School leaders go back to classroom

Hyderabad: "Leadership is a way of thinking, a way of acting and, most importantly, a way of communicating" – was the biggest takeaway from the Leadership Retreat organized at the majestic Hyderabad Public School Begumpet on Friday, where 30 school leaders from some of the top schools from the state of Telangana, viz, Hyderabad Public School, Suchitra Academy, Meridian, Springfield, Rockwood and more came together to brainstorm and learn from each other.

A two day workshop with an enormous learning about leadership has successfully taken the breaths of the listeners. The leaders went back to the board with a lot of interaction, activities and discussions under 4 modules. The first module, leading a future-focused school prepared the school leaders to become effective for global success.

Managing complexity and conflicts focused on learning the science of transforming conflict into collaboration. Building capacities and fostering team spirit was covered in Empowering a 21st century team and Planning: Teaching-Learning for the future helped them craft a vision for powerful classrooms and schools.

"I have always wanted that the school leaders should come together through collaborative workshops and form a cohort to become a think tank for the educational landscape for today and tomorrow, and I am so excited that there has been such immense participation in this retreat", said Kausar Sayeed, founder of Learn2Lead, the organisation that brought the Retreat to the city in association with KA EduAssociates from Mumbai.

The lead facilitator of the Leadership Retreat, Fatima Agarkar was thrilled with the response to the Leadership Retreat. "Our goal at KA EduAssociates is to bring out the experience and expertise out in the open to school leadership community, with a single goal – to focus on the 22nd century.

We all know that the future is uncertain and we're not prepared, and continue as we have been doing for decades, we'll miss the boat. The need of the hour is to unlearn and relearn our school leadership practices with knowledge, bringing disruptive strategies, and it's great to see the collaborative effort in this retreat with some of the best minds in the school leadership", she shared.

KA is a Mumbai-based educational management services company, co-founded by two award-winning educators, Gitika Kishanchandani and Fatima Agarkar. A rich team of professionals, experienced across national and international curricula, work towards delivering progressive professional development courses (face to face and online) for teachers, customized workshops for schools, recruitment and consulting services for school managements, looking to start up or scale up.

Dr Anuradha Sridhar, Doctorate in polymer chemistry & Sr college lecturer and Mili Chikal, A creative and techno savvy educator have also shared their perspectives about leadership.

"Leadership retreat was an amazing experience. I feel there is an urgent need for heads of various schools to collaborate and learn from each other to make learning more meaningful.

At The Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet, we believe strongly in moving forward and being progressive, hence we thought of hosting leadership retreat in our school campus. It was an awesome experience with immense learning over two days in the company of 30 progressive educational leaders", shared Skand Bali, Principal of The Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet who hosted the Retreat.

The Leadership Retreat not just covered the famous and affluent schools, but also brought the schools from Rural Development Foundation on the same platform, so that the process of learning could be democratized across the milieu, environment and social background.

The Retreat concluded with the school leaders committing to open their doors for other schools and learn the best practices from each other to further the cause of learning.