Thinking Maps: Leading with a New Language
seminar description for principals, district administrators,
and teacher leaders
Over the past dozen years Thinking Maps® have been implemented with depth in over 3,000 whole schools, with a focus on improving content learning and thinking processes and with clear quantitative and qualitative gains for students. As we have worked with principals, teachers, and central office administrators many of these leaders have been using Thinking Maps as practical tools for change processes: site based decision making, collaborative problem-solving, visioning processes, curriculum alignment, parent workshops, board meetings, and action planning.... and even for conflict resolution with students. These leaders have proven that Thinking Maps provide a common visual language for managing an overload of information within complex, often nonlinear problems which require gathering, organizing, evaluating and communicating ideas. Thinking Maps have provided the glue for bringing people together across the school. These tools are a common language for literally drawing out ?frames? of mind, multiple points of views and mental models from a range of stakeholders, across diverse populations. This enables organizational members to see each other’s thinking, resolve differences and implement sustainable solutions.
Leading with a New Languageis a unique seminar: participants become fluent in this theoretically grounded, practical graphic language called Thinking Maps and begin applying these tools to improve collaborative processes currently underway ... as well as to create their own transformational patterns for action (Third Order Change). Within the seminar, participants also see how Thinking Maps Software is used as a technology for facilitating, archiving, sharing, and refining ideas while developing reflective thinking in colleagues. On the most practical personal-professional level, participants enrich their own capacities to think through ideas--while seeking other points of view--and present their thinking to others in a visual language that reveals the richness, the holism, of their ideas.
This seminar is also a first stage for bringing Thinking Maps to all students across whole schools. We believe that “leadership” and “learning” are intimately linked. Thinking Maps explicitly bring together these often discontinuous streams. School leaders--principals and teachers--now more than ever, must be instructional leaders. They must lead through facilitation, model techniques they expect all learners to use, and show results. Our expert training processes, modeling, resource materials and follow-up show how natural human thinking processes and habits of mind are the foundation for leading and learning. Thinking Maps are collaborative tools that make thinking and problem solving explicit, efficient, and effective in classrooms. Principals, teachers, and other school leaders will leave this seminar with tools for 21st century leadership and with a clear vision of how these tools will improve leadership and learning for all... across their whole learning community.
"A primary role of the constructivist leader is to lead the conversation."
Linda Lambert, The Constructivist Leader