ISTELive 2025 and the 2025 ASCD Annual Show & Conference kicked off this weekend in San Antonio. Thousands of educators filled the auditorium of the Henry B Gonzalez Convention Center to hear from ASCD + ISTE CEO Richard Culatta, Miral Kotb, founder and creator of iLuminate, and Dan Heath, author, podcast host and Strategic Change Expert.
Here are highlights from their presentations.
Life is too short for sucky learning experiences
This year’s simultaneous event is a first for the two organizations that merged in 2022. Traditionally, ASCD held its event in the spring, while ISTE hosted its event in the summer, just after schools let out for the year. Attendees have access to all sessions and workshops at the conferences.
“Your badge will get you into any session anywhere in the building, so please use this as a moment to try out some new things,” Culatta said.
All activities and sessions at the event have been designed around ISTE+ASCD’s Transformational Learning Principles.
“Our mission is to ensure that all students have transformational learning experiences that spark their imagination and prepare them to thrive in learning and life,” said Culatta. “To put it more bluntly, we believe that life is too short for sucky learning. It is! We just have to have every moment be amazing.”
Culatta charged attendees to use their time at the show to network, build their skill set, flex their curiosity, and refresh their energy stores.
“My goal is that each of you leave here with a new skill, a new question and a new friend,” he said. “Finally, I recognize that you have just spent the entire year giving to others – supporting teachers, supporting students, supporting families, and we want to make sure these next few days are about giving back to yourself. It’s a time to recharge and fill your bucket.”
Powerfully different
With a talk bookended by two iLuminate performances combining dance and technology Kotb shared some of her own personal journey and emphasized the importance of celebrating neurodiversity, and teaching kindness and empathy.
Kotb shared stories of her childhood, including corrective eye surgeries and an early talent for math that had her helping the family with tasks such as calculating and managing the family’s weekly grocery budget down to the penny. “Numbers always made sense to me,” she said.
Later, behaviors such as stimming and temper tantrums emerged, leading to a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Medication helped turn around her behavior and she began to thrive, making new friends, earning good grades and participating in her school’s dance program. Nonetheless, she struggled to understand why she felt different. Summer visits back to visit family in Egypt offered a feeling of belonging, and introduced her to the world of video games, sparking an interest in how they were made.
“I loved making video games,” Kotb shared. “The thing I found was that the computer never gave me a sense of self doubt. . . It was the most amazing best friend I could have because I was in a safe space to let my mind grow.”
Kotb continued to thrive. She attended Columbia University, earning a degree in computer science with a minor in dance, then landed a job writing software for Bloomberg. She went on to produce shows in New York, then founded iLuminate, a company that fuses her love for software engineering and dance. iLuminate dancers came in third on America’s Got Talent in 2011, and the technology has been featured on several TV shows, including “Dancing with the Stars” and “Good Morning America.”
Yet, even with these successes, Kotb says she still struggles with knowing she’s different. She exhorted educators to teach kindness and empathy, to teach students to “see each other for what makes us powerfully different from a young age,” which she said would have made a difference for her.
“I am very proud of what I am today and what I’ve accomplished, and the team behind me that is with me, but I also don’t think it should have been that difficult,” Kotb says.
Look for bright spots
There are moments in our lives when we decide that the way we’ve been doing things has to change, says Heath. He likens these moments to rolling a boulder up a hill.
“These are hard moments, because we can feel the weight of the resistance. We can feel the inertia,” Heath says. “And we try things. Maybe if we just work a little harder, maybe if we just stay at work a little longer, eventually we’ll get that thing to move.”
These tactics will not work, says Heath.”[I]f we want to move the boulder, we have to change our lens. We have to look for leverage,” he says.
Start by looking for the bright spots, Heath suggests. He cites Bobby, a high school freshman, whose home life is a wreck. He has spent most of his life bouncing between foster care homes. Bobby gets into trouble often at school and is frequently sent to the principal’s office for discipline.
One day, Bobby meets Murphy, the new school counselor. Murphy has heard about Bobby. When the two sit down to talk, Murphy opens with a request Bobby has never heard. He asks Bobby to tell him about the times when he does not get in trouble. The counseling tactic called solutions-focused therapy, revolves around two questions: 1) what’s working right now, and 2) how can we do more?
Bobby tells Murphy that he likes Mrs. Smith’s class. He rarely gets in trouble there. Mrs. Smith does three things to that Bobby appreciates: she always greets him at the door with a smile; she gives him easier work when she can; and she always makes sure he understands the directions for assignments. “When he was confused, it was often a trigger for bad behavior,” says Heath.
Murphy went to Bobby’s other teachers and asked them to try the same tactics. It worked. Bobby’s behavior improved dramatically. He still gets in trouble daily, but it’s gone from getting in trouble an average of 4-5 classes a day to one or two classes a day.
“But look at the enormity of this behavioral transformation! Think about all the times when classrooms were not disrupted by his behavior because of this!” Heath says. “And this victory came despite the fact that we really couldn’t address the root cause of his misbehavior. We couldn’t go back in time and give Bobby a warm, supportive family. This was a victory won in spite of the root cause.”
Finding Bobby’s bright spots – when he did not get into trouble – enabled Murphy to identify tactics that were already successful. It was a starting point for crafting a new plan for the young man.
“Anytime in life when we have a difference in outcomes, a difference in performance, we have bright spots, by definition,” says Heath. “[L]earn from what is working. Sometimes we can unlock powerful leverage points simply by understanding more deeply the times when we’re already succeeding.”