Speaking Opportunities
I work with school districts, colleges, foundations, and leadership teams on the practices that build clearer thinkers, stronger educators, and more resilient institutions.
The engagements take several forms. Conference keynotes on critical thinking and the formation of educators. Multi-session faculty development on the slow work of building reasoning into a profession. Closed-door work with leadership teams trying to think more carefully about decisions they cannot easily reverse. Board engagements where the question is not strategy, but the quality of the reasoning behind the strategy.
The work is anchored to two books and to twenty-seven years of practice inside K–12 and higher education. The audiences I serve best are the ones who suspect that the gap between how their organizations sound and how clearly they reason has grown wider than they want to admit.
Topics
The Discipline of Thinking
Drawn from Mastering the Mind: A Guide to Improving Your Critical Thinking.
This is the work I do most often. The argument is that reasoning is a discipline, in the sense that musicians and surgeons use the word, and that the quality of every consequential decision a professional makes is determined more by this discipline than by any other variable. Audiences leave with a working framework, three specific practices, and an honest measure of where their own reasoning is strongest and where it is not.
Formats: 60 to 90 minute keynote, half-day workshop, or three-session leadership series.
AI Fluency for Educators
Drawn from my work as one of six AI Fluency Master Trainers for Dallas College and from designing the Future Educators and AI workshop series.
This is current expertise that very few speakers can credibly offer because the field is moving faster than the speaking circuit. The work covers what the stakes actually are for schools and colleges, what the early evidence is showing about classroom use, and how to build faculty practice that takes both the tools and the risks seriously.
Formats: keynote, faculty workshop, or strategic planning session for academic leadership.
The Formation of Educators
Drawn from the forthcoming Think Like an Educator.
The question this work asks is what separates teachers and leaders who shape lives from those who deliver content and what institutions have to do differently if they want to produce the first kind rather than the second. The work is calibrated for schools of education, community college systems preparing future teachers, and K–12 districts thinking about the formation of their own faculty.
Formats: keynote, faculty institute, or multi-session faculty development across a semester.
Leadership under institutional pressure
Drawn from twenty-seven years inside K–12 and higher education, including service as a community college dean across a seven-campus system.
The work is for leadership teams making decisions with incomplete information, under political and operational pressure, with consequences that will outlast them. The frame is not what to decide. It is how to think about deciding.
Formats: closed-door leadership retreat, board engagement, or cabinet-level coaching engagement.
A NOTE ON FORMAT AND FIT
Not every engagement is a keynote. Some of the most valuable work I do is the work nobody sees, with leadership teams behind closed doors, often across multiple sessions, on questions the public version of the institution is not ready to ask. If you are weighing whether to engage me for a single event or for something longer and quieter, the inquiry form below is the right place to start. I would rather have a short conversation about fit than place a keynote that should have been a retreat, or a retreat that should have been a working session with three people.
PAST ENGAGEMENTS
A NOTE ON DALLAS COLLEGE ENGAGEMENTS
I serve as Dean of Student and Faculty Empowerment at Dallas College, and I am a featured speaker on the Dallas College Speakers Bureau, which offers Dallas College faculty and staff as speakers to community organizations and civic groups at no cost. If you are a community organization, school, or nonprofit looking for a Dallas College speaker on topics related to higher education, student success, or community partnership, the Speakers Bureau is the right channel. Information and the request form are available at the Dallas College Speakers Bureau.
For paid keynote, workshop, or leadership engagements outside the Dallas College community-engagement channel, the inquiry form below is the right starting point. The two channels serve different audiences and different work, and I am glad to help inquirers identify which one fits what they are trying to accomplish.
Interested in booking me for your speaking engagement?
If you are considering an engagement, the form below is the right next step. Tell me what you are trying to accomplish, who will be in the room, and what you hope the audience or the leadership team will be doing differently afterward. I will respond within ten business days, and I will tell you honestly whether the engagement is a fit.