Proving Ground Convening 2024

Most family engagement efforts in schools don't lead to substantive improvements in student learning and well-being. In this opening keynote, participants will learn the most essential evidence on what makes for effective family engagement strategies, and how exemplar districts that have used engagement to make meaningful progress on attendance and other learning goals. 

Grounded in real-world experiences and proven strategies, this session offers a fresh approach to school behavior that focuses on equipping students with the tools they need to succeed—both in school and beyond. Attendees will gain insight into how restorative practices, in a student-led environment, can create schools where conflict is met with connection, harm is met with repair, and community is built through a shared sense of belonging.

In recent years, much research has conceptualized bias as an automatic response, cultivated through exposure to bias in society. From this perspective, combating bias requires reducing a proclivity for bias within individuals as in many “implicit-bias training” efforts. I will introduce an alternative approach that begins with the presumption that people are inherently complex, that is, including multiple, often contradictory patterns of selves and goals. When we conceptualize the person this way, we can ask when biased selves are likely to emerge and whether we can sideline this bias—alter situations in potent ways that elevate alternative selves and goals that people will endorse and for which bias would be non-functional. Using both classic and contemporary examples, I will show how sidelining bias has led to meaningful improvements in real world outcomes, including higher achievement and reduced school suspensions, recidivism to jail, and stereotyping in mass advertisements across three Western countries.

You will be taken on a 30 minutes tour of Huntington Bank Field (Cleveland Brown Stadium) by a Browns representative. PG will be allocating folks who have opted for the Tour to different groups.

You will be taken on a 30 minutes tour of Huntington Bank Field (Cleveland Brown Stadium) by a Browns representative. PG will be allocating folks who have opted for the Tour to different groups.