Foundation Courses
Wednesday, December 3, 2:00–3:15 PM
Begin with shared grounding.
Gather opens Wednesday afternoon with three expert-led Foundation Courses, each aligned with one of the conference pathways: Renewing and Growing, Sustaining School Belonging, and Engaging Across Community.
Designed for anyone who wants grounding in the essential concepts connected to a pathway, these courses establish foundational knowledge, introduce useful language and frameworks, and help you engage more deeply with the programming that follows.
Foundation Courses are different from workshops. While workshops invite you to explore questions, practices, and examples, these extended learning experiences are developed and taught by invited experts at a professional master-class level. There is no additional fee, and any registered attendee may participate.
Foundations in Renewing and Growing: Resilience, Mindfulness, and Self-Compassion—Finding Steady Ground in Uncertain Times
In demanding and rapidly changing environments, educators and school leaders are often asked to support others while navigating their own stress, uncertainty, and competing priorities. How can we cultivate the awareness, resilience, and compassion needed to lead with intention rather than simply react to the pressures around us?
Examine the research and practice of mindfulness and self-compassion as powerful tools for personal and organizational well-being. Drawing on cognitive behavioral science and resilience research, explore how mindfulness can help shift automatic stress responses, strengthen emotional regulation, foster deeper connections with others, and support effective leadership during challenging times. Through guided reflection, practical exercises, and collaborative discussion, experience evidence-informed strategies that can be applied immediately in your school and professional life. Leave with practical tools, renewed clarity, and resources for sustaining resilience, supporting meaningful conversations, and fostering healthy, thriving school communities.
Presenter:
Megan Kennedy, director, University of Washington Resilience Lab
Megan Kennedy is the director of the UW Resilience Lab. As a leader and facilitator, Kennedy aims to build healthy and compassionate learning communities. From engaging stakeholders in vision-setting to partnering with students, staff and instructors, her approach to leadership centers on collaborative relationships.
Currently, Kennedy is developing and evaluating systems-based approaches to well-being that combine applied research, education, and collaborative programming across three University of Washington campuses.
This includes partnering with academic departments, student wellness groups, and community-based organizations seeking to deepen their capacity for mindfulness and resilience.
Foundations in Sustaining School Belonging: When the System Shifts—Finding Clarity, Agency, and a Way Forward
We know education evolves, but what happens when the changes around us feel less like evolution and more like a fundamental shift in the system itself?
Across schools and organizations, changes in professional titles, reporting structures, department names, priorities, and even the existence of particular roles are prompting educators to ask difficult questions: Where do I fit? What happens to the work I care about? And how do I move forward when the system around me is changing?
Examine change through three lenses: self, the work, and the system. Together, let’s identify what is changing, distinguish what is within and beyond our control, examine how systems shape what is possible, and explore where individual and collective agency still exist. Leave with greater clarity about the systems you are navigating and actionable strategies for sustaining meaningful work, even when its structure, language, or location must evolve.
Presenters:
Mistalene Calleroz White, professor, Spalding University
Mistalene Calleroz White has centered her experience in higher education on leadership, strategic planning, and creating systems of access and inclusion. With over 25 years in administration, she has led university efforts to expand recruitment and deepen institutional commitment to student success.
At Spalding University in Kentucky, Calleroz White held the roles of dean of undergraduate education and dean of academic support. Prior to that, she served as dean of students at two campuses at Arizona State University. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and English secondary education from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, followed by a master’s in higher education and doctorate in leadership and policy studies from Arizona State University.
Calleroz White is currently an adjunct faculty member in a doctoral program in educational leadership, where she focuses on innovation and change.
Tiffany Russell, chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, The Galloway School (GA)
Tiffany Simpkins Russell serves as chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at The Galloway School (GA), where she leads work focused on belonging, intercultural competence, organizational culture, and inclusive leadership. An educator, facilitator, and consultant with more than 25 years of experience, Russell helps schools and organizations move from good intentions to practices and systems that strengthen community and create meaningful change.
A Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI®) and a certified HBDI® practitioner, she integrates both into her work with leaders, teams, boards, and school communities. Russell holds a doctorate in educational policy studies from Georgia State University and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in African American studies from Temple University. She is also a ceramic artist whose work explores memory, identity, resilience, and belonging, and who believes some of our most important lessons about people, leadership, and community can be found with our hands in clay.
Foundations in Engaging Across Community: Building Capacity for Civil Discourse
We are teaching and leading in a world that is closing. Closing into certainty. Closing into fear of what is deemed unfamiliar. Closing into the comfort of single stories and simplified answers. Closing into camps around differences. And our students feel this closing.
Yet, the world they are inheriting is anything but simple. It is increasingly complex, constantly changing, and holds multiple truths. Difference itself is not the problem; polarization is. Polarization takes hold when difference becomes a source of fear, fear hardens into “us-versus-them” thinking, and community members begin to believe that meaningful engagement with those who see or experience the world differently is no longer possible—or worthwhile.
We sense this increasing retreat, and so do our students. They encounter it in public discourse that pressures them to take sides quickly, rather than listen deeply or think across perspectives. They see it in digital spaces that reward speed over reflection, certainty over curiosity, and visibility over substance. And they are coming of age amid complex questions that resists single or binary answers.
If we are to reverse this pattern and interrupt the dynamics of polarization in our school communities, we must intentionally build our capacity to engage across ideological, political, cultural, and other differences while creating spaces of trust, discernment, belonging, and cognitive empathy. Dialogue is one form of civil discourse and pedagogy that can help build this capacity. Dialogue doesn’t eliminate difference, nor should it. It can, however, help restore the possibility of engaging and remaining in relationship with difference.
Grounded in both theory and practice, let’s situate dialogue within the broader landscape of civil discourse, including conversation, discussion, debate, and deliberation, and explore what makes dialogue distinct. Clarify when dialogue is most useful, and what conditions and preparations are needed to cultivate a school culture and climate of dialogue grounded in the exchange of experiences, perspective seeking, and what Nicole Furlonge calls “prepositional listening.”
Through group and individual reflection, experiential activities, and a brief dialogue experience, delve into foundational practices including listening, inquiry, perspective-taking, first-person narrative, and reflection and debrief. Examine how intentional framing, prompts, agreements, and facilitation can create conditions where communities can rebuild trust and restore the possibility of engaging—and more importantly—continuing to be in relationship across differences.
Designed for educators, school leaders, and others new to dialogue, consider how to use these practices with both young people and adults—in classrooms, faculty and leadership settings, and school and community life.
Presenters:
Nichole Foster-Hinds, head of upper school, The Nightingale-Bamford School (NY)
Nichole Foster-Hinds is an educational leader, strategist, and community builder with more than two decades of experience in independent schools. Her work centers on helping schools prepare young people to understand themselves, engage meaningfully across difference, and contribute responsibly to an increasingly complex world through academic leadership; global education; dialogue; diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB); and social-emotional learning.
Foster-Hinds currently serves as head of upper school at The Nightingale-Bamford School (NY). Previously, she held leadership roles at Holton-Arms School (MD), where she helped develop Learn Well, Live Well, Lead Well, an educational philosophy integrating DEIB, global education, and health and well-being. Across both institutions, she translated these ideas into curriculum, student leadership, faculty development, and community-building initiatives.
At Nightingale, Foster-Hinds has expanded diploma-level Pathways in Global Studies and Civic Engagement, developed the Intercultural Dialogue Student Leadership program, and built faculty capacity in dialogue as pedagogy in partnership with the Institute for Global Learning (IGL). Her work positions dialogue as central to deep learning and belonging, helping students and adults understand its role in navigating tension, holding multiple truths, and staying curious and connected across differences.
Foster-Hinds brings this work to the broader independent school community through her contributions to NAIS, New York State Association of Independent Schools, International Coalition of Girls’ Schools, and IGL. As a presenter, facilitator, and thought partner, she explores how schools can cultivate academic excellence and human flourishing while preparing young people to lead with curiosity, courage, discernment, empathy, and responsibility.
Hilary McDonough, director of global and civil engagement, The Nightingale-Bamford School (NY)
Hilary McDonough is the director of global and civil engagement at The Nightingale-Bamford School (NY), where she leads the Upper School Global Scholars pathway, global partnerships, faculty-led travel learning, and intercultural dialogue training.
A fluent French speaker with professional experience in France and advanced Spanish proficiency, she is a contributing author to Intercultural Dialogue: A Field Guide for Educators and Schools and was the Institute for Global Learning's 2024–2025 Global Educator in Residence.
She currently serves as an Education Ambassador at the Council on Foreign Relations and holds degrees from Middlebury College and Wofford College.