NAIS Gather

Community Dialogues

Community Dialogues at Gather provide a space for honest conversation with colleagues from different places and perspectives who are navigating many of the same questions, opportunities, and challenges related to inclusion and belonging. We hope that through these dialogues, you build relationships across schools and experiences, and you leave with new thinking and perspectives to bring back to your institution and the students at the heart of this work.

Over three days at Gather, spend time in the same small group and move beyond conference panels and presentations to experience Essential Partners' Reflective Structured Dialogue (RSD) approach, which invites a different kind of conversation:

  • It's not a debate where you take positions and aim to persuade.
  • It's not a discussion where you brainstorm solutions and ideas.
  • It’s a dialogue, where the goal is connection and understanding across different perspectives and lived experiences. 

Community Dialogues are included with Gather registration at no additional cost, but advance registration through the conference registration platform is required. Space is limited to support small-group dialogue, meaningful connection, and thoughtful conversation.

If you haven't registered for Gather yet, you can sign up during the registration process. If you've already registered for Gather but didn't register for Community Dialogues at that time, you can log back into the registration portal and sign up.

What You Can Expect

This is a reflective space designed to help you slow down, speak from your own experiences, and think deeply alongside colleagues. The sessions are intentionally structured, using tools designed to invite new ways of speaking and listening. Facilitators guide participants through the structures of each session.

Why We Start With You

Students are at the heart of this work. We invite you to begin with your own experiences, stories, and values. Starting there moves us away from taking positions, defending, and debating and provides an opportunity to consider how individual experiences inform your perspectives and decisions.

It also opens space for deeper listening, real curiosity, and a both/and mindset. This process starts with getting clear on what matters to you, then opens to what matters to others, and ends with what you'll bring back to your community.

What You Will Leave With

  • New insights: Hearing from colleagues from different schools, roles, and backgrounds can stretch your thinking long after Gather ends.
  • New questions: Bring these back to your community to use especially where you have felt stuck.
  • Practiced skills: Listening to understand, speaking to be understood, pausing before responding, and reflecting before responding—you can use these in your own school's hardest conversations.

Many people from the NAIS community shared ideas that helped shape the community dialogues. Based on that input, here are the topics that emerged as important areas for dialogue and shared learning. Please select the one that feels most compelling and inviting to you.

Choose Your Community Dialogue

Topic 1: Discerning If, When, and How to Have the Really Hot Dialogues

Most school communities eventually face topics that seem too hot to discuss or generate different opinions, questions, or concerns that have the potential to lead toward polarization.

This dialogue steps back from any specific issue to reflect on the discernment itself: what is and isn't up for dialogue in your community, and how do you decide if, when, and how to engage? 

This space is for you to reflect on your community’s readiness to discuss these topics. You will leave with questions to bring back to your school to help you move forward where you've previously felt stuck or unsure.

Listen, reflect, and share with your colleagues about:

  • What is important to you, and your community, about this conversation? 
  • What's at stake if you engage or if you don't? What have you seen happen (in your own life or in your school community) when a conversation like this was taken on or avoided?
  • What is your community actually ready for right now? What are you noticing—in conversations, silences, and reactions that help you move forward?

Topic 2: Expanding Belonging Beyond the Zero-Sum

All students, whatever their identity, deserve to feel a sense of belonging in their school community. Yet creating and sustaining that sense of belonging isn't always straightforward. Students, families, faculty, and staff bring different experiences, needs, and expectations, and those working to foster belonging can find themselves pulled in multiple directions as they navigate these differences.

This conversation explores the belief that supporting one group requires taking something away from another. Together, you'll examine where that thinking shows up in schools, how it can shape decisions and relationships, and what it may mean for students' sense of belonging. You'll also hear how colleagues are balancing the needs of multiple communities and leave with ideas for creating environments where belonging expands rather than competes.

Listen, reflect, and share with your colleagues about:

  • In your experience as an educator, when has belonging felt zero-sum and when has it not? What do those experiences tell you about this current moment?
  • Who is losing a sense of belonging in your community right now and who is carrying the weight of that? Where are you noticing tensions, in yourself or the community?
  • What does belonging truly require? What will it require of you and your school in the months and years ahead?

Topic 3: Holding the Heart & Hope of This Work

Inclusion and belonging work is always evolving, and in moments of uncertainty, the work feels more urgent. In such times, it’s hard to hang on to the heart and the hope of the work. For many, that has come at a real cost—lost momentum, disappointment, erasure. For some, it has revealed opportunities for what the next phase of this work could look like.

This dialogue invites you to ground yourself—to get clear on what you are not willing to let erode in a shifting landscape and to explore how to keep building momentum even, and especially, when more change is coming. 

Listen, reflect, and share with your colleagues about:

  • How has this work evolved and how has it evolved you?  
  • What is the essence of this work for you—the thing that, if you kept it, would mean you're still doing this work even if everything around it looks different?
  • Where does your own sense of the heart of this work match your institution's embodiment of it? And where does it diverge? Given that, what will you choose to protect, push for, or let go of in the year ahead?

Community Dialogues are included with Gather registration at no additional cost. Separate advance registration is required. Space is limited to support small-group dialogue, meaningful connection, and thoughtful conversation.

Community Dialogue Schedule

  • Part I: Wednesday, December 2, 1:45–3:15 PM ET
  • Part 2: Thursday, December 3, 11:15 AM–12:45 PM ET
  • Part 3: Friday, December 4, 11:15 AM–12:45 PM ET

About Essential Partners

NAIS Gather has partnered with Essential Partners to design the Community Dialogues and equip facilitators to lead them.

For almost 40 years, Essential Partners’ Reflective Structured Dialogue approach has been used in secondary schools, civic groups, faith communities, colleges, and organizations to build cultures of connection, deepen belonging, and strengthen mutual understanding across differences in values, beliefs, and identities.