Sept 20, Nov 14, Jan 9, Mar 20, Apr 23
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Sept 30-Oct 1, Dec 4, Feb 12, Apr 23
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Oct 2, Nov 8, Feb 12, Mar 12, Apr 25
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Oct 3, Dec 6, Feb 6, Apr 24
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Oct 15, Nov 14, Jan 16, Mar 19
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Oct 16, Dec 4, Feb 7, Mar 19
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Oct 17, Dec 5, Feb 12, Apr 17
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Oct 18, Dec 12, Feb 22, Apr 11
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Oct 22, Dec 3, Jan 15, Mar 12
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Oct 25-26, Dec 7, Feb 8, Apr 12
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Nov 2, Dec 5, Jan 17, Mar 12
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Nov 16, Feb 5, Mar 8, May 3
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1) If your school isn't already a member, encourage them to join
here
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2) Register for our upcoming events, and keep an eye out for our spring schedule of workshops. 3) Get in touch and let us know what kind of professional learning opportunities you're looking for. 4) Have expertise to share? Contact us about writing a blog post or leading a workshop. 5) Join our mailing list to stay up to date on all our future workshops and events. |
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A message from the
Executive Director,
LISA HANEY
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Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
September! When our schools are up and running, and the year stretches out before us, full of possibility. Even in California, the subtle change in the light and the turning of at least some leaves brings the promise of a new season. Still, we are buffeted by news of natural calamities and the ongoing repercussions of man-made disasters. Life feels very precious indeed.
Temporal landmarks such as the the beginning of the school year invite us to "strive with enhanced fervor to achieve our aspirations," as Daniel Pink reminds us in his latest book,
When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. This is a good time for us as educators to align ourselves once again with our most deeply held values, set intentions, and make a thoughtful plan on how to achieve our own learning goals.
The articles in this month's
Buzz offer ways to make the very most of the time we have with the young people and adults in our school communities and beyond: encouraging us to both expand our scope of what is possible, and get to the hard work of making it real.
Liza Raynal, Middle School Division Head at The Nueva School, writes powerfully in
Educating As If We Are Already There about supporting our students to draft their own "clear and brilliant blueprints" for lives full of meaning and purpose.
When it comes to changing school cultures, perhaps no CATDC facilitator has been as impactful as David Barkan, whose Mastering Group Facilitation workshops have empowered hundreds of educators to facilitate effective and inclusive decision-making processes. We are delighted to share this piece from
The New York Times,
Can Ultimate Frisbee Save the World?, about his organization
Ultimate Peace and the work that he does to build relationships between Israeli and Palestinian youth.
Opportunities abound with the CATDC this year, and certainly time is of the essence. Our ongoing groups are filling up fast, and there are a greater than ever variety of intensives to choose from. So, take out your calendars and check out the
website
. We hope the CATDC will be part of the plan you make for your own rich and rewarding year of learning.
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Educating As If We Are Already There
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By Liza Raynal, The Nueva School
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"I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life's blueprint?"
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked this
of Philadelphia's Barratt Junior High students in 1967. When I
read his speech
at the King Center in Atlanta this July, it pulled me back into school mode because Dr. King's question is ours. As a PreK-12 school, we are responsible for 14 years or 17,640 on-campus hours of a child's education. How we spend that time informs a life blueprint for all future building. If Malcolm Gladwell is right and 10,000 hours makes an expert, each child puts in 7,640 extra hours. Our students can almost get a double major.
What are they becoming experts in?
On the first day of school we asked students a question similar to Dr. King's, not to draw a blueprint for their lives, but to make a golden record to convey the values of our school community. Have you heard of
NASA's Golden Records
? Before they launched the Voyager mission, Carl Sagan had an idea: outfit these deep space probes with a calling card about our planet. On each Voyager probe he placed a literal golden record to explain humanity. If an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization encounters these spacecrafts, they will receive a message from Sagan's team. On the front of the records he engraved images about earth: a hydrogen atom, our location in the universe, and
instructions, in binary, for how to play the
"murmurs of the earth" audio
held in the record's grooves.
Fun fact: the Golden Records were made in San Carlos, California, and are now the furthest-from-earth human-made object ever to be in space, past the boundaries of our solar system.
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Breaking Down Barriers and Building Relationships: Four Strategies for Schools
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By Lori Cohen, The Bay School of San Francisco
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Much of the work we do as school leaders is build relationships. While our main charges are to supervise, support, and coach teachers at our school sites, I also imagine we get work across different types of teams-teams of senior leaders and administrative staff, collaborating on a range of projects and learning activities that cut across segments of school life. Regardless of role, all adults in a school want to feel like they are valued for what they do, that they have something to offer, and that they are seen both in their work roles and as human beings. And in our school sites, we need to make intentional space for deepening relationships.
So what would it look like if schools took the time to break down the barriers of job description and title in service of deepening trust and nurturing healthy school cultures?
Read online...
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From Feel Good to Real Good
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By Kathleen Kelly Janus, Stanford Social Innovation Review
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If there is one trend that sums up the next generation, it is that they want to make a difference in the world. For example, 66 percent of teens
say they want their jobs
to impact the world, and 26 percent of 16- to 19-year-olds are already volunteering. But despite caring more than ever before, so many young people remain ill-equipped to effectively do anything about the problems they see.
A couple of years ago, a junior at Stanford University was getting ready for the campus pitch competition when she approached me about her idea. She wanted to launch a nonprofit to help people in the slums of Cape Town. When I asked her how often she goes to South Africa, she responded, "Oh, I've never been, but I hope to go one day!" She had developed a solution without doing the work to gain a deep understanding of the problem. And she's not alone.
Last fall, when the Northern California fires ravaged my hometown of Napa, California, thousands of well-meaning Bay Area residents wanted to help, but their efforts were often misguided.
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Can Ultimate Frisbee Save the World?
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By Jennifer Finney Boylan, The New York Times
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They'd gathered for supper one night in July, at the summer camp at the Kfar Silver school, in Ashkelon, Israel. For the last couple of weeks this group of kids - some from Israel, some from Palestine - had been trying to learn something about conflict resolution, by playing Ultimate Frisbee. Some of them had become friends.
That was when the air raid siren went off.
The rockets came from Gaza, part of the ongoing clash between Hamas and the Israel Defense Forces. The missiles didn't land in Ashkelon. But they did score a direct hit on the hopes of some of the people who had looked to the camp as an oasis of peace.
"Well, we're not trying to bring peace to the Middle East," said David Barkan, who volunteers as the chief executive of Ultimate Peace, which sponsored the camp. "That's not the goal. It's about changing a mind-set through the values of the sport that we know leads to peace between people."
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