The Leadership Academy collaborates with districts to design and refine aspiring leadership pathway programs at all levels, ensuring they are tailored to local needs. Whether districts are building a program from the ground up or enhancing an existing pathway, we help strengthen their curriculum to cultivate student-centered leadership and data-informed decision-making.
In our work, we:
- Leverage proven curriculum and tools, while customizing to local context. When we partner with districts, we bring a customized and unique approach that is unlike typical “off the shelf” PD. We adapt our research-based aspiring leaders curriculum, resources, and tools to align with district priorities, capacity needs, and local leadership competencies. Our work includes cross-walking and integrating program curricula with local and state leadership competencies.
- Design and deliver professional learning grounded in research on adult learning and data-driven change leadership. We emphasize design and facilitation of professional learning that is active and immediately relevant, and that provides participants with opportunities to practice and reflect. We know that learning of aspiring leaders needs to be job-embedded and have participants use their own data to drive real change.
- Incorporate co-design, co-delivery, and other capacity-building activities to ensure aspiring pathway programs are locally owned and sustainable once TLA’s work concludes. Our consulting model embeds local capacity building through a “gradual release” model. We take an explicit and intentional approach to this work, and activities can include facilitating co-design sessions that help local program leaders understand how we build and revise curricula; providing facilitation training for local facilitators; scaffolding a co-facilitation process with program leaders that includes pre-session examination of curriculum and post-session debriefs; and finally, providing observation and feedback of local facilitators and coaches to help strengthen their practice.
Our aspiring pathway programs can be customized for all school leadership levels – aspiring teacher leaders, assistant principals, and principals.
Our program is flexible and allows districts to choose either comprehensive support for a new pathway program with all the services below, or select targeted services to refine an existing leadership pathway.
- Alignment of an Aspiring Leader Competency Framework: Comprehensive, behavior-based standards are the foundation for our pathway programs, from recruitment and selection to curriculum and program design. We can customize local leadership standards or help build one from the ground up.
- Program Design & Implementation Strategy: We help you design the necessary infrastructure that aligns resources to the vision for impact, and develop an implementation strategy for community buy-in.
- Build Strong Candidate Pool and Cohort Selection: We work with you to create a targeted, competency-based process for recruiting and selecting a cohort ready to tackle the program.
- Design of Curriculum and Assessments: We work side-by-side with you to customize the content we bring and develop experiential curriculum that prepares aspiring leaders to capitalize on local opportunities and meet the current challenges in the district.
- Facilitation of Learning: We can provide facilitation training for local facilitators or directly facilitate the aspiring pathway sessions.
- Evaluation of Program Impact: We help you create the right tools for evaluating the impact of your program and revise the program model based on the learning.