DESCRIPTION
Collaboration among faculty and staff is a key driver for increasing teacher growth and the overall quality of teaching and learning in our schools, and yet deeply collaborative adult cultures are rarer than we would like in independent schools. For the past several years, with support from the McDonogh School and the E.E. Ford Foundation, a design team led by the Folio Collaborative has investigated how to help schools foster faculty collaboration, conducting fact-finding visits to a set of highly-collaborative schools, non-profits, and for-profit companies. Synthesis of this research yielded a school leadership framework and accompanying whitepaper -- The Building Blocks of Transformational Teamwork -- which provides guidance to help schools become more collaborative workplaces. This course will guide participants as they learn about key elements of collaborative cultures, assess the strengths and growth areas of their own school cultures when it comes to collaboration, and acquire a set of strategies and tactics they can use to improve adult collaboration in their schools.
By the end of the course, participants will:
- Take a deep dive into the Building Blocks of Transformational Teamwork framework for fostering adult collaboration in schools, building a vocabulary and set of leadership tactics around adult collaboration
- Reflect upon their school’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of the collaboration framework and identify critical areas for improvement
- Explore tactics for improving adult collaboration in their schools’ identified areas of need, and create a plan for next steps
COURSE FORMAT
This is a two-week online course, which will take about four hours to complete per unit. The weeks/units of this course are asynchronous, but class-paced. There is no fixed time for participation, but assignments are due each week. Throughout the course, participants will connect and collaborate with each other through interactive media, including short videos and discussion boards. Participants will have access to the course and materials for one additional week beyond the posted end date.
TUITION
$355 for One Schoolhouse consortium school or Folio member school participants; $495 for all other participants. Use the link above to register.