VATLL Annual Conference

Every team needs both a Hammer and a Heart. Join two assistant principals as they share practical strategies for building trust, embracing diverse leadership styles, navigating conflict, and strengthening collaboration. Through reflection and real-world examples, participants will discover how to move beyond individual roles and build stronger PLCs, departments, leadership teams, and school communities. 

Women leaders often carry the connective tissue of educational systems: translating vision, supporting people, solving problems, coaching adults, and keeping the focus on students. But when leadership depends on individual heroics, improvement becomes fragile and leaders become exhausted. This session explores how women education leaders can move from personal rescue to system design, creating routines that turn activity into meaningful impact for teaching and learning.

Discover how storylines and Design Thinking can transform standards into engaging learning experiences that build curiosity, collaboration, and student ownership. Through interactive activities and real classroom examples from Virginia's first elementary STEM Lab School, participants will learn a practical framework for creating authentic, community-connected learning experiences. Attendees will leave with planning tools, AI prompts, and ready-to-use strategies adaptable across grade levels and content areas.

Transitioning into building leadership shouldn't mean losing sight of classroom realities. While student success is the ultimate goal, even top initiatives fail when they overwhelm the teachers expected to execute them.
Led by two former instructional leaders turned school administrators, this session focuses on a crucial truth: you cannot support students without protecting your teachers. Participants will learn how to audit workloads, eliminate non-essential tasks, and build sustainable systems that honor teacher time—ensuring student achievement goes hand-in-hand with preventing burnout.

Join us for a jam-packed session on how a self-paced & blended learning structure can transform your instruction & build pathways for independence. Learn how to purposefully use EdTech (we share our faves!). This is not a "sit and get" session; it is a hands-on masterclass. So, bring your devices, your questions, and a beverage because you will experience a self-paced structure firsthand and leave with ideas to implement immediately. Did we mention all the free swag we have? See you inside!

Rather than measuring leadership solely by outcomes, participants will learn to evaluate whether they are intentionally building the conditions that consistently produce those outcomes.


Attendees will leave with immediately applicable tools, reflection protocols, and practical resources they can use the very next day.