Virtual Conference Featured Keynote
Stretching at Your Collaborative Edges
Date: October 29, 2025
Time: 10:00 -11:30 AM UTC
Workshop Description
We have seen on greeting cards the sentiment, “Adulting is Hard” and all humor aside, it is! Especially at this moment in time when things are so uncertain and so ever-shifting. We are living and working in unchartered waters. So, at this moment, it is ever
more important that we strive to develop ourselves, not just as educators, but as human beings. What can we do to be bigger and better versions of ourselves as collaborative team members and as leaders?
This workshop based on Jennifer’s book, Stretching Your Learning Edges: Growing (Up) at Work will look at five facets of being our best at work – the skills and abilities to know our identities, suspend certainty, take responsibility, working with reciprocity, and build resiliency. Join us to consider what it means, in practice, to develop our skills and capacities as fellow learners in our schools.
Participants will learn about:
The research that undergirds this work and ‘threads the needle’ as to the reason that a focus on adult development is so aligned with a positive school culture, increased effective collaboration, and ultimately higher student achievement
The five facets of being one’s best self at work:
- Knowing Your Identity: understanding oneself and others through the lenses of one’s various identities,
- Suspending Certainty: thinking with greater complexity and openness that our way is ‘a’ way, not ‘the’ way
- Taking Responsibility: recognizing one’s responsibility to be mindful of one’s language in all interactions
- Engaging in Reciprocity: living aloud the belief of mutual respect for all and building one’s skill set to live that belief ‘out loud’
- Building Resiliency: working on one’s emotional health for the sake of oneself and for those on one’s team
About the Speaker
Jennifer Abrams is formerly a high school English teacher, new teacher coach and professional development facilitator for Palo Alto Unified School District (Palo Alto, CA, USA), Jennifer Abrams is currently a communications consultant and author who works with educators and others on new teacher and employee support, being generationally savvy, effective collaboration skills, having hard conversations and creating identity safe workplaces.
Jennifer’s publications include Having Hard Conversations, The Multigenerational Workplace: Communicate, Collaborate & Create Community, Hard Conversations Unpacked – the Whos, Whens and What Ifs, and Swimming in the Deep End: Four Foundational Skills for Leading Successful School Initiatives. Her newest book is Stretching Your Learning Edges: Growing (Up) at Work.
Jennifer has shared her work in other mediums as a featured columnist on growth and change for Learning Forward’s The Learning Professional journal as well as contributing to The International Educator (TIE) focusing her writing on adult development and collaboration skills.
Jennifer has been invited to keynote, facilitate and coach at schools and conferences in across North America, Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand. She has been honored to have been named one of the “18 Women All K-12 Educators Should Know,” by Education Week’s ‘Finding Common Ground’’ blog. More about Jennifer’s work can be found at her website, www.jenniferabrams.com, and on X @jenniferabrams.
