NEASC2024

Join educational leaders and NEASC staff as they share their journeys to create a Vision of the Graduate/Portrait of the Learner to articulate their school’s learning goals for their students.

Learn how schools across New England have used this guiding document to align curriculum, bring staff together around shared philosophy, and assess student success. Presenters and NEASC staff will share examples of successful implementation, and resources and ideas for bringing this process in your school.

Designed for group participation, this workshop is an opportunity to work collaboratively, with your school team or with others, to understand the importance and implications of developing a Vision of the Graduate/Portrait of the Learner, consider your school's values and learning goals, and start to understand the importance of authentic assessment for that vision.

All participants will receive a handbook for implementation and access to a library of resources and exemplars from public, independent, and international schools.

IMPORTANT: Please note that general conference registration is required in order to sign up for a pre-conference workshop and that there is an additional fee to attend. If you already registered for the conference but did not add the workshop on at the time and would now like to, please contact mlarson@neasc.org.

Student agency is at the core of meaningful education experiences. Active engagement and reflection in learning processes help students understand themselves not only as individual learners but as members of a learning community. Fostering this type of engagement helps students understand their role as active change agents. In this session, participants will learn about Brooks School's commitment to student engagement, agency, and advocacy through a competency-based education framework. Participants will hear about the development and implementation of two school-wide competencies: Learning Agency and Social Justice Responsibility. The success of a common all-school rubric and upcoming plans to evaluate assessment practices to more fully incorporate social justice responsibility will conclude the presentation portion of the session . Participants will then engage in two collaborative rubric-building exercises that explore classroom engagement, preparation, and advocacy grounded in student agency before asking questions and reflecting upon the session.

For years, high schools around the world have been designing innovative pathways for our learners. Unfortunately, most of us have been doing it in isolation, even though the learning experiences we are all designing are similar. This is why we launched the Pathways Summit in 2024 at the American International School of Budapest. We wanted to bring together international schools to design an innovative diploma around a shared purpose.

Now we're excited to share our Global Impact Diploma, a competency-based diploma designed around the core needs of agency, meaningful learning, and wellbeing. The GID has been co-created by educators from more than 100 international schools and will be piloted by 28 schools for the 2025-2026 school year. Find out how your school can be involved moving forward by joining our session, or go to this link if you're unable to attend: https://bit.ly/3UVdbEA.

The session will outline how this high school has embedded a leadership, ethics and development curriculum (LEAD) for all students 9th through 12th during the school day. This pedagogical approach includes a strong emphasis on leadership for all incoming 9th graders, health and wellness in 10th, and exploration of self and others through service and preparation for exploration of interests. Students have the opportunity to lead an Exploration course, with teacher support embedded in the day. Students, and adults who work with them, will present on each of these components of the program, and highlight the successes and lessons learned from the past five years of development.

Join us for conversation and connection.
Appetizers and beverages will be served.
Entertainment will be provided.

Thank you to our reception sponsor, Jostens.

What would it look like if you replaced tests and letter grades with projects, portfolios and public exhibitions? What if students moved on to the next level, not based on age or time, but when they demonstrated proficiency on essential skills? Performance-based promotion is the fundamental premise of Parker Charter, a public charter school in Massachusetts with 29 years of experience of using portfolios and public exhibitions to assess student readiness to move to the next level of study. This session details how the teachers and students of Parker Charter design and complete projects, share feedback, make revisions and progress through the program. The highlight of the session will be small group discussions with Parker students who will share their academic portfolios, showcasing their growth over time. The students will reflect on the process of learning and what they learned about themselves through hard work, reflection and revision.

Explore the power of student voice and identify why "student voice" is integral to learning success for all students in our schools. In this session participants will consider working definitions of student voice in shared decision making using a democratic school high school as the model. This presentation of a governance model will uncover a range of challenges and supports to building opportunities for student voice in our schools. Examples will be given on how a school community can grow the supports and build bridges to meet the challenges of growing student voice in their school community. Time allowing, each school will have an opportunity to make an action plan to take back to their school.