Saturday July 12

How can Institute teams go beyond current limits?

Lew Smith is the founder and director of the National Principals Leadership Institute and Panasonic National School Change Awards. He served as a NYC high school principal, executive director of a multi-social service agency, and associate professor and associate dean at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Education. Lew has worked with school districts throughout the United States & Canada, including Antioch, CA; Milwaukee, WI; Newark, NJ; New York City; San Francisco, CA; and Winnipeg, Canada. Corwin Press has recently published Smith’s new book, Schools that Change: Evidence-Based Improvement and Effective Change Leadership.

Rudolph F. Crew, Ed.D. is superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s fourth-largest school district. Dr. Crew has served as an administrator, a teacher, a college professor, and coordinator of special programs and staff development in Boston, Sacramento, and Washington State. As Chancellor of New York City Public Schools, Rudy led a number of reforms, including adoption of curriculum standards for all schools, elimination of tenure for principals, and school-based budgeting. Rudy’s new book Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools reflects his philosophy, programs, and priorities.

Margaret Wheatley is President Emeritus of The Berkana Institute. She was a public school teacher and administrator in New York and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea. Since 1973, Meg has been working with an unusually broad variety of organizations on all continents including large corporations, government agencies, foundations, public schools, colleges, major church denominations, and the armed forces. All of these organizations are wrestling with a common dilemma—how to maintain their integrity and effectiveness in these chaotic times. Margaret’s books include Leadership and the New Science, which has been translated into 20 languages and produced as an award winning film; A Simpler Way; and Finding Our Way: Leadership for An Uncertain Time.

Reactor - Dr. Cozette Buckney is CEO of the Institute for Education Services and Academic Achieve--ment (IESAA), which provides
assistance in marketing, technology, -and operations management. Cozette worked in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), as a teacher, principal, district administrator, and the Chief Academic Officer. She has been a consultant to school districts in Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.

Reactor - Carmen Valera Russo has served in district-level leadership positions in New York City, Broward County, Florida, and Baltimore City. While in Baltimore, Carmen established the CEO’s District to transform the lowest performing schools, created Digital Harbor Technology HS, and transformed Paul Lawrence Dunbar HS into a modern health and medical career center. Currently, she is a consultant, specializing in organizational restructuring, strategic planning, and research based whole school reform.

Sunday July 13

How can changing the way we look at community help us re-imagine schools?

Pedro Noguera is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University and the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education. An urban sociologist, Noguera’s scholarship and research focus on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment.
Pedro has served as an advisor and engaged in collaborative research with several large urban school districts. He has been a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the University of California, Berkeley. While a member of Berkeley’s faculty, Noguera remained active in public schools by serving as President of the Berkeley Board of Education and teaching an American history course in Berkeley schools. He is the author of City Schools and the American Dream.

Arlene Ackerman has been appointed CEO of the Philadelphia Public Schools. She served as Superintendent in Residence at the Broad Foundation and Professor of Practice at Teachers College, Columbia University. During her tenure as Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, schools experienced a sharp increase in student achievement, a set of “Dream Schools” was created, and an in-district Aspiring Principals program was designed. Previously, Arlene was Superintendent of the Washington DC Public Schools.

Monday July 14

How can mind mapping help us re-imagine?

Michael J. Gelb is a leading authority on the application of genius thinking to personal and organizational development. He is a pioneer in the fields of creative thinking, accelerated learning, and innovative leadership and serves as a seminar leader and organizational consultant. A former professional juggler who once performed with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, Gelb introduced the idea of teaching juggling as a means to promote accelerated learning and team building. Gelb has authored numerous best-sellers including How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, which has been translated into 25 languages.

Panasonic National School Change Awards Ceremony

This is the only award of its type in the nation because it recognizes and rewards significant school change. Between 2000 and 2007 there were 601 nominations from nearly every state in the union. The United States Department of Education joins us in conducting The Panasonic National School Change Awards ceremony in New York City each July. At that time, we salute the 24 finalists and six winners.

Awards Presenters

Marilyn M. Joseph is Director, Corporate Outreach Programs, Panasonic Corporation of North America, responsible for the management and implementation of Panasonic’s annual corporate giving efforts throughout North America. In her previous position as Director, Recruiting and Corporate Outreach Programs, she was responsible for the corporations’ national recruiting efforts with specific emphasis on the recruitment and retention of minorities and women.

Raymond Simon is the United States Deputy Secretary of Education. In this position, he plays a pivotal role overseeing and managing the development of policies, recommendations, and initiatives. Previously, Simon was the Chief State School Officer for Arkansas and served as a high school mathematics teacher, school and district administrator, and superintendent.

Dr. Larry Leverett is the Executive Director of the Panasonic Foundation, a corporate foundation with a mission to help public school systems with high percentages of children in poverty to improve learning for all students. Larry has been superintendent in Englewood, NJ, Plainfield, NJ and Greenwich, CT and has served as an Assistant State Commissioner of Education. Leverett serves on advisory committees for the George Lucas Educational Foundation and Educators for Social Responsibility.

Juan A. Fonseca has been a teacher of science, counselor for out of school/out of work youth, assistant principal, middle school principal, and Deputy Superintendent of Instruction. Juan served as core faculty and director of the National Principal Leadership Academy at the University of Delaware. Currently, he is a consultant and Deputy Director of the National Principals Leadership Institute and the Panasonic National School Change Awards.

Keynoter

Consuelo Castillo Kickbusch rose to senior officer rank in the United States Army and became the highest-ranking Hispanic woman in the Combat Support Field. Although on track for general officer rank, Lt. Col. Kickbusch, a twenty-year veteran, retired to found Educational Achievement Serv-ices. As a motivational speaker, Consuelo concentrates on school reform issues. She is the author of Journey to the Future, published in 2007.

Tuesday July 15

Expeditionary Learning

How do other organizations revisit their vision?

Unique to the National Principals Leadership Institute is a full day devoted to Expeditionary Learning. All institute participants spend a day at a successful organization that has made a commitment to leadership training and developing change agents. These organizations - corporations, hospitals, the military, and non-profits - have re-imagined themselves and will teach us how to re-imagine schools.

Highlights from the past four years have included:

Colgate-Palmolive Company – Conducted seminars on Bringing Out Your Personal Creativity, Active Listening, and Coaching for Success. Participants received seminar books.
General Electric – Conducted an interactive and catalytic roundtable discussion on their award-winning leadership program and led a tour of their facilities in Schenectady and New York City.
JP Morgan Chase – Explained their mandatory supervisors’ two-day leadership courses - Developing Leaders From Within and Nurturing Professional Relationships.
McGraw-Hill - Detailed their leadership training programs, which include succession planning. Participants received autographed copies of the- -presenters’ books.
Met-Life - Participants received copies of Coaching for Improved Work Performance and Who Moved my Cheese? prior to the visit.
North Shore Hospital – Shared how frontline teams implement change. Clarified how medical issues are handled by teams.
Pearson Education – Discussed how Jim Collins’ Good to Great is used. Conducted a hands-on workshop using The Leadership Architect Competency Sort Cards. Each participant received a kit.
This year, every host site will highlight how they looked at themselves and revisited their vision.

Wednesday July 16

A Day of Imagination

The Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education (LCI), located in New York City, is the educational cornerstone of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. LCI will conduct experiences that will focus on the potential of imagination in education. NPLI participants will benefit from a full immersion in LCI’s practice and educational philosophy.
LCI-trained staff, joined by leaders from diverse fields, will focus on the Capacities for Imaginative Learning. These Capacities were developed by the Institute and piloted by students and teachers at the school the Institute has founded, The High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry (HSAII).

The Imagination Conversation
Scott Noppe-Brandon, Exeutive Director of LCI is our host for “A Day of Imagination.” He chairs Lincoln Center’s Council on Educational Programs, which includes the education directors of all Lincoln Center’s constituent companies. Scott was a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. He has been a dancer, teaching artist and dance critic. Scott is co-editor of Community in the Making: Lincoln Center Institute, the Arts and Teacher Education.

The Imagination Conversation will be moderated by Reynold Levy, President of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Mr Levy has been President of the International Rescue Committee, President of the AT&T Foundation, Executive Director of the 92nd Street Y, and Staff Director of the New York City Fiscal Crisis Task Force. He has written extensively and spoken widely about philanthropy, the performing arts, humanitarian causes, and the leadership of nonprofit institutions.

In her role as Starbucks executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, Paula Boggs leads the Law & Corporate Affairs department. Paula’s legal career began as a United States Army officer assigned to the Pentagon and staff attorney for the White House. Paula served as an assistant United States attorney responsible for prosecuting fraud and regulatory crimes. She was a partner at Preston Gates & Ellis in Seattle, a premier, full-service law firm and Vice President at Dell Computer Corporation.

Ciara Burnham is a Senior Managing Director of Evercore Partner’s investment activities including both private and public equity businesses. Ciara has served on the Boards of Directors of a number of portfolio companies, including Davis Petroleum Corp., TestEquity, LLC., and Resources Connection, Inc. Previously, Ms. Burnham was a founding partner of Five Mile Capital Partners, a hedge fund
management company and an equity research analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., Inc.

Marsha Gartland, PhD, is the Co-founder and CEO of CaseNEX, LLC. Founded at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, CaseNEX is a leading professional development organization that supports educators through a collaborative, online approach to learning using multi-media cases, or “slices of life.” Connections are made between professional learning and the complex school environment.

Tod Machover is head of the MIT Media Lab’s Hyperinstruments/Opera of the Future group. Tod creates music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries. He has composed five operas and is the inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment virtuosity. Machover is also the creator of Hyperscore, a graphic software environment that lets everyone create her/his own original music. He has launched an initiative in Music, Mind and Health at MIT to help alleviate physical and emotional disabilities.

The Imagination Challenge

The centerpiece of the day’s events, The Imagination Conversation, will bring together ground breaking leaders who have challenged the way we do things and brought their expertise to the arts, business consulting, computer technology, dance, educational research, government, holistic health, investment banking, law, the military, music composition, opera, and philanthropy. They are innovators and inventors, who believe in the power of imagination. Questions for discussion will include: What makes an imaginative leader? How can leaders nurture the imagination of students and faculty? How important is the role of imagination in addressing the needs and demands of the 21st century?

As educational leaders, we need to see things as they might be. We need to imagine. Our experience today at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts will challenge us to adopt new perspectives, use different lenses, engage in non-traditional ways.Teams will move from studio to studio, interacting with performing artists, who will ask us to cross established boundaries and encourage us to see the world anew. That is our charge.

The Wycliffe Gordon Quartet will help us synthesize our new insights. Jazz, by its very nature, calls for imagination, creativity, and innovation, the characteristics of schools we want to create. Trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, who enjoys an extraordinary career as a performer, composer, arranger, educator, and conductor, leads The Wycliffe Gordon Quartet. He is one of America’s most persuasive and committed music educators and serves on the faculty of the Jazz Studies Program at The Juilliard School. Recently, he headlined a special tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in The Gospel of Jazz, played at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Wycliffe was featured in Live at Lincoln Center’s Red Hot Holiday Stomp. This event is produced in collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Thursday July 17

Peter M. Senge is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL). Peter is the author of the widely acclaimed book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization which has sold more than a million copies worldwide. Subsequently, he published The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook and The Dance of Change. In 2000, Senge turned his attention to schools becoming learning organizations and he published Schools that Learn: A Fifth Discipline Fieldbook for Educators, Parents and Everyone Who Cares About Education.

Art Kleiner is the editor-in-chief -of strategy+business, a quarterly management journal. He is a writer and commentator with a background in business management, interactive media, corporate environmentalism, education, and organizational learning. Art was a co-author of Schools That Learn. His other books include The Age of Heretics and Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success. Kleiner is a faculty member at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Reactor
Dr. Margaret Harrington is COO of Victory Schools, which manages charter schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York State. Formerly, she was the Chief Executive of School Programs and Student Services for the NYC public schools, where she served as a teacher, assistant principal, principal, and superintendent.

Reactor
Over the last 30 years, Dr. Marcia Lyles has served as teacher, staff developer, assistant principal, principal, deputy superintendent, community superintendent, and regional superintendent in New York City.  In 2007 she became the Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning for the NYC Department of Education.   

Rethinking what we do and how we do it

Dr. John Rowe is currently a Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. Previously, Dr. Rowe served as Chairman and CEO of Aetna, Inc., one of the nation’s leading health care organizations. Before that, Jack served as the President and CEO of Mount Sinai NYU Health. Dr. Rowe was a Professor of Medicine and the founding Director of the Division on Aging at the Harvard Medical School. He is co-author, with Robert Kahn, Ph.D., of Successful Aging.

Reactor
Dr. Charlotte K. Frank is Senior Vice President, Research and Development for McGraw- Hill Education. Previously, she served as Executive Director of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction for the New York City Board of Education where she was also a teacher and supervisor.

Reactor
Deborah Sims, Ed.D., is Superintendent of Schools in Antioch CA. Previously, she served as Chief of School Operations, district administrator, principal, and teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District.

Friday July 18

How can the nature of our conversations help us re-imagine?

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is a sociologist who examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationships between culture and learning styles. She has pioneered “portraiture”, an approach to social science methodology that bridges the realms of aesthetics and empiricism. Lawrence-Lightfoot has written eight books, including I’ve Known Rivers, which explores the development of creativity and wisdom and, her most recent, The Essential Conversation: What Parents and Teachers Can Learn from Each Other. Upon her retirement, she will become the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

Evening Cruise Around Manhattan

An institute tradition unfolds on the last evening, Friday July 18th. There is no better way to view the wonders of New York City than a peaceful ride through the rivers and bays surrounding Manhattan. While day slips into night, our institute cruise features dinner and dancing.

Saturday July 19

Team Presentations
The image of the heroic leader, with the “silver bullet” solution has proven to be an unsuccessful model. Instead, the research on significant school change emphasizes the role of teams, which is why the National Principals Leadership Institute uses a team structure to drive the problem-based learning. Each team’s work culminates with a presentation on the Institute’s final day, Saturday July 19.

The “magic moments”
IIt is difficult to describe the spirit, passion, and bonding created during the eight days of the Institute. There is celebration in completing the team’s plan. There is pride in gaining new insights. There is new energy and enthusiasm to bring home. There is magic, captured in three-minute skits and songs presented by each team.