Center for Leadership and Educational Equity’s Monthly eNewsletter – January 2025
Our collective power expands when we support each other to foster the unlimited potential of each and every student.
Top 5 Leadership Moves to Sustain your Own Growth
In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing education landscape, leadership is not just about guiding others — it’s also about personal growth and continuous development. Sustaining your growth as a school leader ensures that you remain effective, adaptive, and resilient. Here are five essential leadership strategies to help you maintain and accelerate your personal and professional growth:
1. Stay Aligned with your Purpose
Your purpose serves as a guiding compass, enabling you to focus on what truly matters and steer clear of distractions. Aligning with your purpose allows you to make decisions with greater clarity and confidence, reducing stress and uncertainty. Staying anchored to your purpose is also closely tied to professional longevity and job satisfaction. For instance, if your purpose revolves around promoting equitable outcomes for all students, intentionally seek and prioritize opportunities to contribute to that work, even in small ways. By staying true to your purpose, you create a work environment that is meaningful, intentional, and deeply fulfilling.
2. Prioritize Your Well-being
School leadership roles are inherently demanding, with competing priorities, complex challenges, and long hours often being the norm. As a school leader, prioritizing your well-being is essential for maintaining your health, sustaining your effectiveness, and fostering a positive school culture. A critical aspect of this is establishing clear boundaries between work and personal life — and adhering to them. Ask yourself: Do you really need to respond to every email or text in the evening or on weekends? Is it truly necessary to attend every after-school event? In most cases, the answer is no. As author Simon Sinek aptly put it, “The best leaders are those who prioritize their own health and happiness, so they can serve others from a place of strength.”
3. Seek Constructive Feedback
Navigating professional growth without constructive feedback is like embarking on a cross-country road trip without a map or GPS — you might reach a destination, but it likely won’t be where you intended to go. If feedback loops are weak in your organization, take the initiative to seek input from key stakeholders like parents, teachers, and students. Remember, the most impactful feedback is often informal. This could involve collecting exit tickets at the end of a faculty meeting, engaging a small group of parents to discuss their perceptions, or surveying students about their experiences. By modeling a proactive feedback process, you can help dispel the negative associations often tied to feedback in schools, while fostering a culture where staff feel valued, heard, and engaged.
4. Build a Strong Mentor and Peer Support System
School leadership can often feel isolating, as leaders are tasked with making tough decisions and managing significant responsibilities. Building a robust support system helps alleviate this isolation by connecting leaders with a network of peers and mentors who can share experiences and offer guidance. Additionally, a strong mentor and peer support system opens doors to broader professional opportunities, including collaborations, partnerships, and access to new resources and ideas.
Todd Simendinger, CLEE Continuous Improvement Coach and Facilitator
5. Consider Leadership Coaching
Leadership coaching is a transformative investment in your growth, offering valuable insights into their strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots. This deeper self-awareness empowers leaders to make more intentional and effective decisions. Coaches also support you to hone critical skills like communication, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence, enhancing your ability to inspire and guide teams. Additionally, a skilled coach can help alleviate the isolation and burnout often associated with school leadership, fostering resilience and balance.
In conclusion, sustaining your growth requires intentional effort and continuous improvement. By integrating these leadership moves into your routine, you’ll not only enhance your leadership capabilities but also inspire those around you to strive for their own growth. In doing so, you create a thriving environment where both you and your team can excel.
Not sure how to get started? CLEE can help. We offer coaching, facilitator training, support in implementing initiatives through our Cycles of Improvement professional learning, and other peer support programs that help leaders like you strengthen skills, build networks and achieve your career goals.
Connect with CLEE to Support your Top Leadership Moves
Springfield, MA Continuous Improvement: School Teams for District Transformation
Springfield Public Schools is in the middle of a five-year project with CLEE to engage teams in every school “to provide leadership and momentum that will further racial equity in their school by implementing best practices, educational opportunities, and programs with a focus on anti-racist practices that ensure racial equity.” Our work is also aligned to the Springfield Portrait of a Graduate the district developed to guide the long term outcomes for every student. Each school team joins other schools in a three-year cohort, and teams get CLEE’s Continuous Improvement Training in professional learning sessions and coaching support.
The school-based teams are focusing on:
- Facilitating adult learning in their schools
- Developing skills to use data to increase equity
- Understanding root causes
- Implementing frequent change ideas
Ben Doren, CLEE Continuous Improvement Coach and Facilitator
Each school in the district has a team that works with a CLEE Coach for three years, aligning support to the content in the professional learning sessions. This time commitment is essential to develop the capacity for a school team to lead this equity work, learn how to facilitate collaboration with colleagues, and evaluate the effect of the changes they propose and enact with their colleagues. CLEE coaches guide the school teams by asking Essential Questions over the three years: What is our team’s role in this work? What is our realm of influence? Where are we going? What does a student centered and anti-racist instructional core look like, sound like, and feel like? How do we sustain improvement to get better at equitable outcomes for all students in the coming years?
This is hard and important work for Springfield Public Schools as they change practices and remove barriers to ensure each and every student can learn at high levels, feel a sense of belonging and joy at school. This is the work that supports each family in achieving their dreams for their children. It is exciting for the educators and leaders to learn how to do this together.
Empower Educators to Lead Continuous Improvement in Your Setting
Thank You for Supporting Educators for the Future!
As a non-profit, CLEE relies on generous donors like you to amplify our work. This year supporters gave $3,038 to support educators to create forward-thinking schools. CLEE develops collaborative leadership among educators to focus on students, and their needs, to create the best possible futures for them. Your gift to educators leading transformation in the present is an investment in the future. Your gifts support:
- CLEE’s library of over 400 collaboration tools and resources accessible to all educators at no cost,
- Services to schools, districts, and individual educators,
- Our national gathering, Fall Meeting, and Fall Meeting scholarships,
- CLEE projects across the country, and
- Scholarships for aspiring principals in Rhode Island.
Facilitator Training (Virtual): Lead Adult Learning
All of us have the ability to lead adult collaboration that increases student learning regardless of our position in our organization or school. Facilitator Training builds your capacity to be a leader for equity. Facilitative Leadership provides leaders and educators a place to share best practice, engage using collaborative tools that strengthen leadership skills, and challenge thinking to discover ways that improve student outcomes.
Register for Facilitator TrainingBecome a Principal in Rhode Island in 11 Months!
Students need educators like you who are ready and willing to create learning environments focused on their needs more than ever. The Principal Residency Network (PRN) is one of the longest-running residency-based preparation programs in the country. We are dedicated to developing the next generation of principals who lead through innovation.
Make PRN your first step towards equitable leadership. Equip yourself with the tools you’ll need to address the complex challenges and to advance your career in education!
I Want a PRN Application!
Applications are due March 21, 2025
Join a PRN Info Session – Next week!
- Tuesday, January 14, 2025
- Tuesday, February 4, 2025
- Monday, March 3, 2025
All Times 4:30 – 5:30pm
I Am Interested in PRN
The PRN Interest Form will help us to better support you as you continue to explore the PRN.
Fall Meeting: Save the Date!
You are invited to join us in Providence, RI November 13-14, 2025
The Fall Meeting is a transformative experience that goes far beyond a typical educational conference. This will be an opportunity to connect with educators from across the country as we explore what leading for equity looks like in our current world. What would it look and feel like if every student got what they needed to unleash their unlimited unknowable potential? What strengths in our adult learning community can we build upon to reach this vision?
Together, we will practice the heart, hand, and mind work through tools and protocols to increase equitable outcomes for each and every student.
Each month, CLEE offers a question or two to help you reflect on what you are experiencing. Thinking about the importance of questioning and what your answers mean is one more step in your growth as a leader for equity.
Join CLEE on Twitter @Leadforequity to follow the monthly questions and share your answers.
Where do you want to focus your growth this year?