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DLAC attendee reviews

BEST CONFERENCE EVER! —un-named attendee #1

OMG I can’t believe how great it was!!!!—un-named attendee #2

Every speaker was the best I had ever seen!!!—George from New York City

We’ve all seen these testimonials, right?

If you’re like us, you don’t find them all that convincing. Why? Because first, there’s no evidence that these are real people. Second, if you trust the conference organizers, it’s still not that hard to find a few people from among hundreds (or thousands) who will give you a positive review.

We’ve decided on a different approach. On this page and in the attached document, we are including all of the comments and reviews that we received. Most of these came in via our survey. A few (the longer ones) were emailed to one or more of the DLAC organizers personally. Note that these are the general comments about DLAC overall from our surveys, focusing on what attendees liked and didn’t like, and where we could improve. We’re not including the topic-specific comments because the list would get extremely long, and detailed.

We have not deleted any; we have included all (you’ll believe us when you see a few of the negative ones). We have not edited these except to remove words and phrases that identify the reviewer or their school/district/organization. The full list of reviews is provided below and in the attached pdf document.

How we are using this information

We are posting all of this information for three reasons:

  1. We suspect that showing that the huge majority of attendees had positive experiences is more believable if we include the ones that said they didn’t.

  2. We know that DLAC isn’t for everyone. It’s more active and engaged than some people like. It’s also more for school and district leaders than for physical school teachers—although we have had teachers attend and give DLAC great reviews. We want attendees to feel like they allocated their funds well!

  3. We are trying to improve every year, and our main avenue for improvement is listening to attendees. For example, we know that we were close to capacity in 2020, and some people felt that the rooms were too crowded. We have already lowered our attendance cap for 2021, and we are working on ways to mitigate crowding (which will be even more important if Covid-19 concerns persist or re-emerge.

Summary survey results

Detailed comments