Stevens and Harvard Bring Educators’ Conference to Jersey City

On the first Thursday of October, a few hundred teachers and school leaders will file into the Stevens Cooperative School’s Jersey City campus. They’ll come from PreK classrooms and high school departments, from public schools and private ones. And they’ll spend the day talking about something that rarely gets a full day: how kids actually learn to think.

The school is teaming up with Harvard University’s Project Zero to host “Learning and Thinking That Make a Difference,” a one-day conference on October 3. It’s the first time Stevens has opened its professional development to the broader education community, and the lineup is built around a simple idea — that thinking is a skill you can teach, not just a talent some kids have.

Registration is open now. The day includes a keynote from a leading Project Zero researcher and small, interactive workshops led by educators who’ve already put these ideas to work in real classrooms. Sessions will touch on critical thinking, creativity, student agency and how to reach diverse groups of learners. Teachers walk away with concrete strategies they can try the next morning.

“This is about deeper learning and about what we’re preparing our students for,” said Shehla Ghouse, principal of Stevens’ Jersey City campus and the conference organizer. “My hope is that the conference begins a conversation among educators, a community that is not just learning from the workshop presenters, but learning with and from one another.”

Project Zero isn’t new to this work. Founded in 1967, it’s the oldest research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Its researchers study how people learn to think, create and understand — and how schools can design classrooms that make those things more likely. Stevens faculty have been involved with Project Zero for years through book studies, collaborative workshops, institutes and online courses, folding the ideas into their own curriculum conversations.

The conference is the culmination of that relationship. What started as a handful of teachers reading and talking together has grown into a full day built for anyone who works with kids.

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably seen the difference between a classroom that asks students to memorize and one that asks them to explain their reasoning. That’s the gap this conference is trying to close. Project Zero’s frameworks give teachers specific routines — questions to ask, ways to document student thinking, protocols for group work — that push kids past the right answer and into the why.

For Hudson County, that matters close to home. Teachers here are working with some of the most diverse classrooms in the country. A day like this one is a chance to share what works across district lines, and to bring ideas back to schools that may not have the budget for large-scale training. It’s also a reminder that Jersey City is increasingly a place where education conversations happen, not just a place they’re discussed from a distance.

Ghouse framed the goal as building a community of learners — the teachers themselves. That’s a shift from the usual model, where an outside expert talks and everyone else listens. Here, the workshops are meant to be hands-on, and the educators in the room are as much a resource as the presenters.

There’s no controversy here, no policy fight, no budget cut. Just a school opening its doors to colleagues from across the region. In a school year that’s already busy and often stressful, that quiet kind of collaboration can be easy to miss. But it’s how classrooms change, one teacher at a time.

If you’re an educator interested in attending, registration is open now through Stevens Cooperative School. Space may be limited, so it’s worth checking soon if you want a seat. Parents who want to know more about Project Zero’s approach can look up its research online — the ideas are public, and many are simple enough to try at home.

The conference won’t make headlines for weeks. But for the teachers who show up on October 3, it might change how they plan their next unit, ask their next question, or listen to the kid in the back row. That’s the kind of thing that ripples out slowly, into classrooms and eventually into how a generation learns to think.