TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Welcome to Spotlight Chat, a conversation with leaders. Our special guest is Karen Evans. She's the director of Accountability for Accord Education. Karen, thanks for being our guest on Spotlight Chat.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

TJ you and your organization are known, increasingly known in the charter world for your summits. Tell us about the summits. What do you do in these? How do people benefit?

That's an awesome question for me to share a little bit more since this is something Accord has been growing. We have been involved in leadership summits for many years now, but we've really changed the focus in recent years. So I want to talk a little bit about what we've done this past year, what we're actually wrapping up today here in Las Vegas, and what we're planning for next year. So this past year we've had two summits and we're really aiming to bring together leaders and visionaries from our charter organizations that we work with and for others in the community that are looking for opportunities to network with experts in the community, with the cutting edge thinkers, and to learn from one another with best practices. Charters sometimes feel very isolated. They're trying to do a great job and find those resources, but it's hard to do. You have limited staff and a lot going on. So the summer are an opportunity to come together not just for professional development, for networking and deep workshop style learning. So you have an opportunity to have really tangible things to take back to your campus.

The futurist John Nesbitt once wrote way back in 1980 in one of his Megatrend books, that the more high tech the world gets, the more high touch it gets. And the more people, Even back in 1980, the more they were using technology, the more they actually wanted to get together face to face. And in this era of online learning, email, Skype, chats, it only is increasing the rise in overall conferences, summits, workshops, because people want to connect with the ones that they've been talking to by email and reading their blog posts and seeing on YouTube. Is that what's driving a part of this?

I think that's an absolutely great point. And the summit we're wrapping up right now in Las Vegas, we have 300 guests here and our theme is Teach for Tomorrow, which of course there's conversations about technology and how do we get our kids prepared to utilize that, how are we using it in our classrooms as teachers? But really the underlying message is how do we build the human side of that. So it's wonderful to have access to technology and we have so much information out there that we can access quickly in so many different ways. But when we're together face to face, have those conversations and talk about it as humans, how do we process information, how do we manage the opportunities that are out there, what's working? Well, that's a hard thing to do. I think in a disconnected way. The technology can bring us together, but it's not the same as a face to face connection. Absolutely, it's not the same.

You've had other summits in the last few years. What has the response been from attendees when they tell you they're glad they came? What did they get out of coming that they couldn't have got by just purchasing the audio downloads or looking at blog summaries of this event?

So a good example, I stepped out right now from a session with Lena Bankert, she's with Bellwether Education Partners. And we're talking about how you can grow your network and how to evaluate as a school, are you ready to grow? So they have a tool where you do surveys and you crunch data and you can get a really nice report printed out and get some supports. But those of us in the room are given time to dialogue about that. An area when I'm thinking about my organization that is kind of a hotspot, an area we want to grow and strengthen. I have an opportunity to discuss that with another school that's had success in that area. What worked for you? Help me problem solve this. And I think that face to face time and we all face similar challenges in the charter world. We're all having fantastic success stories in the charter world. So being able to brainstorm and digest and again, that's something that we do for the Accord summits and will implement with our Accord conference coming next year in 2017. Time not just to get a little snippet from somebody that sounds like a great product, but time to really dig in and think how I will apply this to my campus and its own unique situation.

Now, a court education is a relatively young company, less than a dozen years old. You service a lot of schools in the charter school movement as opposed to, I guess, regular, plain vanilla schools. One of the criticisms of many people in the education world is workshop summits. They all sound the same, nothing new. In 20 years, you don't have that whole legacy to worry about. How do you come up with summits, workshops, conferences that are different, that strike people as. I hadn't heard of that before. This actually is new.

We have a real advantage in that we work with 20 different campuses a Court education. So we've been surveying them, we've been working closely with them throughout the year. And I think the advantage is that we're able to get a big picture on where there are strengths and where there are struggles. So when we go into planning an event, whether for our clients or open to the public, we have some inside scoop on areas they may not have realized they need help, areas that they're succeeding that they may not have recognized they need to speak up about. And that informs how we're selecting our presenters, our speakers, our themes. We're basing that off of the actual data from our clients and their day to day experiences. I think often I've been as an educator, I have 12 years of education on campus and I went to many trainings and many conventions. And I would say the ones that stood out were the ones that really either hit an area I knew I desperately needed more or introduced me to something that I hadn't realized how much I needed it. And Accord's really aiming to find those things and bring them to our guests.

You have 20 campuses in five states that use your services, rely on you. What are their pain points right now? Where are they? Maybe not desperate, but feeling really in need.

The charter movement is at an exciting point. There's a lot of growth, there's huge momentum, great parent excitement. Students are looking to have choice with their education, but with success comes a lot of growing pains. So you have one or two successful campuses. How do you make sure if you add additional grades or you add a new facility that that campus maintains success and you continue to grow? There's also a lot of politics involved, and charter educators tend to be very. No, I know. Politics. The one danger word. Uh, o. Charter educators tend to be really passionate about education and that's fantastic. That's what makes the movement thrive. But passion for education also means you need to be passionate about the context of education and be aware of the political environment. And while it's not a message everyone comes begging to hear when they get educated on some of those issues and how to manage them and approach them and be informed, they definitely feel more empowered and can go out and protect the success they have and engage with their community in a way that enables them to grow.

What are your plans for upcoming summits and conferences in the next few years?

So we are excited to bring back the Accord conference. This is an event that we have done in prior years and had to take a bit of a hiatus when everyone hit our recession. I don't know if anyone was impacted by that. Hahaha. But we are stoked to be bringing that back. 2017 the Accord Conference will be based in Orange county and that will be, I think of it as a for educators by educators event. There will certainly be sessions to meet administrative and organizational needs because our educators need their leaders to be strong. But we really want to focus on meeting the needs of our charter educators. We have a special track for 2017. We have a focus on STEAM education. So not just the science, technology, engineering, math, ethics, STEM that's been so trendy, but integrating the arts, the communication, the expression side of things, blending that integration together at Accord and nationwide, globally, we're looking at the future for our students and realizing it's an integrated future. It's a diversified future. It's something that we can't project what that will look like. But we know that the skill sets our kids to needs have to be very rich. So our focus next year is a specific track on STEAM and how that plays a role in education.

The organization is Accord Education. For more information you can go to their website accordeducation.org we've linked to it in the show notes as well. Special thanks to our guest Karen Evans, the Director of Accountability, which is a great title by the way, the Director of Accountability for Accord Education. Thank you for listening to Spotlight Chat, a conversation with leaders.