Spring Courses
All our courses contain synchronous elements.
Instructional Coaching Principles & Practices – Spring 2025
This two-part APEX course is focused on both outlining foundation principles of instructional coaching while also dedicating time to the practical work of conducting the observation and feedback process. During the first eight weeks (six sessions), we will ground the learning in several key texts and do a guided practice of the coaching cycle. For this course we will read the complete texts of Never Underestimate Your Teacher and The Coaching Habit. We will also read Plutarch’s essay “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend” and excerpts from The Art of Coaching and Leverage Leadership 2.0. The second part, lasting eight weeks, will shift gears into a mentorship model- with the facilitators meeting individually with participants to be a thought partner as they do the work of coaching on their campus.
At Great Hearts, we value the short cycle observations as outlined in Leveraged Leadership and utilize the Great Hearts Pedagogy – The Teaching Playbook: The Role and Practice of Our Best Great Hearts Teachers and its references to Teach Like A Champion in order to calibrate excellent teaching throughout the network. We also consider rubrics deployed in each region to help guide us toward excellence.
Required Texts: Robyn Jackson’s Never Underestimate Your Teachers and Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit
Course Dates: January 6, 2025 – April 29, 2025
Facilitators: Mary Chin and Jennifer Ramirez
Personal Leadership I: Know Thyself – Spring 2025
This course builds upon the wisdom of the three Delphic maxims inscribed in the Temple of Apollo: “know thyself,” “nothing in excess,” and “certainty brings ruin.” It combines classical models of leadership with modern management practices. Its anchor, however, remains the medium of tragedy, the realm of truth and self-discovery par excellence. Some of the texts studied are Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Donald Cowan’s and Louise Cowan’s Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority, and Max De Pree’s Leadership Is an Art. The lyric voice will also feature prominently, as the “star to every wand’ring bark,” as Shakespeare writes in Sonnet 116.
This course encourages self-reflection about such topics as leadership style and bringing the best in those whom one serves. It seeks to reveal the contours of leadership (rather than details) so as to engender an understanding of leadership as an art in the sense of the ancient Greek word techne. It does not focus on operationalizing one’s vision in a school. This course requires a personal mentor.
Required texts: Donald Cowan’s Classic Texts and the Nature of Authority and Max De Pree’s Leadership Is an Art
Recommended texts: Sophocles’s Oedipus the King and Aeschylus’s The Eumenides. Links to free, online versions will be provided in the course.
Course Dates: January 26, 2025 – March 2, 2025
Facilitator: Dr. Amber Dyer, Headmaster of Great Hearts Irving Upper School
Lives of Leaders: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – Spring 2025
It is a daunting task to offer a course on one of the most important people in history. It is not possible, in such a short time, to capture the breadth and depth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We are not quite done capturing his magnificence, and continued reflection—from poets, historians, philosophers, teachers, and the public at large—can only produce a better understanding of the man. Rather than attempt to give a comprehensive view, then, this course aims to engage with some of Dr. King’s most pivotal writings and most crucial events. As you work your way through the modules, feel free to supplement them with your own research. The hope is that this course will inspire you to live up to the kind of community that Dr. King was trying to shape.
Required Texts: Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World
Course Dates: March 16, 2025 – April 13, 2025
Facilitators: Cindy Audelo, Headmaster at Great Hearts Live Oak Upper School