Monday - July 29 - 12:35 PM PDT
Tony Thurmond
California State Superintendent of Public Instruction

Tony Thurmond was sworn in as the 28th California State Superintendent of Public Instruction on January 7, 2019. Superintendent Thurmond is an educator, social worker, and public school parent, who has served the people of California for more than ten years in elected office. Previously, Superintendent Thurmond served on the Richmond City Council, West Contra Costa Unified School Board, and in the California State Assembly, representing District 15.
In the State Assembly, Superintendent Thurmond served on the Assembly Education, Health, and Human Services Committees. He chaired the Assembly Labor Committee and the Assembly Select Committee on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Education.

Education is at the core of Superintendent Thurmond’s legislative record. He authored legislation that successfully expanded the free lunch program, bilingual education, and the Chafee Grant college scholarship program for foster youth. Additionally, Superintendent Thurmond’s legislation guaranteed preferential voting rights for student school board members, improved access to families for early education and childcare, and shifted millions of dollars directly from prisons to schools. Superintendent Thurmond introduced legislation to expand STEM education, improve school conditions for LGBTQ youth, and tax private prisons to fund early education and afterschool programs.

Monday - July 29 - 12:50 PM PDT
Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond
President, California State Board of Education; President, Learning
Policy Institute; Professor of Education Emeritus, Stanford University

Linda Darling-Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University and President of the Learning Policy Institute. She has conducted extensive research on issues of educator supply, demand, and quality. Among her award-winning publications in this area are What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future; Teaching as the Learning Profession; and Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and be Able to Do. She was executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future and director of RAND Corporation’s education program. Darling-Hammond began her career as a public school teacher.

Monday - July 29 - 1:20 PM PDT
Dr. Victor Rios
Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Dr. Victor Rios' work analyzes the role of social control and education in determining the well-being of young people living in urban marginality; tracks the social consequences of the punitive state and punitive social control-across institutional settings, and examines young people’s resilience and responses to social marginalization. He uses insight from his research to promote equitable policies and develop programs to improve the lives of marginalized youths.

In his latest book Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth (University of Chicago Press, 2017) Rios finds the traditional good kid/bad kid, street kid/decent kid dichotomy is much too simplistic, arguing instead that authorities and institutions help create these identities—and that they can play an instrumental role in providing young people with the resources for shifting between roles. He finds that to be a poor Latino youth is to be a human target—victimized and considered an enemy by others, viewed as a threat to law enforcement and schools, and burdened by stigma, disrepute, and punishment. Human Targets was a selection for the LA Times Festival of Books in 2017.

Rios has also published on juvenile justice, masculinity, and race and crime in scholarly journals such as The Annals of the Academy of Political and Social Sciences, The Annual Review of Sociology, Latino Studies, and Critical Criminology. He is also the author of three trade books aimed at public audiences.

Professor Rios was awarded the 2017 Public Understanding of Sociology Award by the American Sociological Association. The award is given to a "person or persons who have made exemplary contributions to advance the public understanding of sociology, sociological research, and scholarship among the general public." He is currently Chair of the Latina/o Sociology Section, American Sociological Association.

Monday - July 29 - 1:40 PM PDT
Huda Essa
TEDx Speaker, Author, Founder of Culture Links, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Consultant
Founder of Culture Links, LLC | Author of Teach Us Your Name and Common Threads

Huda Essa is a TEDx Speaker and the author of the motivational children's book, Teach Us Your Name, focused on empowering children to take pride in their many identities while showing respect for themselves and others. This book is sold both individually and was selected as a component of Teacher Created Materials’ Culturally Authentic and Responsive Text Collection. Huda continues to write culturally authentic and relevant children’s books with her next book, Common Threads to be released in August. She is also currently writing for education professionals focusing on overcoming limitations of unconscious bias in order to best serve their school communities so as to allow for staff, students and families to reach their greatest potential for success in our ever-changing world. Additionally, she is the producer of a series of short films focused on matters of social justice.

Huda has positively influenced countless communities around the nation through her engaging and thought-provoking learning opportunities. She utilizes her extensive experience as a Cultural Competency Consultant, former Teacher and English Language Development Specialist to support organizations in successfully meeting their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. In her Keynote presentations and interactive learning opportunities, she works closely with teachers, school site leaders, school district officials and higher education professionals to help them develop practices and cultures that promote cultural competence, engagement, unity, and academic achievement. Huda also works with students, parents and community members in order to engage the entire village so as to reach maximum current and future growth and success. Furthermore, her work extends to supporting professionals in businesses, corporations and non-profit organizations. Her belief is that the learning needed to work towards social justice is a lifelong education that can be applied to virtually all ages, social identities, and careers. Her explorations include international travel to gain insight from communities around the globe in order to share and apply the learning with U.S. audiences.

Tuesday - July 30 - 12:50 PM PDT
Dr. Maisha Winn
Chancellor’s Leadership Professor, Co-Founder, Co-director
Transformative Justice in Education Center, School of Education, UC Davis

Maisha T. Winn is the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor and the Co-Founder and Co-director (with Torry Winn) of the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. Professor Winn’s program of research examines the ways in which teachers and/or adult allies for youth in schools and in out-of-school contexts practice “justice” in the teaching of literacy. Professor Winn was named an American Educational Research Association Fellow (Spring 2016) In 2014 she received the William T. Grant Foundation Distinguished Fellowship and was named the American Educational Research Association Early Career Award recipient in 2012. Professor Winn is the author of several books including Writing in Rhythm: Spoken word poetry in urban schools(published under maiden name “Fisher”); Black literate lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (published under maiden name “Fisher”); Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline; and co-editor of Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Research(with Django Paris). She has two new books, Justice on Both Sides: Transforming Education through Restorative Justice(Harvard Education Press) and Restorative Justice in the English Language Arts Classroom (with Hannah Graham and Rita Alfred on National Council of Teachers of English Principles in Practice Series). She is also the author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals including Review of Research in Education; Anthropology and Education Quarterly; International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; Race, Ethnicity and Education; Research in the Teaching of English; Race and Social Problems; and Harvard Educational Review.

Wednesday - July 31 - 11:30 AM PDT
Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
Professor of Education, Psychology & Neuroscience
Brain & Creativity Institute; Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is Professor of Education, Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. She studies the psychological and neurobiological development of emotion and self-awareness, and connections to social, cognitive and moral development in educational settings. She uses interdisciplinary studies of narratives and feelings to uncover experience-dependent neural mechanisms contributing to identity, intrinsic motivation, deep learning, and generative, creative and abstract thought. Her work has a special focus on adolescents from low-SES communities, and she involves youths from these communities as junior scientists in her work.

A former urban public junior high school science teacher, she earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 2005 in human development and psychology and completed her postdoctoral training in social-affective neuroscience with Antonio Damasio in 2008. Since then she has received numerous awards for her research and for her impact on education and society, among them an Honor Coin from the U.S. Army, a Commendation from the County of Los Angeles, a Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences editorial board, and early career achievement awards from the AERA, the AAAS, the APS, the International Mind, Brain and Education Society (IMBES), and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Foundation (FABBS).

Immordino-Yang served in 2015-2018 on the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s committee writing How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts and Cultures . In 2016-2018 she served as a distinguished scientist on the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional and Academic Development, and recently published a brief on brain science for educational policy-makers with Linda Darling-Hammond and Christina Krone.

In 2018-2019, Immordino-Yang is a Spencer Foundation mid-career fellow. Her project involves working with Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford; Learning Policy Institute), Doug Knecht (Bank Street College of Education), and Annemarie Palincsar (University of Michigan) to learn how we might leverage developmental and social-affective neuroscience in the design and implementation of progressive educational policies and practices.

The Orange County Department of Education, Butte County Office of Education, and the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools are hosting the 3rd Annual California Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) Professional Learning Institute (PLI) on July 29-31, 2019 at the Long Beach Convention Center. This year’s theme is “All Means All - Know My Name, Face, and Story."

The annual institute is a major educational event for educators and community members committed to creating inclusive and equitable school conditions for students and families. Stakeholders are invited to share promising practices that support the academic, behavioral, and social-emotional success of all students.

The 2019 California MTSS PLI theme “All Means All - Know My Name, Face, and Story" will focus on promoting excellence, equity, and access for all learners. The planning committee is excited to offer our participants the opportunity to engage deeply with the California MTSS Framework and the California Department of Education's School Conditions and Climate Work Group Recommendation Framework (CCWG).