About the Seminar-Treat for School Heads
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Time...alone and with 15 or so other people who share the unique experience of heading a school, time for reflection, sorting out, savoring, designing, enjoying, renewing, replenishing, even time for celebrating one's talent and mission and personal/professional splendor.
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A chance to engage in active conversation with two authors, one an independent school headmaster, one a Harvard University researcher/professor/artist: Richard Hawley, author of, The Headmaster's Papers, Seeing Things: A Chronicle of Surprises and Boys Will Be Men, and Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, whose artistry in "portraiture" shines in The Good High School, Balm in Gilead: Journey of a Healer, I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (published six months before the tenth Seminar-Treat), Respect, and The Essential Conversation.
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Other sessions will be just the participants together, with David Mallery simply as instigator-presider, in which the heads explore with each other issues that seem particularly interesting, urgent, alive for them, and in which the heads' own vision, hopes, sense of their own stories, their own journeys, are explored and celebrated.
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A setting—ACE Center, 800 Ridge Pike, Lafayette Hill, PA 19444—that is comfortable, even a bit elegant; beautiful grounds abundantly celebrating springtime; surroundings for walks, runs, tennis and indoor pool, gym, exercise room.
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A Special Note from David Mallery: As we move toward the 22nd Seminar-Treat, and as I look down the list of nearly 400 heads who have taken part, I feel deep respect and admiration for those who have gathered in this seminar and made something fine for themselves and each other.
We urge past participants to portray the Seminar-Treat to colleagues and friends and let me know about them so I can get in touch with them directly. This process has brought together an extraordinary range of people from schools around the world. We hope that heads who like the sound of this will call me. They will get a warm welcome. (215-242-0731)
We do not hurry to explain that the gathering is serious. “Treat” has many meanings, and we hope participants will find their own as they make their experience alone and together.
I know about April and school heads. I know they worry about faculty development money and may hesitate to ask their boards for a grant for themselves. (Don’t hesitate!) I know that heads are often over-meetinged, over-seminared, overwhelmed with nuts-and-bolts lectures and visionary big picture exhortations. Instead of all that, this Seminar-Treat offers refreshment and enjoyment, a sorting-out and savoring time
