20th Annual Teacher Leadership Institute: Inspiring Excellence

Join us for the 20th Annual Teacher Leadership Institute — this year with a new location and a refreshed format to best support your learning!

We’re celebrating two decades of empowering educators to lead with purpose, passion, and a commitment to driving educational success. This year’s theme, Inspiring Excellence, focuses on equipping teacher leaders with the tools, strategies, and inspiration to elevate instructional practices, foster welcoming school cultures, and positively impact student outcomes.

Along with powerful keynotes, you'll experience hands-on workshops and collaborative choice sessions, all to explore how to lead with vision, cultivate professional growth, and inspire excellence in your colleagues to improve learning outcomes for your students in all areas of education. This year's Teacher Leadership Institute will inspire you to be agents of change and champions of innovation in your schools and communities.

JUST ANNOUNCED: This year's keynote speakers are educational psychologist Dr. Michele Borba, Brandon Fleming, author of Miseducated, and Jessica Vance, author of Leading with a Lens of Inquiry!

About This Year's Speakers
Educational psychologist Dr. Michele Borba is an internationally renowned educator, award-winning author and parenting and child expert and is recognized for her solution-based strategies to strengthen children's resilience, social intelligence and character, and reduce peer cruelty. Dr. Borba's presentation will leave you inspired and with usable strategies. She is the award-winning author of 25 books translated into 21 languages, including Thrivers, Don't Give Me That Attitude!, Building Moral Intelligence, and Build Empathy UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World. She is also an NBC contributor who has appeared 150 times on the TODAY show and countless other shows.

Author and educator Brandon P. Fleming will share his incredible story of transformation in his keynote. In Fleming’s memoir, Miseducated, he shares how he “grew up in an abusive home and was shuffled through school” and dropped out of college before finding a renewed life vision centered around words, power, and debate, which eventually brought him to work at Harvard University. After transforming his own life, he began transforming the lives of others from underserved communities through the art of debate. He raised millions of dollars to enroll more than 250 students of color into Harvard's summer debate residency on full scholarship, then created the Harvard Debate Council Diversity Project, a nationally acclaimed Atlanta-based pipeline program that recruits, trains, and feeds Black youth into a Harvard debate summer residency.

Author and inquiry educator Jessica Vance will launch our learning as the opening keynote speaker this year. Jessica's  journey and experience in International Baccalaureate schools and place-based education fuels her passion and global work in coaching both teachers and leaders in their roles, as well as supporting schools in implementing inquiry-based learning. In her publication, Leading with a Lens of Inquiry, she outlines the ways we, as leaders, need to support and facilitate our teachers in the same ways in which we want our teachers to engage with their students. Her forthcoming book (anticipated release early 2025) highlights the importance of documentation as a means to support student assessment, retrieval and reflection process.

This year's choice sessions will feature Arizona teacher leaders along with a variety of educational experts from across the country.

Want support in talking to your administration about attending the 20th Annual Teacher Leadership Institute? We've put together this resource to help you share about the benefits of attending with your principal or administrator!