Leading Schools in an iConnected world
A Program for the Senior Leadership Team of Schools/Networks
- Online on Zoom as a collection of eight (8) sessions of 90-120 minutes. Content spread over 8 weeks – 12 weeks on mutually agreed days, dates and times.
- Face-to-face as a two-day (2 days) program. Program sponsor needs to provide the venue, AV equipment, catering, and any printing and photocopying for the two days.
Session 1: Learning to Learn: Supported Critical Reflection
This session is an “intellectual warm-up” routine that uses Morgan’s popular constructs of organisational and personal metaphors, Borton’s “practice” model of critical reflection, and the timeless wisdom from Nichomachean ethics, and eastern philosophy to get you primed and ready for the learning to follow.
Session 2 : The iConnected World: Renaissance of Amateurism
In this session, participants are encouraged to connect deeply with the iConnected world in which their organisations and they find themselves. It is a very new, and very different world to the Industrial world it has supplanted in less than two decades. The iConnected world is awash with vibrant online communities, relational networks of connections, and digital weapons of mass collaboration. Participants understand the challenges and opportunities that this world brings with it and strategies for leveraging them for best advantage.
Session 3 : Extended Personality: The “Updating You”
This session weaves nature, nurture and the “conscious scribe” in an energising narrative. Your personality is the drawing-together of these three diverse, but related strands at three different levels of functioning. Together, they represent three echelons of sophistication in your understanding of, reaction to, and meaning-taking from your lived-experiences. They constitute your extended personality. This session also examines the just world fallacy, post-traumatic growth, learned helplessness, and learned optimism theories to demonstrate the link between adversity and your extended personality.
Session 4 : Personal Branding: The Authentic “You”
This session catalyses your conscious and strategic efforts at self-reflection. It helps you define your “unique value proposition” for your target audience, and the “brand persona” you wish to create for them. Once you have completed these tasks, sculpting your “personal brand statement” will not be as daunting as it sounds.
Session 5 : Finding and Using Signature Strengths: Unlocking a world of possibility
This session harks back to Nichomachean ethics. The Aristotelian view of Eudaimonia or the engaged life is also the foundation of positive psychology. It argues that wellbeing anchored in authenticity requires that you identify, revel in, celebrate, and frequently use your signature strengths in the wilful choice and pursuit of morally praiseworthy activities. The big, little question is, “what are your signature strengths?” It thereafter shows participants techniques to gain empowering insights on how best to leverage their signature strengths and the signature strengths of their colleagues to build outstanding work groups.
Session 6 : Calculus of Motivation: The Drive to Excel:
Excelling at work is about human agency and persistence in the face of formidable challenges. This session delves into the psychology of optimal experience using concepts like flow, vital engagement, and job crafting to make mindset and behavioural shifts to achieve happiness at work.
Session 7 : Insightful Inquiry: Multiple Loop Problem Solving
This session uses the power of Action Science to make participants more aware of their behaviours, assumptions, and decision-making processes. It uses key principles of Action Science, like for example, Multiple Loop Learning, Model 1 and Model 2 behaviours, and Ladders of Inference to help participants recognise and remedy sub-optimal problem solving both in themselves and in their organisations.
Session 8 : Recap of the program and team presentations
This session seeks to consolidate and manifest participants’ professional and personal growth during the program. Using the critical reflection processes honed during the program, participants distil the impact of its variegated content on “their ways of thinking and acting.” In keeping with the academy’s ethos of collaborative and strengths-based endeavour, participants work in creative and collegial groups, to create engaging and insightful “free form” expositions of their key learnings.
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