Summer Learning Institute 2026

Experience “Changing Lives” with Project Surf Camp (PSC). This half-day session provides unique opportunities for attendees to experience PSC and learn how physical activities enhance students' self-confidence, social skills, and overall well-being and learn the power of activity based learning.

Goal setting has the power to create focus, alignment, and accountability at every level of an educational system. This session will explore how clear, meaningful goals can drive improvement from individual students to Professional Learning Communities, departments, schools, and the district as a whole. Participants will examine how goal setting creates coherence across the organization, ensuring that daily actions, team collaboration, and systemwide priorities remain connected to improving student learning and outcomes.
Attendees will learn how to establish goals that are specific, measurable, and actionable, while also building the structures needed to monitor progress, reflect on results, and make timely adjustments. The session will highlight the importance of vertical alignment so that student goals, classroom goals, PLC goals, departmental goals, and district goals reinforce one another rather than operate in isolation. Participants will leave with practical ideas for creating a goal-driven culture that promotes clarity, ownership, continuous improvement, and stronger results for students.

This session will provide educators with practical trauma-informed classroom practices designed to strengthen student connection, increase engagement, and create emotionally safe learning environments. Participants will explore how trauma can affect students’ behavior, attention, emotional regulation, and relationships, and how these effects often show up in the classroom. The session will emphasize proactive strategies that help educators respond to students with empathy, consistency, and structure while maintaining high expectations for learning and behavior.
Participants will leave with concrete approaches they can implement immediately, including relationship-building practices, predictable routines, co-regulation strategies, restorative responses, and classroom structures that reduce stress and support student success. The session will also highlight how trauma-informed practices benefit all students by improving classroom climate, reducing behavior disruptions, and increasing students’ sense of belonging, safety, and readiness to learn.

What if we could predict and prevent future disengagement, dropout, and even incarceration—starting in elementary school? This session explores a transformative framework that reduced chronic absenteeism by over 31% in 18 months. Rooted in the doctoral research of Dr. David Diehl and informed by five major longitudinal studies, this model identifies early warning indicators of student disengagement and leverages them to drive actionable, tiered interventions.
Inspired by Dr. Diehl’s experiences working with system-involved youth and shaped by the urgent need to support students in marginalized, under-resourced communities, Selma USD built a data-informed, equity-centered approach that prioritizes student voice, relationship-building, and community partnership.
Participants will learn how Selma’s attendance teams, comprising social workers and newly hired Community School Liaisons, utilize predictive data, early literacy indicators, behavioral concerns, and school avoidance patterns to engage students and families proactively. 
This session will offer practical insights into:

• Implementing a proactive, tiered attendance intervention model
  
  
• Building systems that identify high-yield predictors of disengagement
  
  
• Strengthening family-school partnerships through culturally responsive outreach
  
  
• Addressing root causes of absenteeism, including academic, behavioral, and social-emotional barriers
  
  

Walk away with replicable tools, actionable strategies, and inspiration to reimagine how data, hope, and community can converge to change the trajectory of our most vulnerable students.

More than ever, we need to be able and willing to engage in difficult conversations. Not to win, but to find common ground in support of our students and families . This means normalizing conflict by changing our mindset about its value and purpose. This session will provide a framework for having difficult conversations that build bridges, strengthen relationships and set clear boundaries. Participants will get a step-by-step guide that shows how to lean into discomfort self regulated in order to to create a solid foundation for change and progress.

Session OverviewThis session offers school administrators a practical, concise guide to prompt engineering for effective AI integration in education. We'll cover the basics of crafting clear AI instructions, demonstrate applications across common educational AI tools (Gemini, ChatGPT, MagicSchool, SchoolAI, NotebookLM, Canva, Adobe Express), and address crucial issues of bias and misinformation. The goal is to equip administrators to lead responsible and strategic AI use, enhancing efficiency and learning outcomes.

Kings River High School has been intentionally and steadily growing its Career Technical Education (CTE) program, with tremendous success. This presentation will explore the key ingredients behind that growth, the opportunities CTE provides for students and schools, and the success stories that demonstrate its impact. Participants will gain insight into how expanding CTE pathways can increase student engagement, build real-world skills, and create meaningful futures for students.

Sanger Unified has been on a three-year journey to develop and define student growth in a way that can be measured, monitored, and analyzed at the district, site, grade, teacher, and individual student levels. This work is grounded in the district’s commitment to operationalize a clear and ambitious goal: All Students Will Achieve One Year of Growth or More. In this session, participants will learn how Sanger Unified moved from a broad aspiration around student achievement to a practical system for defining, tracking, and using growth data to drive continuous improvement across the organization.
Attendees will explore the processes, challenges, and key decisions involved in building a student growth framework that creates clarity, ownership, and alignment at every level of the system. The session will highlight how growth measures can be used to inform instruction, strengthen collaboration, guide site and district leadership, and keep the focus on the progress of every student. Participants will leave with insights into how a district can create a shared understanding of growth, build systems to monitor it effectively, and use that work to support higher levels of learning for all students.

In this engaging breakout session, we’ll explore how Career Technical Education (CTE) programs equip students with practical skills that extend far beyond the classroom. Participants will hear how students leverage these skills in part-time jobs while pursuing college, transition into full-time employment after graduation, and contribute to their local communities and economy. Join us as we highlight success stories, discuss strategies for strengthening school-to-career pathways, and examine the critical role CTE plays in preparing students for meaningful, sustainable careers.

Experience “Changing Lives” with Project Surf Camp (PSC). This half-day session provides unique opportunities for attendees to experience PSC and learn how physical activities enhance students' self-confidence, social skills, and overall well-being and learn the power of activity based learning.