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Leadership Development Projects

We design and provide a range of leadership development interventions and experiences for teacher leaders, administrative leaders (at the school, network, and system levels) as well as for school-level and system-level leadership teams. We also design and provide development experiences for individuals who provide leadership coaching to school and system level leaders.

Our approach to leadership development recognizes the importance of leadership practice/competency development and emphasizes “active” learning designs. In this work we design/provide professional development, lead networked learning communities, and provide leadership coaching. Our impact-oriented learning designs identify what will be impacted through learning and formative data are collected through a “learning design” approach so that learning designs can be refined to strengthen developmental outcomes. 


Current/Recent Projects
DEVELOPMENT OF NETWORK CHIEFS, CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS (CPS)

Since the school year 2015-16, CUEL has provided leadership development to Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Network Chiefs. Chiefs supervise principals in nearly all of Chicago’s neighborhood schools apart from the 75 Independent School Principal schools that are not members of a CPS Network.  This work has been funded over this timeframe by the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, an anonymous funder, and through additional funding provided by the Finnegan Family Foundation.

In 2021 under the leadership of Director Cosner and Faculty Affiliate Barron, CUEL began using a cycle of inquiry that supported extensive data collection within CPS to help us consider and identify the most pressing learning needs of Network Chiefs. Based on this cycle of inquiry Network Chiefs are learning how to engage in joint work with school leaders to diagnose and develop more distributed forms of leadership within schools. As a part of this learning design, Network Chiefs experience monthly large group learning experiences, smaller professional learning communities with a subset of Network Chiefs, and small group leadership coaching. Read more