EmpowerEd Weekend
A weekend learning experience where Michigan educators come together to deepen practice, share innovation, strengthen communities, and shape the future of education.
Systems Change
Feedback Under Pressure
Let’s face it: feedback in schools can feel like that surprise pop quiz you weren’t ready for — awkward, stressful, and sometimes completely ignored. Yet, when done right, feedback is one of the fastest ways to grow as a professional, strengthen teams, and actually get things done without pulling your hair out.
In Michigan’s high-pressure educational landscape of overcrowded classrooms, endless mandates, and administrators juggling more priorities than a circus performer, feedback often happens top-down, one-off, or not at all. Educators feel voiceless. Administrators feel bombarded. And everyone wonders why morale and trust sometimes evaporate faster than your morning coffee.
This 90-minute interactive session flips the script. Participants will collaborate on designing feedback systems that actually work (structured, practical, and yes, safe) from every perspective: administrators, teachers, support staff, and even students. We’ll tackle how to give and receive feedback without sparking defensiveness, burnout, or passive-aggressive emails.
Participants will leave not only with insight, but with tangible tools:
- A Feedback Friction Map to spot where systems break
- A sustainable 3-layer feedback loop
- A 30-day micro-experiment plan for immediate impact
By the end, participants won’t just understand feedback, they’ll own a plan to make it actionable, reduce friction, and create a culture where giving and receiving feedback becomes a tool for growth instead of dread. Bring your opinions, your questions, and maybe a sense of humor.
Facilitator Information
Kris Thompson
Kris Thompson is an Industrial-Organizational Psychology practitioner and management consultant with a focus on leadership systems, performance optimization, and organizational design. She works with leaders navigating complexity, competing priorities, and structural pressure — helping them build feedback mechanisms that strengthen trust without sacrificing accountability.
With a background in systems thinking and applied behavioral science, Kris specializes in translating research on feedback intervention theory, 360-degree systems, and psychological safety into practical tools organizations can implement immediately. Her work emphasizes reciprocal accountability, clarity of expectations, and sustainable performance under stress.
Kris brings a cross-industry perspective to education, helping schools move beyond compliance-driven evaluation toward feedback systems that retain talent, reduce burnout, and improve execution across roles.
The Modern Teacher’s Grade Book
Early-career educators often drown in data without a clear way to use it. Teachers are expected to track everything, yet few are taught how to turn that information into insight. This session directly supports ongoing work around chronic absenteeism, MTSS-aligned progress monitoring, and equitable access to instruction by giving participants a practical, teacher-friendly system for transforming raw classroom data into real, instructional impact.
In this highly interactive workshop, educators will build their own customizable data tracker from scratch, using a model designed and tested in real Michigan classrooms. Through short demonstrations, structured build time, and collaborative problem-solving, participants will create a fully functional gradebook tool that visually identifies struggling students, reveals patterns in classroom management, predicts who needs intervention, and connects attendance trends to academic outcomes. This tracker is not simply a tech tool, but a framework for instructional planning, intervention design, and classroom culture shifts.
Participants will spend the session actively designing, editing, and personalizing their own spreadsheet system using their real rosters and classroom data. Small-group scenarios grounded in real data and common behavioral patterns will help teachers practice interpreting their data and selecting targeted instructional or classroom management responses.
By the end of the session, educators will walk away with:
- A ready-to-use gradebook system aligned to their own classes
- A workflow for weekly data routines that saves time and reduces guesswork
- A clear method for identifying whether academic struggles stem from attendance, behavior, instruction, or accessibility
- A transferable framework they can adapt for project management, progress monitoring, parent communication, and student support meetings
- Increased confidence using data to drive instruction in a way that feels human-centered, not compliance-driven
This session is designed for early-career teachers and anyone responsible for student progress monitoring in a secondary education setting. Participants are active participants in this session, building, testing, and refining a tool they can take directly into the classroom to improve instructional decisions and classroom environment.
Facilitator Information
Maddie Krawczyk
Maddie Krawczyk is a second-year high school social studies teacher and Teach For America–Detroit corps member who designs clear, sustainable systems to help teachers make sense of their classroom data. Her tools grew out of the real challenges of early-career teaching and have already been shared with educators across several Michigan schools, including through a recent presentation at Teach For America’s corps member workshop in January. She has since supported fellow corps members across multiple schools in implementing data routines and progress-monitoring systems. Maddie focuses on creating easy-to-implement systems that cut through the noise of competing demands and surface what students actually need. Her work begins in her own classroom, where each tool starts as a practical solution to the day-to-day realities she faces with her students. She brings an engaging, collaborative, and grounded approach to professional learning, reflecting her commitment to helping educators build human-centered, doable, and immediately impactful systems for their classrooms.
Funding Shapes Everything
Michigan’s special education funding structure doesn’t just impact students with IEPs, it shapes staffing models, class sizes, intervention systems, instructional delivery, and district decision-making across the entire education system. In this collaborative workspace session, participants will explore how funding structures influence real classroom realities (from co-teaching capacity to MTSS implementation to behavioral supports) using Michigan-specific data and scenarios. Rather than presenting theory, this session functions as a structured design lab.
Educators and leaders will:
- Examine current demographic and disability trend data in Michigan
- Map how special education funding flows through their systems
- Identify pressure points where funding structure impacts instruction
- Develop a draft action map or advocacy alignment plan tailored to district-level needs
Participants will leave with a practical tool to guide internal conversations about funding, equity, and system design that is grounded in Michigan’s current policy context and the MI Blueprint reform framework.
Facilitator Information
Heather Eckner
Heather Eckner serves as Director of Statewide Education at the Autism Alliance of Michigan (AAoM), where she leads initiatives focused on improving education systems for students with disabilities through policy, coalition-building, and family engagement. She convenes statewide partnerships at both grassroots and grasstops levels to advance systems change reform, most notably through the Michigan Special Education Finance Reform Blueprint.
Heather previously founded A2IDEAS, a special education advocacy nonprofit, and has experience as both an elementary classroom teacher and instructional assistant at Wayne State University’s College of Education, where she developed family programming to support parents navigating the special education system.
She has extensive knowledge that encompasses all areas of eligibility and continuum of services in special education with a training emphasis in autism and dyslexia, and also served as a content advisor for the Michigan Dyslexia Handbook. Heather is a 2014 graduate of the Leaders in Policy Advocacy (LIPA) program, a 2021 fellow of Michigan Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities (MI-LEND), a member of Leadership Detroit Class XLII, and has also served on the Executive Committee for the Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC).
A parent of children with disabilities, Heather’s advocacy is driven by her commitment to education, social justice, and empowering families and communities to create meaningful change.