CALSA Summer Institute 2025

This workshop will equip leaders with practical strategies for leveraging Notebook LM to enhance team growth through more effective feedback practices. Participants will learn how Notebook LM can be used to draft specific and targeted feedback comments grounded in data, ensuring alignment with job expectations, evaluations and district goals.

Furthermore, the workshop will explore how Notebook LM can streamline the feedback process by facilitating the documentation of feedback conversations and the tracking of progress on action plans. Ultimately, this workshop will empower leaders to use Notebook LM to provide more consistent, objective, and growth-oriented feedback, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and nurturing the potential of their team members.

Just as strong roots grow from a single seed, a thriving school culture begins with one intentional conversation at time. In this session, you’ll explore how to lead with emotional intelligence and apply trauma-responsive strategies to strengthen relationships and support a healthier school climate.  Learn how to recognize and regulate your emotions and skillfully navigate emotionally charged and difficult conversations. By listening with intention, you’ll create space for healing, growth, and connection. Like tending a garden, leadership grows through presence, patience, and care. Because every conversation is a chance to lead—and every moment of connection can shape culture.

What if your teacher PLCs sparked inspiration and improved outcomes for English Learners (ELs)? This session shares how we transformed routine teacher collaboration into purposeful Professional Learning Communities that prioritize the needs of multilingual learners. By anchoring PLC work in the core principles of collaboration, shared learning, and a focus on results, teacher teams moved beyond surface-level planning and into meaningful instruction shifts. Through this approach, educators developed greater confidence in supporting ELs, integrated language development into all subject areas, and increased the use of effective scaffolds. Participants will walk away with practical tools, examples, and key takeaways to strengthen teacher collaboration with English Learners at the heart of the work.

Rooted in lived experience and cultural heritage, this session highlights how Latina elementary school principals and superintendents are transforming education through equity-centered, emotionally intelligent, and purpose-driven leadership. Drawing from two dissertations Empowering Education: Unveiling the Strategies of Latina Elementary Principals in Cultivating Culturally Responsive Learning Environments, and Pláticas on Perseverance, Presence, and Praxis: The Occupassion of Latina Superintendents, the workshop explores how identity, justice, and heart are central to leadership that nurtures the potential of both students and staff.
Using strategies drawn from Chicana/Latina Feminist Epistemology, Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005), Applied Critical Leadership (Santamaría, 2014) and the Principles of Latino Leadership (Bordas, 2013), this session provides opportunities for reflection, storytelling, and collective dialogue. Participants will walk away with insights and tools to lead schools that are inclusive, equity-centered, and grounded in authentic connection. Together, we will explore how culturally responsive leadership creates the conditions for transformation, belonging, and liberation in our schools. Above all this workshop will provide a sense of affirmation and validation for the ways Latinas lead with love.  

Staying connected with fellow CALSA members has never been easier! With our CALSA Comunidad, we’re excited to offer a dynamic, inclusive network designed to strengthen communication and collaboration. You may already be familiar with ParentSquare’s unified communication platform, which helps districts organize their school-home communications and keep families engaged in their school communities. The CALSA Comunidad utilizes ParentSquare’s Community Groups feature to enhance our ability to connect, learn, and grow together.
By joining the CALSA Comunidad, you'll stay informed on valuable opportunities to actively engage with CALSA’s mission of empowering leaders and uplifting communities.

Leaders, teachers and students face unique challenges every day, which is why it is so important to create a campus environment that fosters safety, connection, and well-being at all levels.
We believe, “if you have a child’s heart, you have a child’s mind.” If teachers create a relational connection to students, or “Capture Kids’ Hearts ,” performance accelerates, and behaviors greatly improve because kids want to be in school. The same can be said of leadership and all staff who face challenges. When school culture is built on relationships that tend to overall well-being, it is proven that campuses, districts, and entire communities can be transformed.

Join your CALSA hermana Superintendent Yolanda Valdez for a journey into her district's classrooms in the beautiful Central Valley to see the incredible results her teachers have experienced with students across the curriculum by leveraging "instructional AI." Two Cutler-Orosi JUSD teachers will share how they have improved students' writing, critical thinking, and confidence by making data-driven decisions in their classrooms and fiscal areas through Packback's writing platform.