Nebraska Career and Technical Education Conference 2026

Lesson Plans, Sub Plans, Meal plans… SO MANY PLANS!
Educators are planners by nature, but when it comes to officer teams, summer planning days often become overwhelming, unfocused, or rushed. This session takes one major plan off your plate: the plan for your officer team’s summer planning day.


Designed for advisors and educators who work with student leadership teams, this workshop provides a framework for a productive, engaging, and meaningful planning day. Participants will walk through a proven agenda from almost a decade of leading teams through MAPS (our team planning experiences hosted by The Leadership Center) that balances team building, goal setting, leadership development, and actionable planning—without the chaos or burnout.


You’ll leave with practical tools, sample schedules, facilitation tips, and adaptable activities you can use with your officer team. Whether you’re a first-year advisor or a seasoned pro, this session helps you turn planning day into a focused launchpad for the year ahead—saving time, reducing stress, and empowering students to lead with clarity and confidence.

As built for the 2025 Nebraska Afterschool Conference, Maile and Abby will share their toolkit from hours of research for how to avoid burnout and what to do when it does, inevitably, hit you. 


Burnout doesn’t usually happen all at once—it creeps in through overcommitment, blurred boundaries, and the constant pressure to say “yes.” This session helps educators recognize burnout not as failure, but as a signal to realign habits, priorities, and expectations.


Grounded in neuroscience, behavior change, and real-world educator experience, From Burnt Out to Balanced introduces a practical framework using our Matchbox (burnout recovery) and Fuel Station (burnout prevention) models. Participants will identify common burnout signals, understand why motivation feels impossible when dopamine is depleted, and learn simple, realistic tools to regain momentum—without adding more to their daily plate.


Attendees will leave with a concrete burnout recovery toolbox and a proactive checklist to protect their energy during demanding seasons of the school year. This session is honest, relatable, and action-oriented—designed to help educators move out of survival mode.


Takeaway: Practical tools to recover from burnout now—and prevent it long-term.

Many students walk into interviews underprepared; not because they lack potential, but because they’ve never been taught how to prepare, and neither have their coaches! This workshop equips educators with simple, repeatable tools to help students approach interviews with confidence, clarity, and professionalism. Our team has developed an expansive library of exercises with almost two decades of helping students interview for scholarships, state officer positions, and Dairy Princess titles more confidently (just to name a few!).


This session breaks down interview preparation into teachable components: understanding what employers are really asking, structuring strong responses, practicing clear communication, and managing nerves. We don't just tell you to "Smile and don't say "Um!". Participants will learn how to coach students through both traditional and behavioral interview questions using story telling frameworks, calm their nerves and discover their experiences—even when they think they “don’t have any.”


Educators will leave with practical strategies, sample prompts, and classroom-ready activities they can immediately implement with high school or college-aged students (or even yourself!) and be of the first to hear about new curriculum being developed for this topic. Whether preparing students for jobs, internships, scholarships, or leadership opportunities, this session provides a clear roadmap to help students show up prepared and confident.

District meetings