News

ESU 10 hosted a four day Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar in April 2023. Dr. Scott Blum and Sue Pressler, ESU 3 staff and certified Adaptive Schools trainers, facilitated our training series. Twenty ESU 10 staff from across all four departments attended alongside central office staff from Grand Island, Kearney, and Lexington Public Schools.

The outcomes of the four-day series provided us an opportunity to develop:

• An increased capacity to initiate, develop and sustain high functioning groups
• Understandings of systems thinking as rationale and focus for Adaptive Schools work
• Understandings of the importance of group identity for sustaining adaptivity
• New lenses for diagnosing the stages and phases of group development
• An expanded repertoire of practical facilitation tools
• Understandings of when and how to engage groups in dialogue and discussion, the limitations, forms and values of each
• Skills to move groups beyond consensus to common focus
• Ways to value and use dissension, argument and conflict
• Strategies for keeping group members on track, on topic, energized and resourceful

Throughout the four-days, we had an opportunity to work across departments and with other school district leaders. We learned the concepts of Adaptive Schools and experienced strategies to incorporate into our daily practice. The Teaching and Learning Department will be debriefing our learning on May 17 and discussing how we plan to implement the strategies into our internal and external work.

Based on the feedback from ESU 10 staff and our school districts in attendance, the training series was impactful. All of our participants are taking back key concepts and strategies that they can implement immediately. Kearney and Lexington Public Schools have already reached out with the intent to bring Adaptive Schools training to their leadership teams. My goal for the Teaching and Learning Department is to embed the concepts of Adaptive Schools into the way we do business.