2026 Schedule

8:30am to 9:00am
THE CAFÉ

Come early. Grab coffee. Find an old friend. Meet someone whose work you’ve been meaning to learn about. We’re starting slowly and relationally, because the people in the room ARE the conference.

9:00am to 10:00am
COLORADO IN TWO MINUTES

Two minutes. Three images. One thing you’re building. One question you can’t answer alone.

We’ll kick off the day with a rapid tour of what’s happening across Colorado. No slide decks. No twenty-minute explanation of your strategic plan. Think Ignite Talk meets TED meets speed dating.

Each Learning Host gets two minutes to help us see a glimpse of what they’ve created, and leave us wanting to know more.
Then we’ll give you the chance to do exactly that.

Sign up to be a Learning Host!

10:10am to 11:10am
THE LIVING LEARNING FAIR

The room becomes a living map of learning across Colorado. Learning Hosts spread out throughout the space and invite us into their work.

See student work. Handle artifacts. Try a tool. Experience a protocol. Ask questions. Meet learners. Look at prototypes. Hear the story behind an idea. Discover something you didn’t know was happening 20 miles – or 200 miles – away.

If you’re hosting, bring the work with you. We especially encourage schools to bring learners who want to share, demonstrate, explain, question, or participate alongside adults.

This isn’t an exhibition hall. It’s a chance to experience what learning looks and feels like in another community.

11:20am to 12:20pm
CONVERSATIONS WE NEED

What question did you hear this morning that you can’t stop thinking about? What are you trying to solve at your own school? What conversation do you wish someone in Colorado education would finally convene? Now’s your chance.

We’ll shift into an EdCamp-style hour of participant-generated conversations. Propose a question. Join someone else’s provocation. Move when you need to. Share what you know. Ask for what you don’t.

There are no experts at the front of the room. Just people with experience, people with questions, and people who might see something that the rest of us can’t yet.

12:20pm to 1:00pm
LUNCH

Lunch is on us. Keep talking and building relationships.

1:00pm to 2:30pm
THE IMPOSSIBLE IDEAS LAB

Now we’re going to ask you to temporarily forget how education works. Forget the schedule. Forget the funding formula. Forget the staffing model. Forget “we tried that once.” Forget, for 90 minutes, the reasons that something can’t happen.

Choose an impossible challenge and join a team of people from across Colorado to imagine what we might create if we started with possibility instead of constraint.

How might we…

• make Colorado the best place in America to be a learner?

• ensure that every learner has a mentor?

• make every neighborhood and community space in Colorado into places of learning?

• design policy that accelerates rather than contains innovation?

• and so on…

We’ll give you provocations, design tools, Cards for Humanity, and permission to go somewhere unreasonable.

There is one rule: Nobody gets to say, “That won’t work.“

2:40pm to 3:30pm
WHAT IF WE ACTUALLY DID IT?

Impossible ideas get interesting when someone decides to take them seriously.

We’ll bring the room back together for a House-of-Genius-inspired final hour. Teams will share what they imagined. The rest of us will build on it.

What has energy? What connections do we see? Who else needs to be involved? What could be prototyped? And what might actually leave this room with us?

We’ll end by asking what we’re willing to build together.