The training not only explores what makes teams effective, but how to develop skills as facilitators and informed group members in informal and formal settings, in small and large groups. It takes participants beyond the idea of professional learning communities to the actual implementation, describing specific ways to weave the collaborative fabric of a faculty, develop group member skills, and acquire the principles and understandings to engage in a continuous cycle of team and individual improvement. Adaptive Schools is the “how” of professional learning communities: how to behave in groups, how to lead them, and how to facilitate them for improved leading, teaching, and learning.

In the four-day Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar, participants will 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

• Strategies for keeping group members on track, on topic, energized and resourceful