Adaptive Schools Seminar
Workshop Details
WHEN: Thursday, 12 to Sunday, 15 March 2015 (8:00am - 3:30pm)
WHERE: ISKL Melawati Campus - Community Room
FEES: USD900
FOCUS: Schoolwide
Workshop Overview
In this Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar 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.
Participants will learn practical frameworks and tools for developing collaborative groups that bring collective responsibility in student learning. Leaders and group members will learn 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. Working in a variety of settings, skilled and confident facilitators will increase their ability to accelerate group development.
This workshop is specially designed to support site administrators, teachers, district and agency personnel and staff developers who convene and manage work teams, site councils, shared decision making groups and faculty committees.
Learning Outcomes
• 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
• Strategies for keeping group members on track, on topic, energized and resourceful
Michael Dolcemascolo
Michael Dolcemascolo is Executive Co-Director of Thinking Collaborative, the home of the Adaptive Schools Seminars and the Cognitive Coaching Seminars®. He is the former Co-Director of the Center for Adaptive Schools. An independent consultant, Michael regularly presents workshops to educators on Cognitive CoachingSM, Adaptive Schools, learning styles, presentation skills and many other topics to urban, suburban, and rural schools.
Michael delightfully spends much of his energy mentoring coaches and facilitators who wish to become agency trainers for their systems, and also regularly facilitates groups that are planning, problem-resolving, and engaging in change.
Michael is co-author with Robert Garmston of The Focusing Four: A Consensus Seeking Activity DVD Viewers Guide and Dialogue DVD Viewers Guide, Center for Adaptive Schools, 2009. With Carolyn McKanders, Michael has co-authored the Developing Collaborative Groups CD Study Guide, and co-edited the Adaptive Schools Foundation Workshop Learning Guide, 2012. His article, Supporting the “Whole Teacher”: Five Resourceful States of Mind, appeared in the March, 2013 NYSASCD Impact Journal. An interview with Michael is featured in the Fall, 2013 School Administrators Association of New York State journal, Vanguard.
A former English teacher, Michael taught at all levels from Kindergarten through grade 12, and became a professional development specialist for 20 years. He served as Assistant Director of Staff Development at the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison Board of Cooperative Educational Services, providing professional training and facilitation to the 23 school districts surrounding the city of Syracuse in Central New York.
Michael holds BA degrees in Religious Studies and in English from Montclair State University, an MA in Cultural Symbol Systems from Syracuse University’s Department of Religion and a CAS in Educational Administration from the State University of New York, Cortland.
