Keynote Speakers
Makiri Pugh
Wednesday, November 5, 2025
Building the First AI-Powered Network in Education
Discover what it means to run the first AI-powered school network in America. This keynote reveals how Maya Angelou Schools built an AI Operating System across instruction, leadership, operations, data, and IT—anchored in values, Bloom’s Taxonomy, and governance. Participants leave with a framework for ethical, top-to-boom AI integration in their own districts
Makiri Pugh is an instructional leader, systems strategist, and AI integration expert with over a decade of experience transforming student outcomes in alternative and charter school settings. He currently serves as the Managing Director of Teaching, Learning, and Innovation at the Maya Angelou Schools & See Forever Foundation, where he leads academic strategy, instructional coherence, and professional development across five campuses.
Makiri is known for building from the ground up, developing instructional frameworks, MTSS implementation models, data systems, and professional learning structures that drive both teacher growth and student achievement. His work consistently results in scalable systems that outlast individuals and anchor sustainable progress.
Most notably, Makiri leads C2 Education Solutions, a consultancy focused on helping districts design and implement custom AI solutions, leadership development, and instructional systems design, including GPTs trained on district-specific instructional logic. His leadership bridges the gap between innovation and execution, helping school systems turn abstract AI potential into real-time, classroom-level impact.
With deep roots in school leadership and a reputation for clarity, rigor, and forward-thinking design, Makiri brings both technical fluency and human-centered strategy to every project he leads.
Kunal Dalal
Thursday, November 6, 2025
Be a Lighthouse: Exploration, Joy,
and AI in These Uncertain Times
This keynote and workshop is designed for teachers navigating the rapidly changing landscape of education.
Educators today are called to be steady lighthouses—grounded in empathy, illuminating paths of exploration, and sparking joy for students and communities in uncertain times.
- The keynote and session will draw from three deeply personal and professional sources of insight:
Parenting with AI: Reflections on using AI at home with my own child to strengthen creativity, empathy, and connection. - Student Leadership: Learnings from the nation’s, and possibly the world’s first student-led AI summit, where young people imagined the future of learning in their own voice.
- Relationships at the Center: A vision for how AI can enable us to recenter families, relationships, and joy as the foundation of education.
- Teachers will leave inspired to see themselves as anchors of stability and
imagination, empowered to guide students not just through technology,
but toward a more human future.
Kunal Dalal is the author of The AI Parent and the Chief Consultant for GenerativEducation and AI Parentology.
He previously served as Administrator of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation for the Orange County Department of Education, where he led AI initiatives across 28 districts serving nearly 450,000 students.
Through GenerativEducation, Kunal advises leaders on building agentic, human- centered systems. Through AI Parentology, he explores how parents and children can use AI to strengthen relationships, creativity, and joy at home.
Kunal is recognized for blending bold vision with personal storytelling, drawing from his professional leadership as well as his lived experience as a father experimenting with AI alongside his young children.
Kunal is a former high school science teacher, HS administrator, and avid snowboarder and climber.
Katherine Arden
Friday, November 7, 2025
Classroom Campfires: telling scary stories in a scarier world
Historians of horror will tell you that the genre holds a mirror to our anxieties. Dracula was a product of the feverish Victorian mind. The modern zombie was invented in the wake of World War One. The post-apocalyptic subgenre came into its own after the atom bomb. Maybe that is why a surprising number of people find comfort in horror. The anxious imagination calms when it encounters fear in a way that can’t hurt. Today we’ve entered a whole new age of anxiety and also, perhaps not coincidentally, have seen a renaissance of the horror genre. Authors, filmmakers and game designers are charting new ground and lifting up new voices. We’ll talk in detail about the development of this genre, especially in the children’s space, and how even the scariest stories can be a comfort in strange times.
Katherine Arden is the New York Times, Sunday Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Winternight Trilogy and The Warm Hands of Ghosts. She is also the author of the Small Spaces Quartet and The Strangest Fish for children.
The first book of the Winternight Trilogy, The Bear and the Nightingale was named by Amazon as the best science fiction and fantasy novel of 2017. The trilogy has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus and Nebula Awards, the Vermont Book Award, and has been translated into over twenty-five languages.
R.L Stine called Arden’s, Small Spaces, the first book in the Small Spaces Quartet, “terrifying and fun.” It was named a best book of 2018 by Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly, the Chicago Public Library system, and the American Library Association, as well as garnering nominations for student book awards in over twenty states. It is the winner of the Golden Dome award in Vermont, the William Allen White award in Kansas, the Nene award in Hawaii and Nebraska’s golden sower award.
Born in Austin, Texas, Arden studied Russian in Moscow, taught at a school in the French alps and worked on a farm in Hawaii. She currently lives in Vermont, where she writes, hikes with her dog, skis, and continues to expand her vegetable garden and extensive beds of perennial flowers.