For schools to effectively respond to the press for accountability and provide quality learning for all students, they must simultaneously address two perennial goals. One goal is the professional development of individual educators. The second is the development of the organization’s capacity to learn and be adaptive; both build the capacity for schools improvement, without which reform efforts will fail. In this 4-day workshop, learn how to build strong collaborative and caring work cultures, in which results-oriented faculties work together for continuous school improvement. Explore the latest practical findings in organizational development, team learning and navigating the currents of change.
You will learn practical frameworks and tools for developing collaborative groups that bring collective responsibility in student learning, ways to influence and attain more productive and satisfying meetings in which members develop new norms and skills for collegial interaction, goal clarification, problem-solving and decision-making. You will also develop: an increased capacity to initiate, develop and sustain high functioning groups; new lenses for diagnosing the stages and phases of group development, an expanded repertoire of practical facilitation tools, understandings of when and how to engage groups in dialogue and discussion, the limitations, forms and values of each, skills to move groups beyond consensus to common focus, ways to value and use dissension, argument and conflict, and strategies for keeping group members on track, on topic energized and resourceful.
http://www.thinkingcollaborative.com/register?id=1719