Professional development for decision-makers—including administrators, directors, board and committee members, and faculty chairs—working in Waldorf schools or other workplace settings. This course is taught remotely in real-time. Read about Summer Series 2024.Â
Are you shaping your organizational and leadership culture consciously or unconsciously? Do you have the skills necessary to recognize problems that might exist or arise within your workplace? And are you able to help your leadership team prioritize these issues and equip your fellow team members (and yourself) with the tools required to address them?
For over a decade, Sunbridge’s Collaborative Leadership Summer Series course has helped individuals with leadership responsibilities in their school, business, or organization improve their planning and problem-solving processes. In this highly-useful course, our focus is on the practical work of being a leader and decision-maker. Through a process imbued with the anthroposophical understanding of the human being, and successfully applied in organizations from Waldorf schools to multi-million dollar nationals, Collaborative Leadership will help you learn how to improve your effectiveness as a member of your leadership team.
Each participant is asked to bring their own organizational question, project, or challenge. Using your real-life cases, we will apply these four core models for collaborative leadership:
- Three main leadership tasks:Â Maintaining and creating identity / Creating space for healthy, stable relationships / Assuring professional results
- Diagnostic and planning tools: How to look at an organization as a whole and understand the dynamics of intersecting segments
- How to create processes toward healthy decision-making
- The balance between power and trust
Your course takeaway will be an individualized action plan for the question, project, or challenge you have brought with you, along with an understanding of the necessary skill set with which to execute it. As always, we encourage more than one attendee from a school so that they can work on a project together.
BONUS: Ongoing coaching support! To support you as you implement throughout the year what you have learned and practiced during the summer, this course includes conference calls facilitated by co-instructor Jessica Heffernan Ziegler scheduled from October through May. In these coaching conversations, you and your classmates will continue to hone your collaborative leadership skills, addressing and supporting one another’s progress and challenges—and so gain further insights, understanding, and expertise.
Instructors
Joachim Ziegler, PhD, has been working in the fields of organizational development and human resources development since 1994. A partner in MIRA Companions for Development, an international consulting group, Joachim’s current list of American and international clients encompasses the banking, pharmaceutical, retail, and manufacturing sectors, as well as anthroposophical institutions and Waldorf schools. Joachim is a member of the College of Social Sciences Section at the Goetheanum and the international Association for Social Development and has taught at the University of Muenster and at Germany’s first private university in Herdecke. He holds an MA in adult education and a PhD in medical education.
Jessica Heffernan Ziegler has been the executive director of Sunbridge Institute since 2008. Her professional focus on leadership skills, governance issues, and personnel development are utilized both in her executive director role and in her work as co-instructor of Sunbridge’s Collaborative Leadership course and related workshops; she also teaches Waldorf school administration in Sunbridge’s Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher Education program and previously taught in Sunbridge College’s Administration and Biography programs. Jessica is a partner in MIRA Companions for Development, an international consulting group, and works as an executive coach and organizational development consultant for Waldorf administrators and teachers and other professionals in diverse institutions and schools in both the US and Germany. She served as the first administrator and as a board member at a Waldorf school she co-founded in Everswinkel, Germany, and has sat on many other boards, including her current role as trustee for AWSNA, for which she is also an active committee member and workshop presenter. Jessica holds a BS in business management and did her biography training with Karl-Heinz Finke and her executive coach training with SECA International.
Your course also includes sessions on DEI topics with Meggan Gill of Sunbridge Institute. Eurythmy instructor TBA.
Here’s what recent Summer Series Collaborative Leadership participants had to say about their experience:
- The quality of the course was outstanding. Jessica and Joachim really made the information come alive and explained it in a way that was easy to digest. I really enjoyed when we had the opportunity to break out into smaller groups as it made for a more personal connection.
- Jessica and Joachim just emanate warmth and knowledge in a space that is supportive, inclusive and cares about our continued success. The charts and written materials provided in concert with the lectures and experiential work created a good depth and breadth with which to digest the information.
- Meggan brought a wealth of experience and created a safe space for validation of feelings around this important work. She is exceptionally skilled.
- I felt that Meggan covered a lot of material in an organized way. The subject is so vast and she has a great way of distilling it and allowing people a way in to examining our own relationship to it as a path to working with others.
- I love how practical the information is. There are plenty of actionable models and steps I can take within my own school. The portion I’ve enjoyed most was the one-on-one time I had with my talking partner (which) gave me the opportunity to delve deeper into a relationship with someone I found to be so helpful with her advice and perspectives.
- The content has been very useful. As a school leader with a background in public education and passion for personal development, I appreciated the weaving of Waldorf values partnered with practicality. I was able to apply the teachings in a faculty meeting the Thursday of our program and it went well, the difference was felt and experienced by all.
- Very high quality. I found the lectures to be particularly helpful and insightful, especially when paired with colleague Q&As.
- I found the pace and timing of each session – each a bit more intensive and deeper investigation of the collaborative leadership process – to be not only comfortable for my learning but also enlightening to me. It seemed like each day a new and brighter light shone on a concept I had experienced but never really seen before. Interspersing the break-out discussions in between each lecture was particularly satisfying to me because I find it helpful to learn in community, dialoguing is a way to construct new meanings with others.
- I was extremely impressed with the intentions set to feel like a collaborative and connected classroom, even in a virtual world.
- With the classes being online, it is perfect to have the start time where it was for those on either side of the continent.
- Excellent quality, creative facilitators, great tools
- This course is the best one I have taken. It is balanced, succinct, realistic, human and brings warmth to otherwise very cold and rigid themes. It went beyond my expectations!
- The main highlight to me was how even though we all knew anthroposophy is underlying, Steiner was mentioned a couple of times and that the mentions about anthroposophical institutions was from a human, critical, realistic standpoint.
- It was worth the value and to have monthly calls included was just what I needed – super grateful that was included in the price.
Schedule
This course takes place July 21-26 in a synchronous online classroom
ALL TIMES LISTED ARE EASTERN (NY) TIME ZONE
Sunday evening, July 21
7:15 pm-7:25 pm: Log in for tech check and attendance
7:30 pm-9:00 pm: First session
Monday-Thursday, July 22-25
9:45 am-9:55 am: Log in for tech check and attendance
Sessions run from 10:00 am-4:30 pm, with times for breaks and lunch
Friday, July 26
9:45 am-9:55 am: Log in for tech check and attendance
Sessions run from 10:00 am-1:00 pm, with mid-morning break
NOTE: Participants should be prepared to work on course-related assignments outside of their regularly scheduled instructional sessions (including some that may be assigned in advance). A complete schedule will be sent two weeks before your course start date,
Cost
$665 includes all materials, follow-up coaching calls, and a $55 non-refundable registration fee
Available Discounts
25% discount for:
- Students currently enrolled in a Sunbridge teacher education program
- Sunbridge program graduates
- Payments made in Canadian dollars
Accounts must be in good standing and discounts may not be combined. Qualification for discounts will be verified by Sunbridge staff. Â
Questions?
Please contact Barbara Vitale, admissions and summer coordinator, at [email protected] or 845-425-0055 x20
Sunbridge reserves the right to make faculty substitutions when necessary. See registration form for refund policy.
