Brendan O'Day has been a teacher for over 20 years, dedicated to using innovative and experiential approaches to instruction that move lessons-learned to knowledge-applied.

His clients include national non-profit organizations like City Year and New Leaders for New Schools; statewide organizations like the Massachusetts Audubon Society and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents; and local community organizations like the Lower Roxbury Coalition and Quincy Asian Resources Center. He has taught at Dartmouth College where he offered courses on adaptive leadership in the context of education policy, and worked with emerging leaders in the Rockefeller Center's Leadership Fellows program.

As a doctoral candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Education his research explored the market effects of charter schools, and he served for three terms as a member of Ronald Heifetz's Adaptive Leadership teaching team at the Kennedy School of Government. Before entering Harvard, Brendan taught in a small independent high school in Maine, and won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at a large urban middle school in Paris, France.

He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his wife and four children, and sits on the Board of the Arlington Education Foundation.

Samantha Tan is a teacher, host and speaker committed to facilitating courageous conversations that make a profound difference in work and life. Samantha designs and facilitates local, national and international gatherings, with a focus on intergenerational and intercultural dialogue. Her clients have included Buddhist monks and nuns of the Dharma Drum Monastery in Taiwan and New York, line employees and executives of the Nokia Corporation in Singapore and Beijing, and US Girl Scouts ages 12 to 70 at their 51st national convention.

Samantha's first career was in strategy and policy development with the Singapore government where she worked on national reform projects in the manpower, arts and education sectors. She has trained and worked extensively with Ronald Heifetz at Harvard University, first as a member of his teaching team and then as a Research Fellow for the Urban Superintendents Leadership Program, supported by the Wallace Funds.

Samantha is a Global Steward of the World Café and is a chapter contributor to The World Cafe: Shaping the Future Through Conversations That Matter (Berrett-Koehler 2005) where she wrote about creating a learning culture in Singapore. Samantha lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Noe Medina possesses more than 20 years experience in designing and conducting formative and summative evaluations on a wide range of education issues. He has focused on projects designed to improve student achievement; reduce at-risk behaviors among adolescents and youth; address skill and learning needs of educational administrators, faculty, and school staff; and restructure the operation of schools. These projects have ranged in scope from those involving only a single school to those involving multiple school systems in several countries.

In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Medina also served as the Director of Field Services for the Education Alliance at Brown University from 1998 to 2000 and as the Director of Program Development and Assessment for the Cambridge (MA) Public Schools from 1990 to 1995. In both positions, Mr. Medina was responsible for the development and assessment of innovative education projects. Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Mr. Medina served as the Director of the Education Division for the Children's Defense Fund in Washington D.C and as a Legislative Aide to the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and lives in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.