2025 Summer Symposium

This unique session leverages "dumb data" team spirit and the absurd, presenting metaphor-rich prompts to ensure engagement without the pressure of competition. It's joyous, silly, and inclusive, fostering high engagement. Wellness blossoms as teams connect, reflect, share, and laugh together over poll answers seen in real time.  Funny Polling is the perfect teacher's aide for wellness and team to help ensure happy healthy teachers will continue to influence more happy healthy students.

Understanding who we are and how we can best take care of ourselves through self-care is one of the best ways to support our human and prepare our best selves for those we serve. In this session you'll realize practical strategies for the four types of self-care, and discuss resilience strategies and activities that contribute to developing a strong foundation for healing.

In the "Healing through Self-Compassion" session, participants will reflect on their current self-care practices, align them with various dimensions of self-care, and identify any gaps. They will then select from suggested activities to fill these gaps, leading to the creation of a personalized self-care goal. This process encourages a holistic approach to wellness, promoting self-compassion and a deeper commitment to personal well-being through enriched self-care practices.

A classroom environment can only be filled with what the educator has the capacity to pour out. To ensure learning environments are safe, collected, and calm, educators themselves must first integrate wellness practices designed to refresh and refill. This session emphasizes the importance of SEL strategies in the implementation of educator self-care. Participants will discover how to calm the parasympathetic system using techniques which support mindfulness.

In this session we will set the foundations of a behavioral MTSS structure and explore how to ensure all tiers of students are getting what they need to thrive.  We will look at best practice programming to support students and forecast mistakes to avoid in developing and implementing MTSS systems.

Additionally, we will lean on the perspective of our clinical therapist, Dr. Pickens, who will help participants better understand behavior management, emotional regulation, and restorative ways to support students within the MTSS structure.

Educators are facing the highest levels of stress and burnout in decades, often being forced to address and prioritize the health and well-being of others over their own. Stressed-out educators are less productive, struggle with absenteeism, and have a much higher risk for illness and major medical problems. In this session, learn about the negative impacts of stress on the body from a recovering stress-a-holic and Sudden Cardiac Arrest survivor who was quite literally stressed to death at the age of 28 while working as a school administrator. Hear Heather’s story of survival, learn about the negative impacts of stress on the body, strategies for managing and coping with the many pressures facing educators, and strategies for moving from stressed and overwhelmed to healthy and successful.

Grounded in cutting edge research on courage, vulnerability, empathy, and resilience, this interactive session focuses on creating systems to support healthy teams. Starting with activities designed to build connections and enhance effective communication in staff meetings and PLCs, this workshop incorporates self-reflection, discussion, and the development of key empathetic leadership moves to establish strong collaboration. Teachers and leaders will leave with simple, ready-to-use tools to harness collective strength and cultivate brave spaces for all teams to flourish.