Arrival at Sugarloaf,
registration, settle into rooms, meet other participants, start conversations.
12:00 noon
Lunch.
1:30 p.m.
Opening Session: A
Close Look at How It's Going and What It's Like for Me: Sharing experiences,
reflections, discoveries, how-we-got-here, problems, resolutions, joys,
memories, convictions, hopes. An exploratory opening session with the
participants and David Mallery.
5:00 p.m.
Social hour.
5:30 p.m.
Dinner.
7:00 p.m.
Screening of feature film:
The Search for Bobby Fischer (1993). A provocative, evocative
film about a genius kid, and chess is the area of his genius. There is
fascinating stuff about his teachers, official and unofficial, his parents,
his friends, his competitors, and about the whole issue of competition
among hugely talented persons and those who love them, hang around them,
promote them, exploit them. In the midst of it all is a delightful kid,
charmed and delighted by his talent, suddenly caught up in a whirlwind
of excitement and hysteria that puzzles and dismays him. His ways of dealing
with all this, and the education of his parents, his chess teacher,
his street-wise, sought-out chess coach, are played out with real perception,
astuteness and freedom from the usual stereotyping.
10:00 p.m.
Evening is adjourned
Thursday,
February 5, 2004
7:00 a.m.
Breakfast.
8:45 a.m.
To Lead or Not to Lead? and, With the Heart or the Head? School
leadership has almost always been a complex, ambivalent role, and never
more than now, a time when effective leadership has never been more
crucial, but when turnover among administrators is accelerating. For
most who are in administrative roles and who consider going higher up,
there are two questions: Can I do it? and, Is It Worth It? This sessions
will examine five key dilemmas all leaders face and will outline an
approach to leading that draws on one's native strengths rather than
on a list of techniques. It will help participants identify their own
core commitments and ways to use these both in their current role or
in other roles they may assume.
--Robert Evans and the Seminar Participants.
12:00 noon.
Lunch.
1:15 p.m.
Strategy building Session: Development of a specific plan for carrying
out back at school: each participant chooses a plan, question, program,
curriculum move, counseling effort, organizational change, personal
life-planning design, to work on alone, uninterrupted, for a half hour.
In that half hour, each person lists actual steps, strategies, next
moves, which seem appropriate and promising to bring the plan or way-of-proceeding
into action. Then the group reassembles, and we go into conversation
teams of four people. In these sessions, each member has fifteen minutes
to be "on," to explain the situation, proposal, plan, to the
other three colleagues, to be heard out, to get a sympathetic ear, to
receive questions, suggestions, ideas, helpful encouragement, so that
at the end of the fifteen minutes, the person has a longer list of possible
strategies than the list he or she started with at the beginning of
the fifteen minutes. Then the next person in the foursome is "on,"
then the next, then the next... The conversation groups can not only
be useful to the four members but can, over the coming weeks and months,
provide, by mail, phone and possible visits, ongoing support, planning,
sharing what may be of real value.
--David Mallery and the Seminar Participants.
4:00 p.m.
End of Session. Free Time.
6:00 p.m.
Social Hour.
6:30 p.m.
Dinner.
7:30 p.m.
Wrestling with Angels: The struggles we have, seen as messages
about what we really need to be doing...Our own talents, characteristics,
strengths, styles, stories...Ways people gravitate to each other, or
spin off from each other, in a community...What "opposite"
people can teach us... Finding, listening to our own best wisdom.
--The Rev. Paula Lawrence Wehmiller
11:00 p.m.
Evening is adjourned (note
late adjournment for Thursday evening)
Friday,
February 6, 2004
7:30 a.m.
Breakfast.
8:30 a.m.
The Administrator
in Action as Problem-Solver: A look at people-problems in schools,
and ways the administrator can be helpful, being a bridge, a negotiator,
a bringer-together, a "furtherer" in making relationships work
better: student-student, student-teacher, teacher-teacher, teacher-administrator,
faculty-parents, faculty-trustee, everybody-head of school. The focus
will be on enactments, actual situations, challenges, encounters between
persons in a school, examples provided by the participants and worked
on together.
10:45 a.m.
Coffee Break.
11:00 a.m.
We gather for the final session: a look at resolves, hopes,
a vision of the career, the journey, the view of the past, the present,
the future, and a gearing up for Monday and Tuesday...
--The participants and David Mallery
12:00 noon
Adjournment.
Lunch available for those wishing it.
Place:
Sugarloaf Conference Center, 9230 Germantown Ave.,
Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, PA 19118.
Cost to the School:
$995.00 for overnight participants. $895.00 for day
only participants.
