Stepping Off the Sidelines: Eagle Rock Students Drive Educational Leadership at CLEE's Fall Meeting

If you have ever sat through an educational conference keynote wishing for actionable tools instead of high-level lectures, this year’s Center for Leadership and Educational Equity (CLEE) Fall Meeting is taking a fundamentally different route. Traditional keynotes are out. In their place are student-facilitated experiences designed to pull attendees off the sidelines and straight into active, collaborative work.

Learning by Doing, Not Watching

The Fall Meeting centers on the actual work happening inside schools. Attendees will examine authentic student work, practice facilitation protocols, and tackle the real friction points educators face daily. Whether your team needs to revitalize common planning time or sharpen instructional practice, the focus is immediate utility: test the tools in the room, improve them with colleagues, and take them back to your local context.

Hart’s Ladder and Hands-On Application

On Day 2, students and staff from Eagle Rock School & Professional Development Center are co-facilitating a hands-on exploration of youth-adult partnership. Using Hart’s Ladder as a shared framework, Eagle Rock students will guide participants in evaluating their own leadership habits, identifying organizational barriers, and drafting concrete next steps. The session itself serves as a live case study, conceived, designed, and facilitated directly alongside young people.

Embedded in the DNA: Eagle Rock’s Theory of Action

This session reflects how Eagle Rock operates every day. For over 30 years, Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center has worked from a simple premise: meaningful school change cannot happen when adults design systems for students without including them. Youth-Adult Partnership is not a decorative add-on, a line item on a grant report, or an occasional guest presentation. It is the core engine of Eagle Rock’s Theory of Action.

Eagle Rock grounds its professional development in the belief that lasting school innovation requires shared authority. When young people act as primary co-designers, researchers, and professional learning facilitators, schools move past compliance and toward real engagement. Teaching educators how to build equitable partnerships requires modeling it directly by placing student expertise at the center of adult learning.

Putting Theory into Practice: The Changemaker Cohort

You can see this Theory of Action in action through Eagle Rock’s national Changemaker Cohort. Rather than sending staff alone to professional learning, participating schools form intergenerational teams, sending student-adult pairs to collaborate over a full school year.

For example, when partner schools tackle major system-wide challenges like overhauling graduation requirements or improving classroom belonging, student leaders and educators work as equal co-designers. Using frameworks like Improvement Science, students do not just offer occasional feedback on adult proposals; they co-analyze student data, draft new competencies, and co-facilitate professional development workshops for their own schools and teaching faculties. Through supporting these intergenerational pairs with coaching and resources, Eagle Rock demonstrates that young people are active drivers of institutional change, not passive recipients of adult decisions.

Ready to Shift Your Practice? Register Today

Join us for two days of hands-on, student-led collaboration and walk away with strategies you can immediately implement in your school or district.

Event Details

• Dates: October 8 & 9, 2026
• Location: Massachusetts
• Who Should Attend: K-12 educators, school leaders, instructional coaches, and youth-adult leadership teams.

Join Us & Reserve Your Spot

Bring students, bring a team, and bring a challenge you are actively working to solve. Space is limited to keep collaborative sessions interactive and impact-driven.

Click Here to Register for the CLEE Fall Meeting