Entering the Principalship: Responsibilities and Challenges for New Leaders
The 2012 Colloquium will be our sixteenth and promises to be our best ever! Join us for four and one-half days developing the theme of Leadership in a Professional Learning Community. Whether you are new to PLC work, or well-educated and experienced you will find much in the Colloquium to meet your needs. If you attended last year as an aspiring or new principal, come on back this year! You will find that there is a good deal of new content and an increase in participant engagement experiences and more direct transfer to leadership at your site.
ANTHONY MUHAMMAD will set the tone. Many have heard him before, but you haven’t heard this presentation. Anthony has developed new content focused on leadership needed to develop a true trusting, collaborative culture that serves as the foundation of a professional learning community. Clearly PLC can’t be effectively mandated. While structures and schedules can be put in place, the traditional school, staffed by independent operators, doesn’t magically transform itself into an open, sharing, collaborative culture driven by a sense of collective efficacy. Anthony will provide you with some invaluable tools and resources to help you to develop those professional relationships so essential to making collaboration work.
Sid Morrison will set the scene for Anthony Muhammad during Tuesday’s afternoon/evening, focusing on both examining your core beliefs and values
as a leader and upon developing a comfortable familiarity with the other participants.
Following Muhammad’s presentation on Wednesday morning, participants will choose from among several workshops designed to provide new and aspiring site leaders with the practical skills and tools they need to lead a collaborative community. Also offered for “aspiring” principals is the ever popular session with local HR assistant superintendents on resume writing and interviewing. In the evening, we invite participants to relax and enjoy a number of effective video clips and activities designed to motivate, inspire, and support staff resiliency. Take home easy to use protocols to use these resources on your own site.
Thursday morning’s session with Frances Gipson provides an introduction to Adaptive Schools work in building professional collaboration skills in staff and facilitation skills in meeting leadership and decision making. The afternoon embeds teams of participants in applying Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the principles and practices in collaboration learned in the morning to move a rather unfocused and disjointed staff forward.
Friday morning ever popular Pam Robbins invites us to examine and apply research-based and practical real-life strategies to transform boring one-dimensional faculty and grade level meetings into engaging deep-learning opportunities. In the afternoon, Edwin Javius addresses closing the achievement gap through leadership of culturally responsive schools, which we guarantee to be entertaining and thought-provoking. Participants leave with a clear view of equity and strategies to begin to move a school toward practices and cultures that move all toward success.
Saturday morning closes with an inspiring motivational message from Jeff Eban about believing in your leadership and a reminder to focus on the positive and to celebrate the “wins” that exist on every campus.
The New & Aspiring Colloquium isn’t “sit and get” professional development or a disconnected collection of PD experiences. Our presenters thoughtfully plant the seeds of skills, strategies, and resources designed to meet the needs of a successful leader of a collaborative community, then, in small groups, led by skilled and experienced facilitators, participants get an opportunity to grow their new found knowledge through informal exchanges that question, adapt, contextualize, share, and apply new leadership capacity.
Participants are engaged all day, then, are able to enjoy well deserved “nights off” in on Wednesday and Thursday evenings in nearby Westwood. On Friday night, we have our traditional barbeque. Every evening, participants are invited to network with others from around the state in relaxing social gatherings.
Each year we have learned from participants who help us determine just the right blend of outstanding visionary presenters, in-depth processing time in small groups, individual processing/reflection/planning time, nuts & bolts leadership skills, and networking time with new and aspiring educational leaders from all over California. Our participants are quite diverse---rural, suburban, and urban; large and small school; high achieving and struggling; high wealth and low wealth; elementary, middle, and secondary--- so we have taken great care in choosing presenters and designing group experiences to ensure that you come away with your leadership needs fulfilled.
Participants come away with
• Clear set of individual core values to frame and drive their leadership
• New knowledge to inform their leadership
• A set of priorities for implementation at their school site
• A network of new leaders to call upon for advice, resources, and support
2012 Faculty:
• Jeff Eben
• Francis Gipson
• Edwin Javius
• Sid Morrison
• Anthony Muhammad
• Pam Robbins
Registration & Admission
To guarantee a spot in the program registration forms and complete payment must be received by July 5, 2012.