Amesbury High School • 5 Highland St, Amesbury, Massachusetts
TIME |
AGENDA* |
| 7:30 AM | Breakfast and Networking |
| 8:00 AM | Welcome & Opening Plenary with Dr. Jane Feinberg |
| 9:15 AM |
Breakouts, Round I
|
| 10:45 AM | Snack Break and Transition |
| 11:00 AM |
Breakouts, Round II
|
| 12:45 PM | Closing Circle |
| 1:00 PM | Lunch |
| 1:30 PM |
Optional Afternoon Time
|
*An agenda with session descriptions can be viewed here.
Founder & Executive Director of Power of Place, LLC. Feinberg began her career as a journalist and documentary producer. She developed, wrote, and produced for award-winning public television programs and series, such as “MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” “The American Experience,” “Frontline,” “Long Ago & Far Away,” and PBS specials on Amelia Earhart and the Honorable Thomas P. O’Neil, Jr. She was also a writer/producer for the popular ABC-affiliate nightly newsmagazine “Chronicle," where she often covered social issues. Feinberg directed a two-year statewide media campaign for the ABC affiliate in partnership with the United Way of Massachusetts. The campaign, which won the coveted Service to America Award, elevated the importance of after-school programs to youth development and thriving communities.
In addition to her previous media work, Feinberg served as the Director of Communications and Press Secretary for the Boston Public Schools. She also served as Senior Associate for FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C., where she helped translate social science research about how Americans think about key social issues into messaging for senior leaders engaged in policy and program change. Feinberg was a strategist to school districts in northern New England that received funding from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation to embed student-centered philosophies and practices. She also served as Regional Partnership Lead for Reimagine Learning, a project of New Profit that focused on better supporting marginalized and minoritized students. This work led to the creation of the Essex County Learning Community (ECLC), which launched in 2018 with generous funding from the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation. ECLC is the flagship program of Power of Place Learning Communities.
Feinberg is a Summa Cum Laude/Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Minnesota, holds masters degrees from Boston University and Antioch University, and a PhD from Antioch University. Her research focuses on the relational dimensions of teaching and learning, with a particular emphasis on white teachers and students of color.
Luis Ortega is a multidisciplinary storyteller, educator, cultural strategist, facilitator, and the founder and director of Storytellers for Change.
Over the last fourteen years, Luis has worked with youth, educators, and cross-sector organizations to co-design storytelling projects and narrative change strategies to foster empathy, inclusion, and equity across communities and organizations. His work and projects have been featured at the Harvard DACA Seminar, HBO’s “Where Do You Exist?” podcast, the Kauffman Foundation’s Disruptor Speaker Series, the ArtPlace America Summit, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center. Luis is a W K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network Fellow and the co-founder of the Expresión Storytelling Fellowship at the Latinx Education Collaborative.
Gabrielle Rappolt-Schlichtmann, EdD, is an applied education scientist and a person with dyslexia. She is the executive director and chief scientist at EdTogether, a not-for-profit organization focused on understanding the experience of vulnerable students in school and innovating solutions to broaden their participation. She is an adjunct lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she teaches a course on universal design for emotion in learning.
Before joining EdTogether, Rappolt-Schlichtmann was co-president and director for research at CAST. She worked for several years at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation and at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, studying post-traumatic stress disorder and its impact on attention, learning, and memory. She served as the solicitations editor of the Harvard Educational Review and as a research associate on several national research projects, including the national evaluation of Early Head Start.
Rappolt-Schlichtmann’s work is focused on reimagining the design of education and curriculum to support and empower youth with learning differences. Her work is anchored by a commitment to bringing evidence-based solutions from the learning sciences to practical implementation at scale. She is a national expert on Universal Design for Learning and on the role of emotion in learning. Her work has been supported through funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the Oak Foundation, and others.
Gil Noam, EdD, is the director of the Institute for the Study of Resilience in Youth at McLean Hospital and founder and director of PEAR Inc. (Partnerships in Education and Resilience). Dr. Noam has a strong interest in translating research and innovation to support resilience in youth in educational settings and has published over 200 papers, articles, and books on topics related to child and adolescent development and risk and resiliency. He served as the editor-in-chief of the journal New Directions for Youth Development: Theory, Practice and Research, with a strong focus on out-of-school time, and also provides consultation to youth development, education, and child mental health organizations.
Focusing on prevention and resilience, Dr. Noam trained as a clinical and developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst in both Europe and the United States. He previously served as the director of the risk and prevention program at Harvard and is the founder of the RALLY Prevention Program, an intervention that combines early detection of health, mental health, and learning problems in middle school youth, and pioneers a new professional role—the “prevention practitioner.”
Carrie Conaway is a senior lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Until June 2019, she was the chief strategy and research officer for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and led the agency’s Office of Planning and Research, which strengthens planning, data and resource use, and the focus on evidence in the agency and the field to improve outcomes for Massachusetts students.
She served as DESE’s principal investigator on numerous evaluations of state education programs and has published two peer-reviewed articles on connecting research to practice. Her team also managed the agency’s strategic planning process and built tools that help districts benchmark their performance and deploy their resources more effectively. She led the development of DESE’s top-scoring, $250 million Race to the Top proposal and managed its implementation, as well as winning several other grants to support state research, evaluation, and data use initiatives. Previously she was the deputy director of the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and an associate editor of the Bank’s flagship publication, Regional Review. She also served as the president of the Association for Education Finance and Policy in 2018-19.
She has nearly 20 years of experience in integrating research and practice to improve public policy. She holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Oberlin College; a master’s degree in policy analysis and labor policy from the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; and a master’s degree in sociology and social policy from Harvard University.
Edward Walker, M.Ed, has committed his entire professional career to the realm of education in several capacities, including: Acting Director of Multicultural Recruitment (Bates + Wheaton College), Director of Alumni Relations, Associate Director of College Counseling (Prospect Hill Academy), and Lead College Counseling Consultant (Crimson Summer Academy at Harvard). He currently serves as the Founder and President at Independent Consultants of Education, a consortium of educators devoted to closing the gaps to educational access and opportunity, and as an Instructor/Teacher Coach at IDEAS (Initiatives for Developing Equity and Achievement for Students), where he focuses on the professional learning opportunities in cultural proficiency to support equity and success for all students by facilitating workshops, courses, and seminars grounded in multicultural, anti-racist, and culturally responsive education initiatives for faculty and staff. To date, Ed has worked with hundreds of educators in over twenty-five districts, and served students, faculty and staff in over thirty different schools. Additionally, years of experience as a Guidance Counselor and Dean of Students. Ed has established himself as an influential inspirational keynote speaker, who has had a positive impact on the lives of thousands of youth and adults at over 50 secondary-schools and colleges.
Outside of the typical day-to-day work, with his entrepreneurial spirit, Ed manages his consulting and speaking endeavors. His true full-time job is as husband to Bonnie Walker and father to Tiauna, Takiyah, Kristine, and little Edward Walker.
