By Susan Waterhouse
Last week I attended the 100th Leadership Forum at Silver Bay. It was a great group of people, a mixture of educators, consultants in the area of leadership, and people with a variety of roles in industry – many in human resources and talent management.
There were some interesting talks on the future of work and a strong feeling that corporations need to partner with schools to help identify and support adjustments to educational systems to help prepare students for a continually changing landscape of work.
I hadn’t had a lot of time to read about the speakers before I signed up for the conference, so I was excited when I learned that among those speaking and networking at the conference, was Ken Montgomery the founder of Design Tech High on the campus of Oracle in California. Also, in visiting with the parent of a student that Ken Montgomery brought along, I met a Mandarin teacher from Nueva School. Around the edges of conversations with educators from North Carolina, New York, Indiana, South Carolina, and Vermont, we were talking about the benefits of building leadership into the culture of a school and about the role of grades vs. proficiency.
At both this conference and the one day workshop I went to in April, I was quite aware that we have been doing really good professional development around issues of race and diversity as a school, and I am becoming more able to lead related conversations in settings such as the one I found myself in last week. (I did some work with a small group talking about how to begin to create change in under-resourced schools through implementing leadership skills in curriculum. There were dynamics in my small group that made me extra grateful for the work we have been doing on microaggressions etc.) We aren’t done with this work, but when I go out into the world with people from other places, I am reminded of the long way we have come.
So, In addition to getting access to some interesting leadership tools for workshops and working with kids at school, finding out about great STEM videos that help showcase a variety of voices and talents, and thinking through my own style with the support of executive coaches etc, I got to think a lot about design thinking, creative problem solving, and what models of education might look like in the coming decades.
In A Class Of Our Own 