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Drawing on content from neuroscience and Syfr’s proprietary four P’s: Pressures to Change, Processes of Change, and Policies and Practices for Change, Syfr’s professional development series is designed to transform your school or district into a learning organization where all people are learners. The Art of Excellence combines reading, discussion, digital support, and face-to-face training with action research and collaboration to create change and improvement by focusing on excellence and building internal capacity among principals and teachers. We can work with your school or district to raise measured student achievement.
Syfr Centers of Excellence are school improvement designs that use our Learn–Adapt–Act cycle at the organizational level. Centers of Excellence are based on the premise that all children can learn at increasingly higher levels. The metacognitive, cognitive, and physical domains of learning are all addressed in Centers of Excellence.
- John Medina—Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School
- Geoff Colvin—Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
- Daniel Coyle—The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown. Here's How.
- David Galenson—Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity
- Daniel Pink—Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
- Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein—Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People
- Sharon Begley—Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain
Along with the performance enhancement research of Martin Seligman, Carol Dweck, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Anders Ericsson.
collaborate, v. Etymology: < modern French collaborer, or its original, Latin collabōra-re (< col-together + labōrāre to work, labour n.)
I am a skeptic, an academic who analyzes each text she reads in an attempt to discover its inherent flaws. I am not one who is persuaded easily. In order for a training series to be successful, it must present a compelling argument and follow that argument with impressive and solid evidence. Most trainings that I have experienced have only disappointed. The vast majority regurgitate the same information disguised as something new and revolutionary. Under careful examination, the new is revealed to be nothing but the old. It is with this doubter’s mindset that I first approached Syfr. Although I was intrigued by the images of art displayed and the atmosphere of excitement buzzing around the room, I prepared myself to be underwhelmed. Instead, I was revolutionized as a teacher. For the first time in my career, I learned to appreciate the true meaning of collaboration—a most bandied about term that, for me, had really ceased to denote anything of substance. Through our discussions, ranging from the academic to the creative to the amusing, I melded with my cohort and they became a part of me. Like the great salons or artistic cafes of the nineteenth century, Syfr becomes a space where the possibility for innovation is endless. The environment fostered by Syfr allows for the creation of a truly alchemical atmosphere where individual minds merge into a larger, focused entity. Through the partnerships I have formed at Syfr, I have worked closely with teachers from other campuses in my district to refine the structure of my content. Syfr has endowed me with a new appreciation of practice, repetition, abstraction and re-imagination. Out of context these words mean nothing, but within the scope of Syfr they mean everything. I have seen not only my skills as an instructor improve, but I have seen tangible, measurable results in my students. When I examine my students’ writing and see the vast improvement they have shown or when I moderate a discussion on Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in a Vacuum Pump and its relationship to themes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a discussion that I never would have thought possible before in my inner-city classroom, I need no further proof that Syfr is transformative.
Laura Davenport, PhD
Fox Tech High School, SAISD
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