Please welcome the 2021-2022 cohort of the Perrone-Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership at Hale. We’re looking forward to working and learning with this amazing group and to sharing their thinking and creativity as the year unfolds.
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A group of 20 talented educators and leaders from 20 schools and non-profit organizations in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico completed their first PSi training designed to support leaders as they continue to deal with the realities of a Covid-struck world.
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It is crucial that we resist the seductive temptations of easy answers in education. It’s not enough to grow roses in concrete. We need to smash the concrete. Only then might we have the schools that our children deserve.
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The first federal act to restrict immigration, the Page Act of 1875, targeted Asian women. Asians, especially Asian women, have long been tokenized, otherized, and made invisible, both in society and in our educational systems. While the recent spike in violent hate crimes towards Asians can be attributed to the racist rhetoric bolstered by the past administration and their supporters in regards to the pandemic, anti-Asian hate is by no means recent.
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Hale collaborated with PSi to develop a new virtual professional development course, “Crafting Online Learning Experiences,” which explores how games and initiatives get folks laughing together, sharing personal items from their home, moving up and out of their chairs, collaborating to solve problems, listening to each other...connecting.
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Our nation was founded upon the genocide, exploitation, and enslavement of BIPOC. It has been the work of generations since then to confront this shameful history. Reflecting on the role of leadership, we still have faith in a better future.
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The Artist’s lens provides a liberatory framework to try on new perspectives, build empathy, take risks, and experience new insights that get us closer to our destination.
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For three weeks this past August, a group of twenty-seven emerging creative leaders, from five districts in the Boston area, met in daily Zoom workshops to learn from one another, the PSi faculty, and a host of guest presenters. Now that we have had some time to reflect, we are sharing some “best practices”; while many of these are also best practices in “real time,” they are even more critical on Zoom.
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We caught up with three of our most recent alumni, who have just moved into leadership positions as assistant principals and directors. Even with the intensifying worry about how—or if—we will go back to school safely, these leaders (Mayra Cuevas, Assistant Principal at the Paul Dever School in Dorchester; Tiffany Rice Director of El Sistema at the Conservatory Lab Charter School in Dorchester; and Sonia Lowe, Assistant Principal, Saltonstall School, Salem MA) were upbeat about their new adventures and willing to share their thoughts.
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We’re pleased to share “Expanding Innovation and Equity for K-12 Schools in Massachusetts: Opportunities and Challenges,” a report on the findings of the Innovative School Design Incubator. Funded by The Boston Foundation, the Innovative School Design Incubator project ran from 2017-2019, enabling CAS to aid in the school creation process of four innovative Boston-area school design teams: Boston Collaboratory School, Equity Lab Charter School, Mission Hill High School, and Powderhouse Studios. Despite years of hard work—including research, external funding, consultation with experts, piloting, and revision of plans and designs—none of these schools launched. These were not the results we expected. “Expanding Innovation and Equity for K-12 Schools in Massachusetts” describes the project, analyzes obstacles and opportunities, and offers guidance to future school developers. Through the close collaborations and relationships that CAS staff members fostered with these four design teams, we observed conditions in Boston and other districts in Massachusetts that presented significant, systemic challenges to opening new schools, even though Massachusetts offers pathways established to encourage innovation.
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On July 7th, we hosted an online community conversation titled “The Anti- Racist Leader is a Persistent Leader.” We asked our panelists to respond to this question: We all see how the pandemic has underscored racism and inequity in this country. We cannot return to “normal” when we one day return to school. When we reopen schools, how do we redouble our efforts to address issues of systemic oppression and racism? What three things would you say to your stakeholders?
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Please welcome the new cohort of the Perrone-Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership. We’re looking forward to working and learning with this amazing group and to sharing their thinking and creativity as the year unfolds.
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Last Thursday we experienced a magical—if virtual—moment as PSi’s 2019-2020 Cohort “crossed the stage” to receive their diplomas. Tiffany Rice, a member of the cohort who is moving from her position at Windsor School to become the new El Sistema Director at Conservatory Lab Charter School, opened our celebration with a stirring rendition of “Lift Every Voice” on her violin. Watching Tiffany as she passionately swayed to the rhythm of this beautiful song, an anthem of the Black American community, transported us all. Her immersion in this act of creation and transformation inspired our graduates to remember why they chose to participate in PSi this year: to create a better world by transforming their schools and organizations to become more nurturing and inspiring places for young people and their families.
Read MoreThis morning we woke again to the news with heavy hearts. But we remember again that the racism and oppression from which these events spring are rooted in our nation’s history of enslavement and its culture of violence. They will never be uprooted by an episodic, reactive response.
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Adolescents tend to flourish when their schools give them meaningful opportunities to study and create art that matters to them. After so many years of test-based accountability, I am more persuaded than ever that we need to move these artistic ways of knowing from the fringes of the campus to the center of the school day.
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On Saturday, October 19, 2019, the Center for Artistry and Scholarship (CAS) hosted Next Wave, a one-day summit that showcased educator- and community-developed innovations that foster democratic practices and creative approaches to educational equity and racial and social justice.
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Earlier this month, CAS helped to organize a study trip for a group of 30 clergy and civic leaders who are recipients of a fellowship, supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, for faith-based leaders in education from Kansas City (MO and KS).
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On Friday, October 18th, 2019, CAS hosted a network building summit at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health with school leaders, artists, and academics from across the United States and Canada. The objectives of the meeting were to norm, form, and decide on a clear focus for our work together to form a network of schools that place the arts at the center of learning and to assess the impact of that work from a public health perspective. Among the thought partners present were three-time Grammy award winner Esperanza Spalding and Dean Michelle Williams of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.
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In August, we welcomed 20 emerging school and nonprofit leaders to the August Intensive, an eight-day launch pad for the work they will undertake as part of the 2019-2020 Cohort of the Perrone-Sizer Institute for Creative Leadership (PSi). The new Cohort included a member from beyond the Eastern Massachusetts area—way beyond, in fact—Johannesburg, South Africa. Shannin Antonopoulo, Project Manager at Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg, attended as PSi’s International Fellow.
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During the 2018-2019 school year, Center for Artistry and Scholarship program director Jill Davidson collaborated with a wide range of Conservatory Lab Charter School staff members to document social-emotional learning at the school. Those practices are document in a new publication, “Social-Emotional Learning at Conservatory Lab Charter School".
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