How to Coach a Strong Team: Leading People, Building Instructional Capacity, and Securing Accountability

How to Coach a Strong Team is a course for new and aspiring principals. The course provides frameworks and tools for setting directions, building relationships, developing people, developing a school culture and structures to support desired practices, and securing accountability.

The course starts with attention to the character of the leader. It continues with an exploration of the processes necessary to gain competency in the cultivation of vision, the nurture of trust, the leading of change, the building of teams, professional coaching, and the supervision of professional development. It concludes with hiring practices, handling conflict, and terminations of service.

Dr. Gideon Strauss

ICS 260005 F21

Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)

(MA-EL)

Syllabus

The Observant Participant: Applying Research Craft to Professional Practice

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” (Simone Weil)

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” (Simone Weil) 

How do I avoid becoming the proverbial practitioner who, instead of earning ten years of experience, repeats one year of experience ten times over? How do I make sense of my own experience as a practitioner and how do I learn from my experience? How do I learn from the experience of other practitioners? How do I give attention to what matters most? 

In this course we will consider these kinds of questions. We will draw on the critical reflective practices of other practitioners, we will equip ourselves with the methodological tools of qualitative researchers, and we will cultivate an attitude of attentiveness informed by the approach to practice taken by phenomenologists—becoming philosophically skilful students of our own lived human experience. Doing this course together, we will become more observant participants in our lifeworlds and strengthen our capacity as reflective practitioners in our professions and in our scholarship. 

While the focus of this course is on applying research craft to professional practice, the course is also an introduction to graduate level qualitative research and to key perspectives from phenomenological philosophy. 

Dr. Gideon Strauss

ICS 132501 / 232501 F21

Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)

(MA-EL, MWS)

Syllabus

*NOTE: Approved for Area 2 of the CSTC

Cultivating Learning Communities of Grace

Cultivating Learning Communities of Grace is a course for instructional leaders and school administrators in the consideration of both school and classroom cultures. Course content will include attention to diversity, cultural complexity and increasingly blurred markers of origin and ethnicity, racial justice, and restorative practices. 

This course seeks to help students find clarity in answers to the following questions:

 

• How do we awaken in our students’ knowledge, creativity, and critical reflective capacities in our schools and classrooms?

• How do racism and other forms of oppression underlie achievement gaps and alienation within our schools?

• How can classroom learning be linked to larger movements seeking to effect change in community?/How can school culture be a vehicle for social change?

• How do we cultivate learning communities of grace in our schools?

• What is the relationship between the daily behaviour of educational leaders and the cultures of schools?

Dr. Edith van der Boom
ICS 260008 F21
Blended (Online Asynchronous/Synchronous)

(MA-EL)

Syllabus

*NOTE: Approved for Area 2 or Area 3 of the CSTC

**Subject to ICS Senate approval

Transforming the World: The Role of a Christian Educator

Transforming the World is a course for instructional leaders as they consider their roles as Christian educators. We will consider our context as Christians as we are called to be transformers of society and culture by seeking justice and righteousness for those who are marginalized and disenfranchised. In this course we will consider constructivism, a dominant educational theory in the twenty-first century that informs student-centred pedagogies such as Project Based Learning, through the lens of Scripture and investigate the assumptions that it makes. We will explore our calling as Christian educators to transform culture in our schools, local community, and the world. 

This course seeks to help Christian educators find clarity in answers to the following questions: 

• Context: Who am I called to be as a Christian educator in my particular place and time?

• Constructivism: How does constructivism inform my practice?

• Culture: What role does education play in creating culture?

Course Format

This version of the course will consist of:

1. Reading To Know as We Are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey and 5 articles as specified in the Google classroom prior to August 3;

2. Participation in five 3-hour Zoom sessions during August 9-13;

3. Assigned reading and online discussions throughout the month of August; and

4. A project that demonstrates ones learning from the course.

Dr. Edith van der Boom
ICS 260006 S21
Remote (Online Synchronous)
Intensive, August 9 - 13, 2021

(MA-EL)

Syllabus

*NOTE: Approved for Area 2 of the CSTC

Lead From Where You Are: Making a Difference in the Face of Tough Problems, Big Questions, and Organizational Politics

Leadership is not about personality, authority, position, influence, or power as such. Leadership is an art, a craft, a practice, to which everyone is called sometime or other, in widely different situations. Leadership can be practiced with varying degrees of authority, from any position, at varying scales of influence, and with varying access to different sources of power.

The kind of leadership that we will learn and practice in this course has to do with diagnosing and addressing the toughest problems experienced by organizations, communities, institutions, and societies. This kind of leadership demands political skill: the skill to discern the overt and covert concerns and interests, agendas, and alliances within the organizations, institutions, and societies we serve, and to give each their due while not failing to pursue the common good.

We will learn a leadership language, try out a set of tools and frameworks, and workshop our fresh insights and skills.

Dr. Gideon Strauss

ICS 260003 S21

Remote (Online Synchronous)

Intensive, August 16 - 20, 2021

(MA-EL, MWS)

Syllabus

*NOTE: Approved for Area 2 or Area 4 of the CSTC

Finding Joy in Learning

Finding Joy in Learning is a course that will inspire and support K-12 educators in their own personal journey of learning. The course will provide educators with a vocational vision of Christian educational innovation and leadership. It is intended to “guide students [and instructors] on an inner journey toward more truthful ways of seeing and being in the world” (Palmer, 2017, p. 6).

This version of the course will consist of:

• Reading Let Your Life Speak, You Are What You Love, and The Courage to Teach prior to our first Zoom session on August 4;

• Three 3-hour Zoom sessions (August 4 - 6, 2021);

• A project that demonstrates one's learning in this course;

• Assigned reading and online discussions throughout the month of August;

• An individual mentoring session with the instructor.

Dr. Edith van der Boom

ICS 260001 S21

Remote (Online Synchronous)

Intensive, August 3 - 5, 2021

(MA-EL)

Syllabus

Leadership in Context (Reformational Philosophy Applied)

Course Description TBD

Dr. Bob Sweetman
ICS 1107AC / 2107AC S21
Remote (Online Synchronous)
Intensive, (Dates TBD)

(MA-EL, MWS)

Syllabus

*NOTE: Approved for Area 2 of the CSTC

Fashion Theology

Course Description TBD

Dr. Robert Covolo
ICS 1532SC / 2532SC S21

Remote (Online Synchronous)
Intensive, (Dates TBD)

(MWS, MA, PhD)

Syllabus

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.

The Soul of Soulless Conditions

Although Marxists and Christians have found plenty of reasons to be mutually suspicious, prominent voices in both historical communities explored creative ways of relating to one another, politically and ideologically, throughout the 20th century and beyond. Through dialogical exchanges, party documents, and theological reflection, important questions were raised, if not always solved. Were the first Christians communists? What do Moscow and Havana have to do with Rome and Nazareth? Does materialism disqualify Christians from Marxist analysis? Can Marxist political parties accommodate Christian believers, and how far can Christians go in participating in Marxist revolutions?

Over the course of thirteen classes, we will read several Marxists on Christianity (e.g. Lenin, Luxemburg, Castro, Horkheimer) and several Christians on Marxism (e.g. McCabe, Soelle, Cone, Zuidervaart) to better understand where these communities found points of agreement and disagreement. Because neither Marxism nor Christianity are entirely unified traditions of thought, the selection of authors will aim to represent at least some of this diversity, although privileging voices that made an effort to bring these two discourses closer together in some way. Reading these traditions together, we will try to uncover how Christianity contributes to the soul of soulless conditions, and also what it might mean to embody that soul in the flesh of political organization.

Dean Dettloff
ICS 132902 S21
Remote (Online Synchronous)
Intensive, April 19 - May 28, 2021

(MWS)

Syllabus

*Attention TST students: if you are interested in taking this course for credit, you must petition your college of registration to count the course credit toward your degree program.