Contact cct@umb.edu for more information. RSVP here to received the link to access the event in Zoom, and then wait to be admitted by the host when you join.
General Overview:
These dialogues are free and open to the public. Reflective Practice is relevant to any field — education, health care, organizational leadership, arts, and sciences, activism and many others. It refers to ways that we continually develop or change the practices that we use in their workplaces, schools, and lives. Through reflection, we examine our experiences and seek to understand how they can guide us to make those changes. In this series of participatory dialogues, we’ll explore together how we might then relate our individual practices to the bigger picture — the changing world around us. The sessions use a structured Dialogue Process format, a type of group discussion that emphasizes listening well, sharing thoughts-in-progress, and raising questions. The goal is that learning emerges directly from shared contributions of diverse participants, rather than through presentation or lecture, and that participants leave with new ideas around how their own practices can evolve.
Full Descriptions of Theme: Reflective Practice for Building Schools that Learn
It was twenty years ago that Peter Senge and his colleagues described “schools that learn” in their first release of the book of that same name, a work grounded in Senge’s foundational work around the Fifth Discipline. The book extended this work to the environment of the school by offering the idea that a school, as an institution of learning, is not necessarily and automatically a learning organization. In order for this to be the case, a school needs everyone involved — teachers, students, administrators, and others in the community — in fostering both long-term educational performance and aspirations and capacities of the individuals across the system (Senge et al., 2012, p. 5-6).
The school, as a system, needs to engage in collective actions and visions to learn together and look at its capacity as a whole. A question then is, how far have we come in pursuing this kind of vision? What are the qualities of our schools that open up their potential as learning organizations? How do schools represent places for action as well as learning? How do schools manage change that is needed to be responsive to current events and crises? How do schools increase participation in collective learning? And where do these possibilities still fall short?
In this dialogue, we start here and explore connections between our personal experiences in schools, what we see happening now, and what we want to continue to develop in achieving schools that learn.
Optional Pre-reading:
