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Award-winning Author, Film Maker and educational leader, Alan Blankstein served for 25 years as President of the HOPE Foundation, which he founded and whose honorary chair is Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. A former “high-risk” youth, Alan began his career in education as a music teacher. He worked for Phi Delta Kappa, March of Dimes, and Solution Tree, which he founded in 1987 and directed for 12 years while launching Professional Learning Communities beginning in the late 1980s. He is the author of the best-selling book Failure Is Not an Option: Six Principles That Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools, which received the Book of the Year award from Learning Forward.

Alan is Senior Editor, lead contributor, and/or author of 18 books, including Excellence Through Equity with Pedro Noguera and Breakthrough Leadership with Marcus Newsome and Foreword by Pedro Noguera. He also authored articles in leading education print including Education Week, Educational Leadership, The Principal, and Executive Educator.

Alan has provided keynote presentations and workshops for virtually every major U.S. Ed Org, and throughout the UK, Africa, and the Middle East. Alan has served on the Harvard International Principals Centers advisory board, and the Jewish Child Care Agency, where he once was a youth in residence.

Categories: Author and Writer, Children's Issues, Educator, Educator - Leadership, Educator - Poverty, Philanthropy

Videos

Topics

• It Takes a Community...
  Learn how successful district and school leaders are reclaiming their communities, schools, and students by building relational trust, and using processes, like collective impact, to focus on the needs of youth.
  *Going from Conflict to Healing and Harmony
  *Creating Common and Equitable Goals, Plans, and Actions for All Students’ Success
  *Engaging the Community Around the Voices of Students and Meeting their Real Needs & Underlying Conditions of Challenge (e.g. Poverty)
  *Building Effective, Communitywide Supports for All Students
  *Assuring Successful Teacher and Leader Recruitment and Retention (includes strategies for individual and collective stress reduction and energy management).

• Recovering Learning Loss
  Underlying the challenges children now face in recapturing the learning they would have otherwise gained were they in school steadily since 2020, are additional needs that must be addressed while also rethinking the delivery of instruction. Depending on the student and context, the issues may include poverty, trauma, isolation, and grief. This presentation focuses on adapting instructional strategies to reclaim and engage students, their families, and the community so that the conditions for enhanced learning can be collectively created.

• Courageous Leadership for Breakthrough Results
  There is a time for adaptive responses to a new challenge. At other times, the fundamentals of the situation have shifted significantly and require Breakthrough leadership, whereby leaders see the status quo as unworkable must rethink previous assumptions. In all cases courage is required to act.
  Very few of us were trained to lead through the crises that have befallen all of our schools, communities, children and families these past few years. This keynote points to models of how we can learn from successful leaders who have prevailed during times of extraordinary challenge.

• Achieving Excellence Through Equity
  Five Principles of Courageous Leadership to Guide Achievement for Every Student

• Failure Is Not an Option
  Six Principles that Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools

Books

Testimonials

Alan is an engaging presenter with a highly relevant message. He connects to educators by sharing his personal story and by knowing his audience. I appreciated having the opportunity to speak with Alan about the key issues in our state so that he could tailor his remarks to hit home with our conference attendees.

Wendy Zdeb, Executive Director, MASSP

One of the best keynote speakers I’ve heard.

Maria Garcia, Communications Officer, San Bernadino Unified School District

This was the best and most highly rated leadership event we have ever had!

Kate Harris, Chief Academic Officer, Saint Paul Public Schools, ISD

Alan Blankstein’s presentations are consistently relevant and inspiring to educators. His work addresses the most important issues facing schools in America today, and his approach is both practical and powerful.

Pedro Noguera, Distinguished Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA

Always an inspiring presenter, with a deep concern about equity and a host of ways to make it practical.

Andy Hargreaves, Thomas More Brennan Chair, Lynch School of Education, Boston College

Featured & New to AEI

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