Empowering Leaders' Symposium 2026

Please join the Department of Innovation for “AI-Ready Leadership.” Leading AI at your school starts with developing your own skills. Through this session, participants will explore essential AI competencies for school leaders, boosting your productivity, creativity, and leadership effectiveness. We will cut through the complexity to reinforce your existing foundational AI knowledge and provide the essential AI literacies leaders need to thrive today. This session will empower you to confidently use, model, and lead safe, effective AI implementation in your school, helping you to remain an informed leader.

Learn how the Explicit Instruction approach, developed by Dr. Anita Archer, promotes student achievement, academic engagement, and on-task behavior and helps teachers cover content more deeply and quickly. Throughout the learning, participants will explore the core concepts of Explicit Instruction, a set of research based design and delivery principles that provide a clear model for what impactful classroom instruction looks like.

This collaborative workshop, co-presented by the Teaching & Learning and School Quality departments, will support participants in using Unified Insights to better understand and interpret elementary ELA intervention data. Together, we will explore how the platform brings multiple data sources into focus—revealing patterns, highlighting student progress, and helping schools tell a cohesive story that drives instructional and strategic decisions.
Outcomes:
* Understand how to interpret intervention data within Unified Insights
* Learn how to identify and monitor student progress over time
* Strengthen collaboration between instructional and school quality efforts

Please join the Department of Innovation for “Leading for LifeReady,” a session designed to support school leaders in identifying key innovation priorities for the year ahead. Through this session, participants will explore actionable strategies for integrating the Henrico Learner Profile's (HLP) durable skills into the heart of their school culture to empower students through voice, choice, and leadership opportunities. In addition, we will explore how durable skills equip students to thrive in a world shaped by artificial intelligence. Participants will learn to use an AI-powered tool to crosswalk their school's goals with the HLP, creating deeper connections between strategic planning and student success. 
Leave with actionable ideas and a toolkit of strategies to bring back to your building, and a clearer understanding of how to maximize the role of your Innovation Learning Coach (ILC) to drive meaningful change and support staff throughout the year.