Our Advanced UbD for Curriculum Leaders and Inclusive Curriculum Design both offer teachers and school leaders high-quality, small group settings to expand their thinking about best practices for creating, evolving, and implementing transformative curriculum. All our offerings are guided by our PD the way PD should be philosophy that equips and empowers attendees to immediately apply what they’ve learned while fostering meaningful collaboration.

Leading Curricular Change: Advanced UbD for Curriculum Leaders

Building on the “Train the Trainer” workshop offered by the late Grant Wiggins, this 3-day workshop will equip educational leaders with strategies, skills, and resources to successfully lead and foster Understanding by Design work in their schools and districts. This is an application-based offering.

June 23-25, 2026, hosted by Drew School in San Francisco, CA

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The Story Behind The Leading Curricular Change Workshop

Most recently in 2006, the late Grant Wiggins offered Authentic Education’s train-the-trainer workshop, equipping educational leaders from across the country to lead Understanding by Design Professional Development in their schools and districts. AE President Mike Matthews is proud to reimagine Grant’s train-the-trainer model as part of a brand new offering – Leading Curricular Change: Advanced UbD for Curriculum Leaders.

The Advanced UbD for Curriculum Leaders workshop will equip attendees with strategies, skills, and resources to lead Understanding by Design work in their schools and districts. The 3-day workshop will include:

• Reviewing basic and advanced features of UbD.
• Identifying a need in their school or district, and then using the UbD template to draft a professional development curriculum related to this goal.
• Exploring best-practices for facilitation related to leading UbD PD.
• Learning and practicing coaching strategies for supporting teachers planning UbD units.

Inclusive Curriculum Design: Backwards planning for equity and belonging

Join Mike Matthews & Monique Vogelsang for a 3-day intensive to expand your thinking about best practices for including underrepresented voices, untold stories, and broader perspectives into your curriculum design, resulting in more inclusive and culturally expansive units.

June 29-July 1, 2026 hosted by Drew School in San Francisco, CA

July 13-15, 2026 hosted at the Loft on Two in downtown Boston, MA

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An Understanding by Design workshop that explores the question: “How do we tell the human story?”

For many educators, across grade levels and subjects, our work is connected to the larger human story. Whether we are teaching content that spans social studies or STEAM, educators not only influence academic understandings, we also shape how our students view personal identity, culture, community, and how we understand our place in the larger world. The resources we use, the questions we ask, and the activities students engage in not only support academic growth, if left unquestioned, they can also create a sense of exclusion, or—with intention and affirmation—can cultivate inclusion.

Therefore, it’s important that we reflect on our choices to ensure that the content we teach is age-appropriate, rooted in facts, and has many “windows and mirrors” for our students. 

Over the course of three days, through interactive workshops and small group working sessions, participants will examine a curricular unit they’d like to revise with the lens of inclusion.

Led by two educational leaders—Mike Matthews of Authentic Education and Monique Vogelsang of Humanizing History—participants of this professional development experience will be guided through frameworks of Understanding by Design and models of culturally expansive teaching. Participants will explore the larger story our curricular units are designed to tell, will consider how we name and frame our ideas, and will craft Transfer Goals, Enduring Understandings, and Essential Questions. 

By the end of our three-day workshops, educators and school leaders will have a “ready-to-teach” UbD unit and a plan of action to bring back to their school community, which may serve as a model inclusive curriculum design.

At AE, we do PD the way PD should be.

We deliver highly effective professional development that:

• Models the types of learning we value in our classroom;
• Leverages the expertise and meets the needs of those in the room;
• Equips and empowers attendees to immediately apply what they’ve learned;
• Fosters meaningful collaboration; and
• Supports teachers as they apply what they’ve learned.

Join us this summer to experience it for yourselves.