About the Pathway
Today’s leaders face widening achievement gaps, unfinished instruction, and persistent staffing challenges — yet their commitment to every student remains steadfast. The Organizational Leadership Pathway equips teams to address the root causes of these challenges by aligning vision, strategy, and systems for sustainable change. Through consultancies and professional learning communities, leaders will learn to create the conditions for effective instruction by aligning the time, talent, and tools within their sphere of control. Participants will clarify their leadership role, receive hands-on support with their problem of practice, and learn to drive progress through continuous improvement. By planning and learning together, teams will grow their collective impact and leave ready to lead for grade-level, engaging, affirming, and meaningful — GLEAM® — instruction.
Empower leaders to align vision, strategy, and systems for student success.
What to Expect
In the Organizational Leadership pathway, participants will:
- Explore their own leadership identities and approaches
- Examine barriers to effective instruction and develop a plan to better align time, people, and resources for educational impact
- Learn how to grow the collective efficacy and impact of educational leadership teams
- Leave with an instructional vision, an Action and Communications plan, and tools to help you drive sustainable, org-wide improvements that lead to effective instruction in every classroom
The iterative use of the tools will enable you to:
- Continuously assess and adjust your systems, structures, policies, and practices
- Make strategic decisions about time, people, and resources
Who is the Instructional Leadership pathway for?
K–12 district or school leaders, deans and directors of curriculum and instruction, instructional coaches, and academic department heads responsible for instructional leadership
What Participants Learn
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Day 1
- Gain insight into the historical, policy, and leadership attributes that impact educational outcomes.
- Explore how history shapes communities and schools, prompting an examination of power dynamics and a consideration of how school leaders can and should use their agency to disrupt inequity.
- Examine the UnboundEd leadership hypothesis, emphasizing the significant role of emotional intelligence in fostering a team’s readiness to manage and lead for change.
- Engage in role-specific consultancies to contemplate how beliefs, knowledge, and actions shape their leadership approaches.
- Consider the influence of one’s identity and systemic factors on their decisions.
- Share their reflections on their leadership journeys and the team’s collective impact on a specific issue or practice.
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Day 2
- Explore an initial self-selected problem of practice, focusing on common barriers to school improvement, such as time, money, and human resources.
- Assess their instructional vision for alignment with GLEAM Instruction and leadership, connecting the core components of GLEAM Instruction to their existing instructional vision.
- Explore strategies for cultivating collective efficacy to lead change.
- Use a heat map to scrutinize existing beliefs, knowledge, and actions in the context of instructional improvement and identify gaps in their professional development structures and leadership practices.
- Audit current investments in time, considering how the allocation of time relates to their identified problem of practice.
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Day 3
- Analyze and audit the current investments in people and resources, and consider how the allocation of time relates to their identified problem of practice.
- Revise or jointly develop a new problem of practice that, once resolved, can lead to significant and positive transformations in instruction and leadership.
- Identify and collaboratively develop solutions for their problem of practice.
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Day 4
- Engage in an action planning protocol with their school or role-alike teams, ensuring their strategies are well-defined, actionable, and aligned with leadership for GLEAM Instruction.
- Prepare to address their unique problems of practice using data from their specific contexts, reflections on their team’s collective impact, and an inventory of existing professional learning structures.
- Commit to driving change individually through self-reflection and systemically through the conditions they create.
- Engage in additional team-based action planning.
The facilitators were-well prepared and pushed us as a group to dig deeper with our responses and questions. I felt comfortable taking risks with my responses because of the safe space.
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