The document summarizes presentations from several speakers at a conference. It briefly describes the topics that will be addressed by each speaker: 1) Pat Bassett will discuss improving difficult conversations in schools and address questions around curriculum, teaching methods, assessment, and leadership. 2) Heidi Hayes Jacobs will share her model for upgrading K-12 curriculum to prepare students for the future and will provide steps for strategic revisions to content, skills, and assessments. 3) Michael B. Horn will argue that asking how students can learn better, rather than why schools are underperforming, could lead to new insights into education. 4) Tony Schwartz will discuss how meeting people's needs can free and motivate

2. Pat Bassett
The President of NAIS presents an
analysis of conversation dynamics, why
tough conversations tend to go badly,
and what to do to make them go
better.
He will address some of the essential
conversations we should be having,
but aren’t, such as
“What should we teach (the
curriculum/content question)?”
“How should we teach (the assessment
question)?”
“How should we assess (the
testing/outcomes question)?”
and “How do we embed the 21st
Century school vision (the leadership
question)?”

3. Essential Curriculum NOW! ~
Heidi Hayes Jacobs
How can we best prepare our learners for their
futures? How can independent schools make
the transition out of dated program structures
and curriculum to those for the contemporary
learner? How do we determine the best of our
traditions? Dr. Jacobs will share her model for
upgrading the curriculum for classes K-12. She will
walk through a step-by-step approach to make
strategic revisions in your classroom. You will
examine specific replacements for content, skills,
and assessments to be implemented gradually
and realistically.
The workshop is based on her book: Curriculum
21: Essential Education for a Changing World
(ASCD, January 2010), that will deal with these
most fundamental questions: What do we cut?
What do we keep? What do we create?

4. Improving Education ~ Michael B. Horn
In most school reform efforts the focus
is on the schools. The question we
typically ask is, “Why aren’t schools
performing as they should?” Perhaps a
key reason we’re so dissatisfied with
the state of public K-12 education is
that we’ve been asking the wrong
question. If we asked instead, “Why
aren’t students learning?” perhaps we
might see things that others have yet
to perceive. After all, it’s the
children’s performance that should
concern us. The performance of a
school is little more than the sum of
the performance of its students.

5. Be Excellent at Anything
~ Tony Schwartz
Demand in our lives is increasing relentlessly.
Our capacity isn’t keeping pace. The way
we’re working isn’t working. Far too many
schools expect their employees to operate in
the same way that computers do: continuously
at high speeds, for long periods of time,
running multiple programs at the same time.
It’s a prescription for failure.
Rather than trying to get more out of their
faculty, schools are better served by meeting
people’s multi-dimensional needs, so they’re
freed, fueled, and motivated to bring the best
of themselves to work every day.

6. Done ~ David Eagleman
David Eagleman examines the contracts
people make with their future selves ~ “I’ll eat
this cake if I promise to go to the gym
tomorrow” ~ and pinpoints how this can be
leveraged effectively when it comes to
getting things done. (This talk expands upon a
popular New York Times Op-Ed in which he
discussed the concept of a Ulysses contract,
and suggested that President Obama was
setting up the nation in such a contract by
committing to a deadline for withdrawal from
Afghanistan.)
In a fast-paced talk, Eagleman explores the
powers and tyrannies of deadlines, how brains
simulate the future (sometimes badly), why
holding “open loops” is costly, and why the
enemy of productivity is unpredictability

7. Learning Is An Epic Win ~
Jane McGonigal
Why don’t our schools work more like an online
game? In the best-designed games, our
engagement is perfectly optimized: we have
important work to do, we’re surrounded by
potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and
in a low-risk environment. When we’re playing a
good online game, we get constant useful
feedback, we turbo-charge the neurochemistry
that makes challenge fun, and we feel an
insatiable curiosity about the world around us.
All of these game-world insights can be applied
directly to transform the way we learn, solve
problems together, and develop twenty-first
century skills - and in this talk, Dr. McGonigal will
show us how.