21st Century Adult Learning
Learning Designed for How Adults Actually Think.
Cognitive Coaching
Unlock the Thinking Behind the Practice.
IMSE's products are built on strong instructional content — that's not the question. The question is: are we designing the adult learning experience around that content as intentionally as we're designing the content itself? This session introduces cognitive coaching principles and explores how they can sharpen the way we support educators inside our trainings, facilitator guides, and digital learning experiences. We'll look at how to ask better questions (the kind that actually shift thinking, not just check for understanding), how to build reflective practice into our products without making them feel clunky, and how to move facilitators from "delivering content" to "coaching thinking." If IMSE wants its products to change practice — not just transfer knowledge — this is the piece that makes that happen.
Learning Arc
Five Phases. One Transformed Practice.
Most professional learning follows a familiar pattern: present information, maybe do an activity, hope people use it later. The Learning Arc is a different approach — a five-phase framework designed around how adults actually process and adopt new practices. It moves participants through a deliberate sequence: Why This Matters (building relevance before content), What's Really Happening (grounding in current reality), The Why Behind It (connecting research to practice), Now You (guided application with support), and Make It Yours (ownership and transfer). This isn't a theoretical model we read about somewhere — it's a framework we built, tested, and refined through years of working with educators. And it has direct implications for how IMSE designs and delivers every product, training, and resource. This session walks the team through the arc, shows what it looks like in action, and opens up a conversation about how we can embed it more intentionally across everything we do.
Implementation Science
Understanding and Sustaining Change.
Here's the uncomfortable truth about professional learning in education: most of it doesn't stick. Not because the content is bad, but because nobody planned for what happens after the training ends. Implementation science is the research base that explains why — and more importantly, what to do about it. This session breaks down the key frameworks (think Fixsen, NIRN, and the active implementation cycle) in plain language and connects them directly to IMSE's work. We'll look at what it actually takes to move a practice from "introduced in a workshop" to "embedded in a classroom," including the stages of implementation, the role of coaching and feedback loops, and why fidelity without adaptation is just as dangerous as adaptation without fidelity. For a company whose entire mission depends on educators actually using what we teach them, this isn't a nice-to-have — it's the foundation everything else should be built on.