Who we are together is always more and different
than who we are alone.
Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science
If you want to go faster, go alone.
If you want to go further, go together.
African Proverb |
Dear Assembly Participant,
It is our pleasure to be hosting at this year's PEJE Assembly the first ever field-wide conversation on fundamental challenges facing Jewish day schools. As we are all only too aware, there are key strategic challenges that no school by itself can possibly meet. We could not help but wonder what we could accomplish at the Assembly if we focused everyone's attention at once on one or more of these challenges and carefully capture what emerges. By inviting the diverse perspective, insight, and experience of each Assembly participant into the conversation, we wondered, what potential might be released for deeply understanding and moving these challenges forward?
At PEJE when we think of creating powerful learning environments where people can move forward intractable problems, we always come back to the importance of people talking and working with one another. We are inspired by the vision of classrooms where all the ideas and experience and questions are honored and respected. Research documents that when groups take on a problem, the solutions are always better than those developed by even the most experienced expert-and the more diverse the group, the better the outcome. We believe that this kind of engagement in open conversation among everyone who cares about an issue is an important leadership and learning practice.
With this in mind, we will gather on Monday morning of the Assembly in a World Café, where small groups of people will have in-depth conversations tackling the issues of leadership and affordability in day schools. We will gather around questions that will inspire the sharing of different perspectives, deep listening, and the discovery of new possibilities. We will weave our ideas from the small groups into a larger whole. We will capture potential next steps through graphic recording, poetry, and other means, so ways forward are made visible.
We have invited the Art of Hosting team of Cynthia Lyon Marinstein, Teresa Posakony, Maria Scordialos, Sarah Whiteley, and Tenneson Woolf to help host our conversation and follow its threads throughout the Assembly. We invite you to this innovative field-wide conversation with your curiosity, your willingness to reconsider previously-held assumptions, your ability to recognize new patterns and connections, and most of all your shared commitment to Jewish day schools.
To the right are links to articles that describe the kind of process we will use on Monday. Please peruse as you like. Above all, come ready to learn well in service to our Jewish day school field.
We look forward to being with you soon.
Amy Katz & Josh Elkin
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Resources
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The World Café website, www.theworldcafe.com, offers many resources for participation and learning in the café format. These include several listed below.
The World Café: Living Knowledge through Conversations that Matter. Lead article published in the Pegasus Systems Thinker magazine July 2001
Café to Go! A Concise Guide to Designing World Café Conversations.
The Art of Powerful Questions: Cataylzing Insight, Innovation and Action by Eric Vogt, Juanita Brown and David Isaacs.
Asking Big Questions by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, and Nancy Margulies. From The Dance Of Change. Peter Senge, et al editors.
Conversation as a Core Business Process by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs. Published in The Systems Thinker, from Pegasus Communications. December - January 1996-1997.
The World Café: Changing the Future One Conversation at a Time by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs and Nancy Margulies. Unpublished working notes.
The World Café: Catalyzing Large-Scale Collective Learning by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, Nancy Margulies and Gary Warhaftig. From Leverage Magazine, published by Pegasus Communnications, Cambridge, MA. September, 1999.
Additional websites rich with information and stories of change through conversation include:
www.artofhosting.org
www.berkana.org
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