A strong MTSS requires clear structure and purposeful implementation. Too often, confusion about team roles, missing components, or overlapping processes leads to frustration and overload. We'll explore the three essential teams that drive MTSS, the nine core components necessary for it to work, and common missteps that derail entire systems. You'll learn how to prevent over-reliance on intensive, one-on-one support and design efficient, scalable intervention that keeps students in core instruction while building independence.

Neuroaffirming culture doesn't start in the learning support department—it starts with leadership. School systems have long asked neurodivergent students to adapt to environments never built with them in mind. This session calls school leaders to take bold, systemic steps toward creating cultures where human variability is expected, respected, and intentionally supported. We'll explore five critical leadership shifts that move schools from compliance to genuine belonging—examining structures, language, expectations, and routines that either affirm or undermine students' sense of self.

How do we support students with significant needs while challenging those ready to move ahead? This balancing act is one of the most complex aspects of teaching. Rather than layering on endless differentiation and modifications after lessons are designed, we'll explore UDL as both a mindset and a practical protocol for creating flexible, responsive learning experiences from the start. Participants will learn to identify barriers in engagement, access, and expression—and use collaborative protocols to design instruction that works for the broadest range of learners without reducing rigor.

Every school serves a neurodiverse population, but most assessment systems weren't designed with that variability in mind. From rigid formats to narrow definitions of success, traditional assessments often act as gatekeepers—limiting students' ability to demonstrate learning, distorting our understanding of what they know, and damaging self-efficacy. This session explores how to redesign assessment as a tool for equity and agency. We'll identify confounding variables that compromise validity, create growth-oriented rubrics focused on what students can do and what's next, and build flexible expression options that maintain rigor while eliminating barriers.

Based on the ASCD book by the same name, this session teaches how to design bespoke, interdisciplinary support plans that lead to real, measurable progress for students with complex needs. These aren't one-size-fits-all plans—they're anchored in individual, life-changing goals, rooted in meaningful contexts, and co-created with the people who know the student best. Participants learn to conduct routines-based interviews, write goals that focus on what matters most, select research-based strategies tailored to each learner's profile, and use goal attainment scaling to track progress that's visible and motivating.

When rubrics are designed as progressions of learning rather than static checklists, they become powerful tools for student metacognition, self-efficacy, and growth. In this hands-on session, participants transform traditional deficit-based rubrics into mastery progressions that help students see where they are, where they're going, and what concrete steps to take next. We'll analyze how typical rubrics limit learning by focusing on fixed categories, then redesign them to map clear pathways of skill development, integrate meaningful self-assessment, and support flexibility across different forms of expression while maintaining clarity in expectations.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the mere mention of assessment often drains the light from students' eyes. Natural curiosity—the drive to explore, question, and discover—gets buried under anxiety about being measured, ranked, and compared. We've accidentally turned learning, one of the most joyful human experiences, into a source of stress and defeat. This session shows how to make assessment a joy-maker instead. Participants discover how to design assessments that feel like celebrations of growth, help students track their own learning journey, embrace mistakes as learning gold, and develop the self-efficacy and metacognitive superpowers that create confident, self-directed learners.

Big emotions are part of being human, and in schools, they often come with big reactions. Most behavior support systems focus on calming emotions quickly, but it's not always possible to reach a predetermined emotional state on demand. Drawing on evidence-based strategies from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), this session explores how to equip all students with skills to widen their "window of tolerance" for emotional intensity. Like surfers learning to ride waves rather than trying to hold back the ocean, students learn both acceptance skills and change strategies for navigating difficult moments with confidence, resilience, and agency—building capacity that serves them far beyond the classroom.

This session challenges the divide between general and special education by redefining roles and building shared responsibility across all educators. We'll explore consultative service delivery models that build classroom teacher capacity rather than creating dependency on specialists, examine strategies for delivering intervention without pulling students from core instruction, and investigate how interdisciplinary collaboration creates stronger, more sustainable support. Participants leave with practical frameworks for shifting from "your students" and "my students" to genuine collective ownership of all learners.