Annual Conference headliners: Jukes and Noguera to ‘breakout’
General Session speakers will also address smaller sessions
Published: September 7, 2010
Every one of CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Shows offers something new and different, and this year’s is no exception. One of the innovations at the Moscone Center in San Francisco Dec. 2-4 will be opportunities to engage more informally with the top-billed speakers from the first two General Sessions.
Pedro Noguera and Ian Jukes will go beyond the standard presentations from a brightly lit stage to an audience sitting in a darkened room. They’ll still do those plenary presentations—offering unique perspectives and inspiration on reaching and teaching children—but then each will continue the conversation in a breakout session allowing for greater give and take.
Noguera, a nationally recognized expert on school reform, diversity and the achievement gap, will discuss “Changing the Culture of Schools through Restructuring” on the Annual Conference’s opening day Thursday, Dec. 2. Subtitled “Creating Conditions that Promote Student Achievement,” his talk will focus on strategies for transforming schools to meet the needs of our most vulnerable students.
He’ll immediately follow that with a breakout session, “Challenging Racial Inequality in Our Schools,” where he will lay out some possible solutions for further discussion.
On the conference’s second day, educator and author Jukes will take the theme for his General Session address from his recent book, “Living on the Future Edge: Windows on Tomorrow.”
Jukes will focus on what education leaders need to know about today’s computer-savvy children to help them be successful in a constantly changing world—and then, like Noguera, Jukes will continue the discussion in a more informal setting after his General Session presentation.
An audio interview with Jukes that’s now posted on the Annual Conference Web page offers a preview of his message. The 10-minute conversation covers a lot of ground, including tips on “Understanding the Digital Generation,” the title of another of his books, based in part on interviews with 2,500 children.
“We’re losing them. They’re absolutely voting with their feet. They’re absolutely voting with their mind,” Jukes warns in the interview. “The bottom line is we have to adapt. We need to understand these kids are different, and we have to treat them differently. … They see the world differently, they engage with the world differently.
“And my greatest fear for kids right now is that what we’re doing is we’re trying to fit round-peg students into square-peg schools,” Jukes confides. “Increasingly we’re depending on standardized tests to measure nonstandardized brains, and in doing so, what we are doing is we are failing our children. …
“In the very same way that we expect them to know about our world and how our world operates, we need to take the time to understand how their world operates and we need to be able to find some balance. In the end, this is what I think is the absolute essential basis of connecting with the digital generation.”
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