Watershed Collaborative

Watershed Collaborative was founded to address a tangible problem that had existed for more than two decades. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) had proven to be a highly-effective pedagogy, K-12 curriculum, and professional development program. Yet VTS remained out of reach for most educators. This meant that too few young people - and teachers - benefited from the profound impact VTS can have on learning.

Watershed’s mission is to make VTS possible in any classroom in the US and abroad. To do so, we offer a highly-accessible and affordable portfolio of products and services designed for professional learning and instruction in 21st century classrooms. Watershed leverages digital technology and media to reach teachers and schools unable to access VTS through traditional, high-cost professional development and curriculum.

To help teachers implement VTS, our professional development program that from the beginning has had two elements: practice and reflection. Armed with images and the simple script—ask these questions, listen, paraphrase what you hear—teachers quickly put the strategy into practice with their own students; following their discussions with students, they are asked to reflect on they see happening to individuals, their class at large, and themselves. Watershed supplies the essential resources (video and text explanations), an easy-to-use interactive course platform, one-on-one and group coaching, sequenced discussion assignments for teacher peers, and the all-important images to use in classes with all grade levels.

Hailey Group

From stand-alone workshops of 2+ hours to multi-day programs to ongoing learning and certification.

We co-design learning experiences with you for your organization, designing for clients’ existing leadership and team development programs and for executive education programs at institutions of higher learning. Our offerings support and advance human-centered design, UX, agile, LeanKit and more.

We nurture the kind of leadership that solicits and values all perspectives, asks the right questions, listens attentively, links ideas, frames work as learning. We believe leaders must be able to steward their employees’ growth, not merely direct work. They sustain a culture of authentic engagement, strategic thinking and creativity.

We help build teams, ones where all participants experience pyschological safety, bias awareness, multiple perspectives, cross-functionality, full engagement. Our methodology trains participants in how to create and sustain discussions among a diverse group so that everyone speaks, hears one another, builds effectively on a variety of ideas and information.

We help promoted innovation. We know it doesn't happen without critical thinking and rigorous, open discussion. The skills and mindsets we teach--observation and empathy, deep listening, comfort with ambiguity, thinking before landing, gaining all perspectives--are crucial to executing creativity.

Our work begins with discussions of art, knowing that they are powerful tools to help develop a healthy workplace culture where employees flourish. We cultivate reflective environments that promote trust, respect, a shared understanding of professional values and inter-and intra- personal connection. These sessions also model techniques for renewal, self-care and communication.