This is your first year as Head of School at Dalton. What made you decide to produce a Dalton Intra-Conference this fall?
Well, the first thing to say is that we’re still—proudly—hosting the 9th Annual
From Diversity to Community
Conference in the spring. The topic is implicit bias. We’re expecting a full house, so New York City schools mark your calendars—it’s April 27, 2019 and registration will be up shortly. I’m afraid I just turned my answer into a public service announcement. But it’s actually connected to the reason we’re producing our own Intra-Conference in the fall. In my own experience, the conference has caused me to reflect on some of the most important concepts an educational leader can and should consider. Each conference theme has encouraged me to think more deeply about the topics Dalton should engage with and the type of community we want to continually build.
What’s the connection between
From Diversity to Community
and the Intra-Conference?
We’ve seen the success of
From Diversity to Community
: the impact it has on attendees and the practical solutions that come out of it. And so we said: this is a great model. We can use it to explore our own values, our own choices, our own actions, in more depth. So, in a big way, our conference is an acknowledgement of the power of
From Diversity to Community
. In addition, the work we’ve done with the Pollyanna team over the last several years has developed, framed, and managed our Intra-Conference and has kept
From Diversity to Community
fresh and relevant year after year.
What’s the fall conference about?
The direct inspiration is our recent Strategic Plan, which called for just such a conference. The plan also prioritizes a kind of active citizenship in the school community; it asks Dalton to make a concentrated effort to cultivate ethical, purposeful members of our wonderfully diverse community. So the conference is called
The Dalton Citizen: Community & Belonging
.
That’s a big title. Where do you start exploring those topics?
Our starting point is Charles Vogl’s book
The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging
. Vogl will actually be our keynote speaker. He defines community as “a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare.” Now, that sounds simple, but it has huge implications for the way we structure our days, nurture our relationships, and so on. So we’ll be pursuing questions like: In what ways are we responsible for each other? In what ways do we belong to each other - and to our school? How do we express that sense of belonging?
What do you hope will come out of Dalton’s Intra-Conference?
We tend to get ambitious at Dalton, so I’d love it if we came up with a hundred new ideas and a dozen new plans. But really I have two goals: I want us to feel secure, and I want us to feel restless. We’re part of a 100-year-old institution with bedrock values that speak to—and for—us. But we also have a lot of work to do, and it’s going to be hard, often uncomfortable work, and we should be on fire to do it.
