Faculty/staff members from partner schools in the Sullivan Foundation network will gather to talk and learn about changemaking and leadership in two faculty development workshops at the upcoming Spring 2022 Ignite Retreat, to be held April 1-3 in Staunton, Va.
The Ignite Retreat takes place at the Staunton Innovation Hub, a coworking space in the heart of Staunton’s historic district. Held twice a year, the event brings together a team of facilitators, coaches and conspirators who lead college students on a journey to discover how they can change the world in a positive way, whether through social entrepreneurship, the nonprofit sector or public policy leadership, among many possibilities. The event also includes workshops for faculty/staff who are championing social change and inspiring tomorrow’s leaders on their campuses.
Click here to learn more and register for the Spring 2022 Ignite Retreat.
The agenda for faculty/staff features two workshops on Saturday, April 2: “Building Resilient Faculty Leaders” (10-11:30 a.m.) and “Train the Trainer: How to Run Experiential Workshops” (4:15-5:15 p.m.).
The “Building Resilient Faculty Leaders” workshop will be led by Dr. Jody Holland, associate professor of public policy leadership at the University of Mississippi, and Nell DeVito, director of The Vantage Point in Mary Baldwin University’s Office of Personal and Professional Development.
Dr. Jody Holland
“As we have seen in the past two years, impactful and engaging leaders within higher education must have the capacity to bounce back from setbacks or thrive during times of challenge or change. Resilience grows out of a set of ‘learnable’ behaviors,” Holland and DeVito explained in a summary of the workshop.
“Whether you’re dealing with the acute stress of sudden challenges or the chronic stress of daily life, simple daily actions can increase your resilience. A wealth of research points to four factors that help people—and teams, organizations and countries—become more agile and effective under times of stress.”
The session will provide participants with an effective leading tool called REAL Nanotool, which they can learn and start using in 15 minutes. “The acronym REAL serves as a mnemonic: Relationships, Efficacy, Affect and Learning. Strengthening one or more of these factors can significantly improve individual and team performance,” Holland and DeVito said.
For faculty/staff members, the REAL Nanotool has “the potential to significantly impact their success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people they lead.”
Reagan Pugh
In the second session, called “Train the Trainer: How to Run Experiential Workshops,” the Sullivan Foundation’s Reagan Pugh, who leads the Ignite Retreat with Spud Marshall, will teach faculty members how to run the kinds of fun, engaging and impactful workshops offered to students at the Ignite Retreat.
“Each of our workshops is designed not only to convey information, but to provide hands-on experience so the students walk away having done real work, not fictional exercises steeped in theory,” Pugh explained in his summary of the session. “Attendees of this fast-paced, interactive workshop will walk away with new tools they can apply immediately to their classroom instruction and a playbook of all our workshops we run at the Ignite Retreat.”
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