2023 Innovative Learning Conference
Join us this fall as we reimagine how schools facilitate and inspire learning!
Thursday, October 26 & Friday, October 27, 2023
Hillsborough & San Mateo Campuses
About 2023 ILC
At a time characterized by open knowledge systems, new technologies, inclusive communities, and diverse perspectives, the Innovative Learning Conference (ILC) at The Nueva School in the San Francisco Bay Area is a call to reimagine the way schools facilitate learning.
Returning for the first time since 2019, this year’s reworked conference will offer educators, researchers, parents, and students meaningful resources to better understand and adopt innovative learning strategies.
The theme of ILC 2023 is The Power of Perspectives: Envisioning Our Collective Future. Over the course of two days, attendees will have the space and support to think critically, creatively, and collaboratively as we reimagine the way schools facilitate learning in topics such as AI and emerging tech, institutional equity and inclusion, visual thinking and visible learning, and more.
Conference participants will experience:
- Thought-provoking, open conversations, and facilitated explorations of modern learning contexts
- Inspirational ideas, creative connections, joyous learning, and a focus on your burning questions
- Space and time to reflect and process these ideas in the context of each participant's current needs
- A network of like-minded practitioners to support the ongoing implementation of what you learn
Conference speakers will be announced throughout the summer. Bookmark the ILC website for updates.
Registration Rates
Conference Schedule
Wednesday, Oct. 25
Pre-registration
5:30–7:30 p.m.: Welcome reception at the San Mateo Campus
Thursday, Oct. 26
Registration
8:30–11:30 a.m.: Educators are invited to an optional morning to visit Nueva’s Hillsborough or San Mateo campus and to spend time in cohorts visiting classrooms and engaging in facilitated conversations with teachers and students.
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: Lunch and travel time
12:30-1 p.m.: Day 1 Registration
1:30–4:30 p.m.: Thursday Conference Sessions
All Thursday afternoon sessions hosted at the Hillsborough Campus
1:15–2:30 p.m.: Cornerstone Conversation
A New Age for Education: Where Human and Machine Learning Meet (Tech Trends & Innovation Instruction)
Panelists: Amy Chang, Fei-Fei Li, Kevin Systrom. Moderated by Carlos Guestrin.
2:45–4 p.m.: Session 1 Workshops
4–4:45 p.m.: Cohort debrief
Friday, Oct. 27
All Friday events and sessions hosted at the San Mateo Campus
8:30–9:30 a.m.: Cornerstone Conversation (Mental Health and Student Agency)
Panelists: Rob Evans, Denise Pope, and Rosalind Wiseman
9:45–11 a.m.: Session 2 Workshops
11:15 a.m.–12:30 p.m.: Session 3 Workshops
12:30–1:30 p.m.: Lunch in Cohorts
1:45–2:45 p.m.: Cornerstone Conversation (Creating Belonging)
Panelists: Deborah Cullinan, Jenny Martinez, Cornelius Minor, and Colin Seale
3–4:15 p.m.: Session 4 Workshops
4:15–4:45 p.m.: Closing Cohort Meetings
4:45–6 p.m.: Closing reception at San Mateo campus
Full conference schedule plus logistics, session facilitators, and other details to follow. Times are subject to change.
Hotels
ILC has partnered with the San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport and the Embassy Suites San Francisco Airport Waterfront to offer discounted room rates. For attendees traveling from out of town, we encourage booking reservations early due to a high volume of events occurring in the Bay Area during the week of the conference.
San Mateo Marriott San Francisco Airport
1770 South Amphlett Blvd., San Mateo, CA 94402
Book a room reservation now
Embassy Suites by Hilton San Francisco Airport Waterfront
250 Gateway Blvd., South San Francisco, CA 94080
Book a room reservation now (Use Client ID: 3357494)
Additional local hotels
Crowne Plaza Foster City–San Mateo
1221 Chess Dr., Foster City, CA, 94404
Courtyard San Mateo–Foster City
550 Shell Blvd. Foster City, CA, 94402
Hilton San Francisco Airport Bayfront
600 Airport Blvd., Burlingame, CA 94010
Speakers
Amy Chang serves on the board of directors for The Walt Disney Company and Procter & Gamble, and has previously served on the boards of Cisco, Splunk, Informatica and Marqeta, which encompass nearly a trillion dollars in total market cap. Post-acquisition of her startup Accompany by Cisco for $270M, she led Cisco’s multi-billion dollar Collaboration business. As EVP and GM of this 6000 person team, she led the videoconferencing, cloud calling, contact center, video device and phones businesses. Accompany was an AI/ML-based relationship intelligence platform serving Fortune 500 companies.
Prior to Accompany, Amy was at Google, where she led the teams for Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Trends, and multichannel attribution for over 7 years, growing Google Analytics to serve over 86% of the entire web. She previously led product for the paid search and affiliates channels at eBay, as well as worked in the semiconductor and software industries at McKinsey. She started her career in hardware with Intel, AMD and Motorola.
She serves on the UCSF Hospital Executive Committee, the Stanford School of Engineering Dean’s Advisory Board, and as an advisor to GoogleX, Postman, Masterclass, SambaNova, Panther Labs, Rembrand, Altana Labs, Pendo, Scanner.io, DataIris, Rattle, Greenlight, Gretel.ai, DataChat, Snorkel.ai, PerfectDay, KatanaGraph, Dentity, Switch Bioworks, Galileo, Prosimo.io, Exotanium, NoviConnect and Pragma.
Amy holds a BS in Electrical Engineering with a hardware subspecialty and an MS in Electrical Engineering with a network systems subspecialty, both from Stanford University.
Deborah Cullinan is one of the nation’s leading thinkers on the pivotal role artists and arts organizations can play in shaping our social and political landscape, and has spent years mobilizing communities through arts and culture. She joined Stanford University in early 2022 as the first full-time vice president for the arts. Previously, she was CEO of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), where she launched several bold new programs, engagement strategies, and civic coalitions. Prior to joining YBCA in 2013, she was the executive director of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts. She is a co-founder of CultureBank, board member of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, and recently served as co-chair of the San Francisco Arts Alliance and vice chair of the Yerba Buena Gardens Conservancy. She was the inaugural National Field Leader in Residence at Arizona State University’s National Accelerator for Cultural Innovation and a former innovator-in-residence at the Kauffman Foundation. She served on Mayor London Breed’s San Francisco Economic Recovery Task Force and also on Governor Gavin Newsom’s Task Force on Business and Jobs Recovery. Her passion for using art and creativity to shift culture and advance equity and justice has made her a sought-after speaker at events and conferences around the world.
Robert Evans is a psychologist. A former high school and pre-school teacher, and a former child and family therapist, he has worked with schools and families for 50 years. He has consulted to nearly 1,800 schools and districts around the country. His presentations are known for their lively wit and plain talk. He is the author of many articles and four books, including his most recent, co-written with Michael Thompson, Hopes and Fears: Working with Today’s Independent School Parents.
Carlos Guestrin is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. His previous positions include the Amazon Professor of Machine Learning at the Computer Science & Engineering Department of the University of Washington, the Finmeccanica Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Senior Director of Machine Learning and AI at Apple, after the acquisition of Turi, Inc. (formerly GraphLab and Dato) — Carlos co-founded Turi, which developed a platform for developers and data scientist to build and deploy intelligent applications. He is a technical advisor for OctoML.ai. His team also released a number of popular open-source projects, including XGBoost, LIME, Apache TVM, MXNet, Turi Create, GraphLab/PowerGraph, SFrame, and GraphChi.
Carlos received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He is also a recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award, NSF Career Award, Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and IBM Faculty Fellowship, and was named one of the 2008 ‘Brilliant 10’ by Popular Science Magazine. Carlos’ work received awards at a number of conferences and journals, including ACL, AISTATS, ICML, IPSN, JAIR, JWRPM, KDD, NeurIPS, UAI, and VLDB. He is a former member of the Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) advisory group for DARPA.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. Previously, she was Vice President at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Dr. Li obtained her B.A. in physics from Princeton, her PhD in electrical engineering from Caltech, and a Doctorate Degree (Honorary) from Harvey Mudd College. Before coming to Stanford, Dr. Li was on faculty at Princeton University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Her current research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI+healthcare, especially ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery. In the past she has also worked on cognitive and computational neuroscience. Dr. Li has published more than 300 scientific articles in journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, New England Journal of Medicine, and Nature Digital Medicine. Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. In addition to her technical contributions, she is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education.
Dr. Li has been working with policymakers nationally and locally to ensure the responsible use of technologies, including a congressional testimony on the responsibility of AI in 2018, her service as a member of the California Future of Work Commission for the Governor of California in 2019–2020, and a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation in 2021–2022.
Dr. Li is an elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a Fellow of ACM, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a recipient of the 2022 IEEE PAMI Thomas Huang Memorial Prize, 2019 IEEE PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize, 2019 National Geographic Society Further Award, 2017 Athena Award for Academic Leadership, IAPR 2016 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, the 2016 IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Award, the 2016 nVidia Pioneer in AI Award, 2014 IBM Faculty Fellow Award, 2011 Alfred Sloan Faculty Award, 2012 Yahoo Labs FREP award, 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, among others. Dr. Li is a keynote speaker at many academic or influential conferences, including the World Economics Forum (Davos), the Grace Hopper Conference 2017 and the TED2015 main conference. Work from Dr. Li's lab has been featured in a variety of magazines and newspapers including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Science, Wired Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Financial Times, and more. She was selected as a 2017 Women in Tech by ELLE Magazine, a 2017 Awesome Women Award by Good Housekeeping, a Global Thinker of 2015 by Foreign Policy, and one of the “Great Immigrants: The Pride of America” in 2016 by the Carnegie Foundation.
Jenny S. Martinez is the Richard E. Lang Professor of Law and Dean of Stanford Law School and Stanford University's incoming Provost. Professor Martinez is a leading expert on international law and constitutional law, including comparative constitutional law. She is the author of The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press, 2012) and numerous articles in leading academic journals. She teaches courses on constitutional law, civil procedure, international law, and international business transactions. She is a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Center on International Security and Cooperation and Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.
An experienced litigator, she has worked on numerous cases involving international law and constitutional law issues. She serves as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. She is also a member of the American Law Institute.
Before joining the Stanford faculty in 2003, Professor Martinez clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer (BA ’59) of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; she was also an associate legal officer for Judge Patricia Wald of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where she worked on trials involving genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Cornelius Minor is a Brooklyn-based educator and part-time Pokemon trainer. He works with teachers, school leaders, and leaders of community-based organizations to support equitable literacy reform in cities (and sometimes villages) across the globe. His latest book, We Got This, explores how the work of creating more equitable school spaces is embedded in our everyday choices—specifically in the choice to really listen to kids.
Cornelius has been featured in Education Week, Brooklyn Magazine, and Teaching Tolerance Magazine. He has partnered with The New York City Department of Education, The International Literacy Association, Scholastic, and Lesley University’s Center for Reading Recovery and Literacy Collaborative. Out of Print, a documentary featuring Cornelius, made its way around the film festival circuit, and he has been a featured speaker at conferences all over the world. He is a dedicated Hip hop fan, and on some evenings, you can find him online saving the universe with his PlayStation or on paper saving the realm in Dungeons & Dragons.
Most recently, along with his partner and wife, Kass Minor, he has established The Minor Collective, a community-based movement designed to foster sustainable change in schools. Whether working with educators and kids in Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York City, Cornelius uses his love for technology, literature, and social media to bring communities together. As a teacher, Cornelius draws not only on his years teaching middle school in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but also on time spent skateboarding, shooting hoops, and working with young people.
These days, Cornelius is learning how to bake from his two young children, searching for an elusive pair of Jordan IVs, and is ritually re-reading all of the 1990’s era comic books that he can find.
Denise Pope, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, where she specializes in student engagement, curriculum studies, qualitative research methods, and service learning. She is co-founder and current strategic advisor at Challenge Success, a school reform nonprofit that partners with schools and families to elevate student voice and implement research-based strategies that improve student well-being, belonging, and engagement with learning.
She is the author of "Doing School": How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students (Yale University Press, 2001), which was awarded Notable Book in Education by the American School Board Journal, 2001, and lead author of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies For Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids (Jossey-Bass, 2015). She also co-hosts the Stanford University SiriusXM radio show called “School’s In.”
Dr. Pope lectures nationally on parenting techniques and pedagogical strategies to increase student health, engagement with learning, and integrity. She is a 3-time recipient of the Stanford University School of Education Outstanding Teacher and Mentor Award and was honored with the 2012 Education Professor of the Year "Educators' Voice Award" from the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Dr. Pope taught high school English in Fremont, CA and college composition and rhetoric courses at Santa Clara University.
Colin Seale was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where struggles in his upbringing gave birth to his passion for educational equity. Tracked early into gifted and talented programs, Colin was afforded opportunities his neighborhood peers were not. Using lessons from his experience as a math teacher, later as an attorney, and now as a keynote speaker, contributor to Forbes, The 74, Edutopia and Education Post and author of Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Framework for Teaching Critical Thinking to All Students (Prufrock Press, 2020) and Tangible Equity: A Guide for Leveraging Student Identity, Culture, and Power to Unlock Excellence In and Beyond the Classroom (Routledge, May 2022).
Colin founded thinkLaw (www.thinklaw.us), a multi-award-winning organization to help educators leverage inquiry-based instructional strategies to close the critical thinking gap and ensure they teach and reach all students, regardless of race, zip code or what side of the poverty line they are born into. When he’s not serving as the world’s most fervent critical thinking advocate or tweeting from @ColinESeale, Colin proudly serves as the world’s greatest entertainer to his two young children.
Kevin Systrom is an American entrepreneur who co-founded Instagram, the photo and video sharing social networking platform. Born in Holliston, Massachusetts, Systrom graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Management Science and Engineering. He started his career as an intern at Odeo, which later became Twitter. He would then work on various consumer teams at Google and in quantitative marketing. In 2010, Systrom co-founded Instagram with Mike Krieger, and within a few years, the app had hundreds of millions users. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, and Systrom continued to lead the company until 2018, when he resigned to pursue research for his next company. In January of this year, Systrom launched Artifact, a personalized news and content reading application driven by the latest advances in machine learning. He is passionate about the next chapter of social media being driven by artificial intelligence and has dedicated the last few years to building this company.
Rosalind Wiseman challenges us to understand the power of dignity to build courage, connection, and community.
She is a speaker, writer, advisor, and thought leader on leadership, culture, conflict, and young people. Currently, she serves as the senior leadership consultant at the US State Department’s Office for Overseas Schools which serves over 195 schools throughout the world and is supporting Professor David Yeager at the University of Texas on a forthcoming book on young people and motivation.
She is the author of nine books including the multiple New York Times Best Sellers: Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World—the groundbreaking book that was the basis for the movie and Broadway Musical Mean Girls, and Masterminds & Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World, which was awarded Best Parenting Book by Books for a Better Life. Her ninth book, published by Chronicle Books in the fall of 2022 with co-author Shanterra McBride, is Courageous Discomfort: How to Have Brave, Life Changing Conversations about Race and Racism. She is currently revising Queen Bees & Wannabes for a 4th edition to be published in 2024 in time for the 20th anniversary of Mean Girls.
Rosalind also co-founded Cultures of Dignity, an organization that partners with communities to reimagine how to bring dignity and social and emotional learning to all.
National media regularly depends on Wiseman’s expertise on principled leadership, conflict, youth culture, parenting, and bullying prevention. She has been profiled in or written for The New York Times, Los Angeles, Times, the Chicago Tribune,The Washington Post, and USA Today, among others. Wiseman is a frequent guest on national media like the Today Show,
CNN, Good Morning America, and NPR affiliates throughout the country. She has spoken to audiences throughout the United States and abroad including South by Southwest, Microsoft, UBS, The Royal Society for the Arts, the Association for the Advancement of International Education, the Game Developers Conference, the American Association of School Administrators, and at the White House many times across administrations.
Rosalind is a native of Washington DC and spent most of her life there. She now lives in Boulder, Colorado.
Past topics covered at ILC include:
- Foundational Teaching Skills
Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment - Creativity and Innovation
- Design Thinking
Design Engineering and Entrepreneurship - Equity in Education
- Globalization and Cultural Understanding
- Integrated Technology
- Teaching Critical Thinking and Reasoning
- Gifted Education
Meeting the needs of gifted and talented learners - Neuroscience
- Social-Emotional Learning
Empathy and Mindfulness - Sustainability
Wellness for our shared future
In This Section
ILC Committee
Lee Fertig, head of school
Diana Chamorro, co-chair
Sarah Koning, co-chair
Allen Frost
Jennifer Perry
Jenny Risk
David Robinson
Katie Saylor
Dara Silverstein
Colin Tribble
LiAnn Yim