Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminars

Programme Overview

The Adaptive Schools Seminars present a productive, practical set of ideas and tools for developing collaborative groups in becoming effective and better equipped to resolve complex issues around student learning. The work of the Adaptive Schools Seminars is to develop the resources and capacities of the organisation and of individuals to cohesively respond to the changing needs of students and society.

The training not only explores what makes teams effective, but how to develop skills as facilitators and informed group members in informal and formal settings, in small and large groups. It takes participants beyond the idea of professional learning communities to the actual implementation, describing specific ways to weave the collaborative fabric of a faculty, develop group member skills, and acquire the principles and understandings to engage in a continuous cycle of team and individual improvement. Adaptive Schools is the “how” of professional learning communities: how to behave in groups, how to lead them, and how to facilitate them for improved leading, teaching, and learning.

Participant Learning Outcomes

In the four-day Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar, participants will develop:

• An increased capacity to initiate, develop and sustain high functioning groups
• New lenses for diagnosing the stages and phases of group development
• An expanded repertoire of practical facilitation tools
• Understandings of when and how to engage groups in dialogue and discussion, the limitations, forms and values of each
• Skills to move groups beyond consensus to common focus
• Ways to value and use dissension, argument and conflict
• Strategies for keeping group members on track, on topic, energized and resourceful.

Ochan Kusuma Powell

Ochan Kusuma Powell is an international educator and consultant to schools around the world. She presents in the areas of coaching, special education, inclusion and collaboration. She is a founding member of the Design Team for the Next Frontier Inclusion, a not-for-profit organisation that supports international schools in becoming increasingly inclusive at a systems level.

Ochan taught for 25 years in international schools, in both regular and special education. She has taught across all levels of school and is co-author of several books: on personalising instruction, developing inclusive schools, organisational intelligence, emotional intelligence and teacher self-supervision.