InterContinental Hotel - Athens, Greece
Full Bio
LAURA LIPTON, EdD, is Co-Director of MiraVia, LLC, a publishing and professional development agency that puts theory into practice. She is an international consultant whose writing, research, keynotes, and seminars focus on effective and innovative instructional practices and on building professional and organizational capacities for enhanced learning.
Dr Lipton engages with school districts, public and independent schools, departments of education and international agencies designing and conducting workshops on organizational and group development, learning-focused instruction, literacy development and growth-oriented supervisory practices.
She applies her extensive experience with professional learning to workshops and seminars conducted globally on topics including learning-focused relationships, data-driven dialogue, teacher leadership, building professional community, developing high-performing teams, action research, and learning-focused mentoring.
Dr Lipton is author and co-author of numerous publications related to organizational and professional development. Her most recent publications (with Bruce Wellman) include: Mentoring Matters: A Practical Guide to Learning-focused Relationships, Data-driven Dialogue: A Facilitator's Guide to Collaborative Inquiry, Groups at Work: Strategies and Structures for Professional Learning, and Learning-focused Supervision: Developing Professional Expertise in Standards-driven Systems.
Lynn Sawyer
Professional Development Associate, MiraVia, LLC.
Full Bio
LYNN SAWYER is an international educational consultant, presenting workshops and seminars on learning-focused conversations for mentoring and supervision, facilitating collaborative groups, and data-driven dialogue.
In her 30 years as an educator, Ms Sawyer has been a high school teacher, curriculum specialist, and professional developer. As an administrator of a regional professional development agency, she trained a staff of professional development providers and conducted workshops and seminars.
She led a district wide implementation of a teacher evaluation system based on A Framework for Teaching (Danielson, 2007 and 2013), focusing on a coaching model to support teacher self-directedness. She has led many districts across the U.S. in creating learning-focused supervision models.
Ms Sawyer also facilitates groups in reaching consensus, and strategic planning. She consults with international schools in Europe and the Middle East, as well as Canada, and is also affiliated with Thinking Collaborative.
She wrote the chapter, "Integrating Cognitive Coaching with a Framework for Teaching," in Cognitive Coaching: Weaving Threads of Learning and Change into the Culture of an Organization (Christopher-Gordon).
4-Hour Workshop #1: Fri, March 30
Collaborative Inquiry into Data: Learning from Student Work
Data can distract or direct. Skillfully using data to focus attention and energy keeps interactions learning-focused and student-centered. When teams employ clear structures and well-designed protocols to guide and facilitate their conversations, they overcome the potential for denial, dismissal and defensiveness.
This interactive session introduces the Collaborative Learning Cycle, a three-phase framework that helps groups discover assumptions, motivates data-focused inquiry, and develops shared understandings of both problems and possible solutions to increase confidence and success in working with data and one another.
Data as feedback illuminates choices that are effective from those that are not. This session links data explorations of student work to positive learning outcomes, developing shared ownership of important questions and collaborative answers that make formative and summative assessments meaningful and applicable to improving program and classroom practices. Opportunities for connections to present work, considering specific applications, and establishing next steps for future success will be provided.
Outcomes: Participants will. . .
- Learn practical structures for using data to focus a group's attention and energy.
- Apply a three-phase model for guiding data-driven collaborative inquiry.
- Enhance skills for designing and structuring sessions that build group skills while getting the work done.
Target Audience: Team leaders, department chairs, building administrators at all levels
Continuum Levels: 3, 4
NESA's Learning Continuum:
4-Hour Workshop #2: Sun, April 1
Putting Data at the Center: Structures and Strategies for High-Performing Teams
A group is not a static thing. Teams develop, shaped by their continued shared experiences and the processing of these experiences. The resulting growth in skills and behaviors influences the beliefs and assumptions that ultimately become the new operating norms. This interactive session will address the importance of using data to focus collective action, moving groups from being involved to being engaged.
Structured interactions maximize productivity in a minimum amount of time. Participants will explore The Collaborative Learning Cycle, a three-phase framework for guiding productive collective inquiry. We will illuminate the challenges of collaborative decision making and offer tools to support individuals and groups to construct meaning as they interact with data and one another. Join us to develop strategies for interpreting, analyzing, and applying data to the work of school improvement and design engaging data explorations with both quantitative and qualitative data.
Learn how to frame data-based inquiries that help teams do the following: activate prior knowledge by surfacing predictions and underlying assumptions before examining data sets; explore and discover patterns, trends, and surprises in data displays; and organize and integrate learning by developing theories of causation and theories of action as platforms for thoughtful school improvement planning.
Outcomes: Participants will. . .
- Learn practical structures and strategies for developing high-performing data teams.
- Consider four blocks to collaborative data-based decision making and methods to overcome them.
- Refine and enhance their personal toolkit for facilitating productive group learning, planning, and problem solving.
Target Audience: Team leaders, department chairs, building administrators at all levels.
Continuum Levels: 3, 4
NESA's Learning Continuum:
Learn more about how NESA plans Professional Learning
Handouts
Save paper and effort where possible!
For your convenience, and to support our efforts in being "green", all handouts/files posted here have been notated with an A, B, C or D indicating the following:
(A) hardcopies needed at workshop
(B) electronic version on laptop is sufficient (for viewing during the workshop)
(C) required reading PRIOR to the workshop
(D) file not needed for workshop itself, but simply material of additional interest/reference
4-Hour Workshop #1: Fri, March 30
(A) Collaborative Inquiry Into Data