Thursday Morning | April 12, 2018, 7:00 – 9:00 AM
LU 1.5
Sonja Brookins Santelises
Chief Executive Officer Sonja Brookins Santelises has spent close to 30 years focused on building high-quality teaching and learning to help students excel, including her tenure as chief academic officer for Baltimore City Public Schools from 2010 to 2013. She returned to City Schools in July 2016 after serving for three years as vice president for K-12 policy and practice at The Education Trust, a nonprofit organization focused on closing the achievement gap experienced disproportionately by African American, Latino, and Native students and students from low-income families.
Dr. Santelises first came to City Schools in 2010 from Boston, where she was the assistant superintendent for a network of 23 “pilot schools” with broad autonomy and a track record of successfully meeting students’ needs and improving the achievement of low-income students, particularly students of color. Prior to holding the pilot schools post, she was assistant superintendent for teaching and learning/professional development in Boston.
Dr. Santelises began her career in education as director of professional development and teacher placement with Teach for America (New York). She then served as a teacher and curriculum specialist at Decatur Clearpool School, a year-round school in Brooklyn, where she oversaw the founding of the middle school. Before joining Boston Public Schools, Dr. Santelises lectured on urban education for two years at Harvard University and spent six years as a senior associate with Focus on Results Inc., where she coached superintendents and trained school leaders in five major urban districts. Prior to that, she served as executive director of the New York City Algebra Project, the local site of the acclaimed national math reform program.
Throughout her career as an educator, academic, and administrator, Dr. Santelises has been steadfast in her belief that excellence in urban education is achievable at scale. “Our students have the same capacity for success as any other students,” she says. “We must communicate and demonstrate our complete confidence in that capacity, by charting a pathway to success for each individual child. The real challenge is ours – as educators – to hold ourselves and our students accountable for their achievement.”
Dr. Santelises is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University. She holds a Master of Arts degree in education administration from Columbia University and a Doctor of Education in administration, planning, and social policy from Harvard University. She has lived in Baltimore with her husband and three daughters since 2010.
Grant Lichtman
Grant Lichtman is an internationally-recognized thought leader on the transformation of K-12 education. He works with school teams to develop a comfort and capacity for change in a rapidly changing world. For almost 15 years, Grant was a trustee and senior administrator at one of the largest independent schools in the United States. Since 2012, Grant has visited more than 125 schools and districts, published three books, written numerous articles, and worked with thousands of school and community stakeholders to develop unique and powerful visions and strategies for transforming education away from the Industrial Age and towards future-focused models of deeper learning.
Grant is the author of three books:
Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education;
#EdJourney: A Roadmap for the Future of Education; and
The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School.
Before working in education, Grant directed business ventures in the oil and gas industry in the former Soviet Union, South America, and the U.S. Gulf Coast. Grant graduated from Stanford University with a BS and MS in geology in 1980 and studied the deep ocean basins of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Bering Sea. Grant and his wife, Julie, live in Poway, 20 miles north of downtown San Diego.
For more information, please visit
www.grantlichtman.com.
Twitter:
@GrantLichtman
My TEDx:
"What We Can Learn From 60 Schools"
My new book:
Moving the Rock: Seven Levers WE Can Press to Transform Education
My last book:
#EdJourney: A Roadmap to the Future of Education
My first book:
The Falconer: What We Wish We Had Learned in School
Friday Evening | April 13, 2018, 6:00 – 7:30 PM
Contemporary learning spaces: creating community and opportunity by design
Contemporary learning spaces create community and opportunity by design. Human-centered environments support social, emotional, physical and cognitive learning, and allow the natural patterns of childhood to emerge, allowing children a path to integrating emotional, social, cultural, physical, and academic competence. We'll share how spaces intentionally designed to integrate people into communities of learning foster both formal and informal active and experiential learning.
LU 1.5
Dr. Pam Moran
Dr. Moran has been the superintendent of Albemarle County Public Schools in Virginia since 2006. She was the 2016 Virginia Superintendent of the Year and a top four finalist for the AASA National Superintendent of the Year in 2016. Under her leadership the school system has become a national model of public school innovation and home to some of the most contemporary learning spaces in the United States. The schools have made a commitment to this century’s learning model, a belief that we must learn to “search, connect, communicate and make” and thus unleash the lifelong learning potential of young people. And in Albemarle County that means all children, across 25 highly diverse schools, 726 square miles of rural, suburban and urban environments. Educators from Albemarle are well known for their work to infuse Maker work across the curricula. A district initiative to redesign learning spaces has increased opportunities in every school for learners to research, design, build, engineer, and “make to learn” as well as “learn to make” using a variety of old and new technologies accessible in libraries, mechatronics labs, media labs, arts studios, multi-age spaces, maker spaces, and informal learning settings created throughout Albemarle’s schools.
Bold plans now underway seek to eliminate traditional age-based grades in elementary schools, and single-teacher, single subject secondary courses, replacing both with truly open, truly flexible spaces that help to nurture the natural curiosity and the natural energy of children and adolescents.
Ira Socol
Ira Socol is the Executive Director of Learning Engineering, Access, and Design – A Tech and Innovation focused department for Albemarle County Public Schools. His department is responsible for engineering the re-imagination of the structures within which children learn. His team work on the system’s 3-12 one-to-one computer initiative, on changing physical spaces to support contemporary learners and learning, on building problem and passion-based curriculum that crosses content boundaries, and even on how we use time. He has helped to develop Professional Learning support for the schools’ “Seven Pathways to Transform Learning” – Choice and Comfort, Instructional Tolerance, Universal Design for Learning/Individualization of Learning, Maker-Infused Curriculum, Project/Problem/Passion-Based Learning, Interactive Technologies, and Connectivity.
Ira has a complex mix of background experiences, including being a Studio Art major at Michigan State University, an architecture student at Pratt Institute, a New York City Police Officer, a computer network specialist, and an Assistive Technology Specialist, before his doctoral work in education at Michigan State.