Name: Leadership Workshop: Leading for Understanding
Start: 2026-05-18T08:30:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-18T16:00:00-04:00
Location: MuseumLab

Get ready to lead with your feet and give change legs within your organization at the Leadership Workshop: Leading for Understanding
About this Event

The Graduate School of Education at Harvard University houses Project Zero (PZ), a core research institute whose mission is to understand and nurture human potentials—such as learning, thinking, ethics, intelligence, and creativity—in people of all ages. For more than 50 years, Project Zero has studied the nature of these potentials, the contexts and conditions in which they develop, and the practices that support their flourishing. This course connects Project Zero research, ideas, and frameworks to the needs of the Pittsburgh region.

Workshop goal
The workshop aims to help administrators and educational leaders apply and experiment with leading Project Zero research and frameworks to drive positive change within their institutions.

Facilitation
The workshop will be primarily facilitated by Mark Church, who supports schools worldwide in creating cultures of thinking. He believes teachers can transform student learning by making thinking visible, valued, and actively promoted in daily classroom practice. Mark encourages educators to be students of their students—and of themselves—so they can intentionally use choices that make thinking visible. He is a consultant with Harvard Project Zero’s Making Thinking Visible and Cultures of Thinking initiatives, drawing on classroom experience and work with educators globally. With Ron Ritchhart, he co-authored Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2011) and The Power of Making Thinking Visible: Practices to Engage and Empower All Learners (Jossey-Bass, 2020).

Participant experience
Throughout the workshop, school leaders will explore these ideas and identify ways to leverage their leadership to support learning. Participants will also connect with peers in similar roles to foster cross-school collaboration aimed at creating, sustaining, or enhancing cultures of learning and student engagement.