Welcome to the Center for Adaptive Schools!

his web site provides information about Adaptive Schools: what they are, why they affect student learning, and how they develop essential capacities for sustained growth in achievement. This site also provides information about who are the educators associated with the Center for Adaptive Schools and what services and products are available through the Center for Adaptive Schools.

Why?

The mission of the Center for Adaptive Schools is to help schools develop the technical and social resources to realize continuing student improvement. Steady improvement in student learning is happening in a new kind of professional culture within schools. Sustaining these collaborative, results-focused working relationships requires leaders at all levels of the organization to develop new ways of seeing their work and new templates and tools for engaging collective energies toward common goals.

How?

Schools in which faculty members feel a collective responsibility for student learning produce greater learning gains than do schools in which teachers work as isolated practitioners. Teachers in Adaptive Schools are successfully responsive to the changing needs of students, standards and curriculum demands. The work of the Center for Adaptive Schools is informed by research in the new sciences, integrating this work with change models, best educational practices, learning theory, and research on group and adult development.

Adaptive Schools consulting, coaching and seminars provide skills development in dialogue, discussion, exceptional meeting management, advocacy, inquiry and other skills sets of collaboration. The seminars provide concepts, models and research for building capacities for organizational development, professional development, conflict resolution, data-based decision making, and working with intractable or wicked problems. Of four distributed leadership hats (facilitating, presenting, coaching and consulting) the Adaptive Schools seminars' primary focus is on the hat or function of facilitating group work. Special skills seminars are also provided in each of the four hats. Learn more about our seminars on Adaptive Schools models for improving schools by visiting our Adaptive Schools Foundations page.

Who?

The Center has been assisting individuals and schools in self development since 1992.

Co-Developer, Robert Garmston, Ed.D. is emeritus professor at California State University, Sacramento, and Co-Founder of The Institute for Intelligent Behavior and Cognitive Coaching^SM with Art Costa.

Co-Developer, Bruce Wellman, M.Ed., is Co-Director of MiraVia LLC, a publishing, training and consulting firm working with school systems, professional groups and organizations throughout the United States and Canada.