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The Partners in Excellence conference took place on January 19th and 20th, 2001 at historic Riverside Church, New York, with magnificent bird’s-eye views of the Hudson River that were, unfortunately, obscured by rain, snow and fog. Approximately 90 people attended all or part of the conference.
While recognizing that the partnerships represented exemplary alliances, the primary purpose of the conference was to explore the processes that make them so and discuss strategies for sustainability. We also learned about the long term impact on the culture of each institutional partner, about best practices in professional development, about what constitutes exemplary teaching and learning, and about techniques as well as issues related to evaluation and assessment.
The Guild staff and advisors were determined that the PIE conference go beyond simple presentations in order to examine the inner workings of what makes successful partnerships tick. It was a demanding but exciting exercise as our hard-working facilitators pushed the presenters to deconstruct their partnerships. We are grateful to the conference presenters, for not only providing us all with insights into their work, but for their candor.
The entire conference proceedings were recorded primarily for documentation purposes and may be better used on a referral basis than read from cover to cover. They will also serve as a resource if, for example, you wish to investigate effective professional development practices.
A word about "ecology," which we use to describe something that goes beyond mere structure to a point of interdependence: as a flower produces pollen, from which a bee makes honey that humans consume even as they appreciate the beauty of the garden, an ecological partnership, in our minds, is a community of interacting children, teachers, artists, parents, funders and, frequently, the neighborhood in which they exist. Like any ecosystem, it must have a context. It was gratifying to hear that by the first day’s wrap-up, several conferees were comfortably discussing the ecology of their partnerships as well.
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