channel 4 Television, Ewan McIntosh was responsible for saying ‘no’ to nearly 3000 ideas. What are the ingredients of success from the 1% of teams who relentlessly came up with the winning ideas that flourish? And what lessons are there to borrow for successful schools and classroom innovators?

Katie Powell and Stephanie Simpson of AMLE

Katie is the author of Boredom Busters and the soon-to-be-released Frustration Busters and serves as the Director for Middle Level Programs for the Association for Middle Level Education. Katie began teaching in 2005, first in special education and later in Title 1. This focus on providing interventions for struggling students led to the development of strategies that leverage curiosity and fun to engage students while driving learning deeper. Katie has fine-tuned these strategies to be easily deployable in virtually any instructional setting without sacrificing teachers' already-limited time or money. Katie believes in respecting the expertise of teachers and shares her creative process so they can address engagement and depth in their classrooms within their own teaching styles and content. Let’s reclaim the wonder of learning! Follow Katie @Beyond_the_Desk.

Stephanie is the Chief Executive Officer of the Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE), the premier membership organization helping middle school educators cultivate the potential and possibilities of young adolescents. Stephanie is a seasoned professional association leader. She began her associations career as a policy analyst at the American Medical Association after earning a J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and B.A. in International Studies and Information Technology from DePaul University. Follow Stephanie at @Steph_Auditore and the amazing work of AMLE @AMLE.

Katie Powell and Stephanie Simpson's main conference session offerings:

The Successful Middle School: This We Believe – Celebrating and Leveraging 40 years of Middle Grades Best Practice

In 2022, we celebrate the 40th anniversary of This We Believe, AMLE’s landmark text on best practice in the middle grades. Now in its fifth edition, The Successful Middle School: This We Believe provides a roadmap for any school that serves young adolescent students. In this session, we will explore what’s new in the most recent edition through interactive discussion, explore how schools can leverage the text to the benefit of their staff and students, review some of the latest research in middle level education, and introduce how AMLE's Successful Middle School Assessment and Schools of Distinction recognition program can support growth of middle grades best practices at your school.

Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes

Martin and Steve have a combined 40 years’ experience teaching post-16 students as classroom teachers, heads of faculty and senior leaders. Martin was director of sixth form, and Steve deputy director, at a twice Ofsted-outstanding comprehensive sixth form in the UK, where student progress was among the top 10 per cent in the country. They have spent much of their careers teaching GCSE and A level, supporting KS4 and KS5 learners. Over the last five years they have worked with more than two hundred schools in the UK and beyond to develop effective study-skill development systems. They are the authors of The A Level Mindset (Crown House, 2016), The GCSE Mindset (Crown House, 2017) and The Student Mindset (Crown House, 2019). You can follow Martin and Steve on Twitter @VESPAmindset.

Martin Griffin and Steve Oakes' virtual conference session offering:

Drivers and Thrivers - the study habits most closely aligned with academic success, and how we can encourage them.

In the Autumn of 2015, three researchers surveyed 6000 undergraduate Economics students at the University of Toronto before they began their studies. Students answered questions about procrastination, study habits, social identity, academic expectations, goals, risk aversion, time preference, and locus of control.

Then the research team waited for the end-of-year exams, before selecting the questionnaire responses of those who’d ended up scoring in the bottom 10% of the year group (‘divers’) and those who scored in the top 10% of the year group (‘thrivers’).

In terms of previous academic performance, the students had arrived with similarly high levels of success. The average admissions grade was 87%, and the same expectations had been shared as the course began; that students should study 18 hours a week outside of classes, for example, or take paid work for 8 hours a week or less.

So why the big differences? This presentation will focus on what the researchers discovered by examining the attitudes, habits and study techniques of divers and thrivers, draw some tentative conclusions, and share five concrete, actionable techniques we can use with middle-grade learners to encourage the early adoption of approaches that will serve them year by year throughout their academic career.

Justine Fonte Ang, M.Ed, MPH

Justine is the child of Philippine immigrants renowned intersectional health educator who founded the Health & Wellness Program at The Dalton School, a K-12 independent school in New York City serving as its Director for nine years. Justine now runs her own small business conducting speaking engagements, consultations, trainings, peer reviews, and residencies to support schools build or enhance their health and wellness programming for students, parents, and faculty. Her specialization focuses on sexuality topics such as pornography literacy, consent, gender, and beauty standards and has vast experience with curriculum on mental health literacy and food relationships. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Business Insider, NPR, and USA Today for her notable teaching career in sexuality education. She received her Master's in Education in Teaching from the University of Hawai'i and her Master's in Public Health in Sexuality from Columbia University. You can learn more about her career on her website and follow her @ImJustineAF.

Justine Fonte's virtual conference session offerings:

The Case for Sexual Citizenship in Schools

Sexual citizenship denotes the acknowledgement of one’s own right to sexual self-determination and agency and importantly, recognizes the equivalent right in others. Imagine a world where all of our intimate behaviors brought us safety, fulfillment, and pleasure. While a dramatic cultural shift would need to occur for that to become a reality, it is not an impossibility. We can start by destigmatizing sexuality by centering what's relevant instead of what's age-appropriate. We need to celebrate our various identities by including all of them so that sexual health is experienced for the human right that it is. Otherwise, we are left navigating a hypersexualized society that discourages bodily agency. It's on all of us adults to raise children to be sexual citizens.

Dawn Summerfield and Eric Nelson of NWEA

Dawn has worked in education for 28 years and has expertise in school leadership, curriculum design and assessment, special education and differentiation through the use of data.  Her current focus is on improving student executive functioning skills, promoting school community health and wellness, and mentoring new teachers.

She has held leadership positions in both American schools and International IBO schools and has earned two advanced degrees in special education and health and wellness education.   Dawn is passionately committed to driving continuous school improvement in the standards of teaching and learning.  You can connect with Dawn on Twitter @SummerfieldTEC.

Eric is an Account Executive with NWEA’s International Team, supporting partner schools in Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Canada. Eric lives in New York City and is a native of Virginia. Upon graduating from Pomona College with a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Eric was chosen by Teach for America to join its teacher corps. As an educator, he taught 6th Grade Language Arts and Social Studies at the Roberto Clemente Intermediate School in Harlem, New York City, and served on the school’s curriculum development team. He earned a Master’s Degree in Childhood Education from Pace University and is permanently certified to teach at the elementary level. After a family sabbatical in the Netherlands, Eric returned to New York to join Children’s Progress, Inc. and finally NWEA. Eric supports international schools in the use of NWEA’s assessment solutions and coordinates professional learning opportunities and regional events.

Dawn Summerfield and Eric Nelson's virtual conference session offerings:

Using MAP Data to drive Student Goal setting (Dawn Summerfield and Eric Nelson)

This workshop will focus on student growth and goal setting. We will use the MAP reports to answer questions such as “Are my students making progress?” We will focus our attention on growth reports and use those reports to set goals with students. Finally, we will identify the best ways to share data with students as a way to increase their assessment literacy understanding while using MAP reports to identify the best data points to share with families.

Sean Ross

Sean (He/Him/His) is an anti-racist educator, consultant, facilitator, coach, and community organiser. He has done this work in a variety of contexts including secondary state schools, private K-12 education systems, tertiary education, and non-profit organisations. Sean specialises in diversity, equity, and inclusion planning and practices, social justice curriculum design, anti-racist educational programming, and community engagement.

Sean is currently the Middle School Community Action integrationist at the American School in London working to integrate social justice standards into the MS curriculum to develop anti-bias critical engagement by students with the school, the wider community, and the World. In addition, as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion lead for many years Sean continues to work strategically with the entire community to develop and realise an ongoing DEI strategic plan. Sean also works with students to include student voice and perspective in the development of DEI strategies. Sean is also currently supporting Birkbeck College of the University of London to develop an anti-bias strategic plan as part of their Decolonisation Committee. He also advises and supports as a governor on two public school boards in London. Sean teaches courses on Global Issues, Community Action, Social Justice, Identity, and Culture while developing additional programming for students to engage as partners with local community.

Sean Ross' main conference session offering:

Identity and Student belonging

In middle school students are learning to navigate their own identities amidst a tidal wave of conflicting messages about societal expectations from peers, parents, educators, and the media. Allowing students to develop their identity literacy empowers them to grapple with some of the challenges they face trying to figure out who they are. In addition, educators need to provide spaces where students feel safe and heard so that they can explore the concerns and questions that may arise in their daily lives. In this session, we will explore several activities that encourage us to explore our own identities and then discuss how these same activities would apply within specific subject areas or advisory programs.

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