Twenty-first century schools can be a tangle of complexity. What does it take to launch students from all backgrounds toward becoming fully-realized human beings—socially, emotionally, and intellectually? What is student agency and how can we cultivate it? What are some ways to get buy-in from adults to do what’s best for children?
Come spend three days with Dr. Ron Ferguson, the lead developer of Tripod surveys, whose teaching and research at Harvard University for almost four decades have focused on understanding and improving lived experiences that affect how children develop in families, schools, and communities.
The Pursuing Educational Excellence with Equity in Mind conference uses cutting-edge frameworks to consider how instructional quality, student engagement, parenting, and school leadership combine to affect to student outcomes. It gives special focus to the challenges of responding effectively and equitably to racial, ethnic, and socio-economic differences. Participants will consider the interdependence of various stakeholder groups and think together about how to define and pursue shared goals.
Findings from school research, including Tripod survey data from school systems around the nation, will play a central role, revealing nuanced patterns that have strategic implications. Discussions will consider how student feedback can deepen and sometimes even alter interpretations of student behavior and performance.
Prior to the program, you will have access to an online tool you can use to collect stakeholder perspectives on pertinent issues in your school or district. During your time in the program, you will be invited to draw on these survey data and ideas presented in readings and lectures to begin outlining an action plan for pursuing excellence with equity.
Learning Objectives:
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Schedule Overview:
The conference will begin around noon on Monday, Aug 1, and end around noon on Wednesday, Aug 3. Core content will end by 6pm on Monday and Tuesday, with optional networking activities during the evenings. Full agenda coming soon...
Date: Monday, August 1st - Wednesday, August 3rd, 2022
Time:
Location: Plainfield, IN
Venue: Embassy Suites by Hilton (6089 Clarks Creek Rd, Plainfield, IN 46168 - map)
Price: $1,500*
Registration: Click the button on this page to complete the Eventbrite registration and payment. You will receive a confirmation email from Eventbrite once your registration is complete. Seats are very limited so be sure to sign up today!
Registration closes July 22nd.
*Please reach out if you need to discuss financing options with us.
About Dr. Ronald Ferguson:
Ron is an MIT-trained economist who focuses social science research on economic, social, and educational challenges. He has been on the faculty at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1983, after full time appointments at Brandeis and Brown Universities. In 2014, he co-founded Tripod Education Partners and shifted into an adjunct role at the Kennedy School, where he remains a faculty affiliated at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and faculty director of the Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI).
During the 1980s and ‘90s Ron focused much of his attention on economic and community development. That work culminated in the social science synthesis volume Urban Problems and Community Development (1999), which remains an important text in graduate policy courses.
By the late 1980s he had begun to study education and youth development because academic skill disparities were contributing to growing wage disparity. During the 1990s and early 2000s, his writings on the topic appeared in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education, and various books and journals. In December 2007, Harvard Education Press published his book Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap. A February 2011 profile of Ron in the New York Times wrote, “there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.”
For the past several years, Ron’s focus as AGI director has been an initiative first entitled the Boston Basics. Now renamed simply The Basics, the project has moved out of Harvard into a nonprofit organization, The Basics, Inc. Beginning in 2016, implementation has spread to more than three-dozen other cities in The Basics Learning Network. The Basics Strategy takes a socio-ecological saturation approach, collaborating with many partners to reach extended families with with five The Basics Principles of caregiving advice for parenting infants and toddlers.
Also focused on parenting, Ron and co-author Tatsha Robertson have written The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children, published in February, 2019. Based on the life stories of extremely successful young adults, as told by them and their parents, the book reveals on eight principles or parental roles that appear repeatedly throughout the stories of families from a wide range of racial, ethnic, and income-level backgrounds.
Ron holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a PhD from MIT, both in economics. He is happily married and the father of two adult sons.
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