Spencer Foundation Conference: Creating Powerful Learning Environments

Spencer Foundation Conference: Creating Powerful Learning Environments

We invite you and your faculty to join us on May 8th for a conference in Chicago on Creating Powerful Learning Environments. This conference is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Spencer Foundation to bring together the education scholarship community in and around Chicago to share research and ideas about how we can create and provide access to powerful learning environments for all young people. At the core of these concerns is a need for attention to what we know about what powerful learning environments look like and about the conditions that give rise to them. The conference will attend to the ways powerful learning takes place both in-school and out-of-school as well as what education researchers might do to bring needed understanding and attention to creating greater access to powerful learning environments in Chicago schools and neighborhoods.

As noted above, this event will be held on Wednesday, May 8, 2019, from 8:00 am - 5:00 pm at The Gwen Hotel, located at 521 N. Rush Street in Chicago. The day will begin with a keynote by Jal Mehta of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The day will continue with a series of panel and small group discussions around (1) exploring different conceptualizations of powerful learning environments and what these mean for diverse groups of practitioners and researchers; (2) describing organizational conditions, structures, and interactions that appear to be especially felicitous for creating and sustaining powerful learning environments in under-resourced schools and communities; and (3) identifying ways researchers and research activities might enable practices and policies conducive to the development of powerful learning environments.