Read Smith’s UPDATED plans as of August 5, 2020,
for an entirely remote fall 2020 semester.
For Faculty & Staff
While much of the Wurtele Center’s programming is geared toward students, we strive to equip all members of the Smith community with the creativity, courage and collaborative capacity to lead positive change. We believe strongly that in order to build these skills in our students, we need to engage as learners ourselves as we seek to model collaborative leadership. We also hope to serve as a resource for faculty and staff who are interested in exploring new ways of building collaborative leadership skills in their students.
The Art of Leading Teams is a series of lunchtime sessions open to any faculty or staff member interested in cross-campus community building, discussion, and learning about methods for leading and working collaboratively in teams. While we normally gather in person and provide lunch, the series will be conducted virtually in the 2020–21 academic year. Watch eDigest for registration information, or reach out to us at wurtelecenter@smith.edu to sign up to receive announcements about the series.
Art of Leading Teams Schedule
Fall Semester 2020 & Interterm 2021
| DATE, TIME & SPEAKER | DESCRIPTION |
|---|---|
| SEPTEMBER | |
|
September 16, 2020 |
Tolerance for Change |
| OCTOBER | |
| October 21, 2020 112:15–1:30 p.m. |
Virtual Collaboration “201” This session is a follow-up on our April 2020 session on Leading and Collaborating with Your Virtual Team (but join us even if you didn’t attend that session!). Your team has now been working together virtually for some time and will continue to do so indefinitely. We’ll return to the topic for a discussion of what is working, what’s not working and how we might improve our collaboration. |
| NOVEMBER | |
|
November 18, 2020 |
Keeping Antiracism at the Forefront of Your Work as a Team Racism is a public health issue and one that affects all facets of work and life. As an institution that prioritizes equity and inclusion, how can we continue to challenge ourselves to begin or continue the work, and create avenues for discussion and ongoing learning within our teams? In this session we will talk through some strategies to keep this work centered in our offices and departments. |
| JANUARY 2021 | |
| January 13, 2021 12:15–1:30 p.m. |
The Mid-Year Collective Deep Breath Gather with colleagues to reflect on our teams’ work together throughout the fall semester. We’ll also share some strategies you can use with your team to pause, connect and recharge before launching into the rest of the year’s work. |
The Wurtele Center for Leadership is available for consultation, collaboration and support for any faculty members whose courses are actively team- or groupwork-oriented, and who are interested in exploring how they might work more intentionally with students to develop their collaborative skills in order to lead projects and initiatives forward. Our curricular engagement with faculty has ranged from individual consultation and curricular co-design to guest teaching arrangements to resource sharing.
In addition, in partnership with the Provost’s Office, the Wurtele Center supports faculty working to develop students’ capacity to cultivate a public voice as they learn to translate their scholarship for a public audience and speak out about issues that matter to them. The Amplify Program includes Curriculum Enhancement Grants offered to faculty, paired with co-curricular programming that builds on and enhances this work in the classroom.
For more information, please contact Wurtele Center Director Erin Cohn, and check out the Resources and Amplify pages of our website.
The Wurtele Center for Leadership also collaborates widely with a range of campus partners to support the collaborative leadership development of students and staff through co-curricular or work experiences. This includes:
- Ongoing training and development partnerships with student leaders in Residential Life, House Leadership and Student Affairs
- Support of student club and organization leaders
- Collaboration with other centers on campus to develop programs, talks and workshops
- A monthly student intern leadership enrichment series open to student interns and work-study students across campus
- Assistance with meeting design, retreat design and facilitation of team engagement for other units on campus
If you are interested in collaborating with the Wurtele Center in these or other ways, please reach out!