Looking for meaningful practice-based professional learning that connects theory to practice? Do you want to meet and develop relationships with other leaders? Seeking coaching to continue cultivating your leadership practices?
You’ve come to the right place.
Courses begin January 2024
Collaborative Leadership Coursework Experience: Key Components
Earn a micro-credential through engaging and relevant 8-week coursework. This is an opportunity to further cultivate the skills, knowledge, and dispositions of collaborative and shared leadership! Our courses are designed to bring theory and practice together with equity and relational trust integrated throughout each course.
Coursework Goals:
- Deepen understanding of collaborative leadership, shared power, and voice (one of the six key practices of Community Schools)
- Collaborate to design and maintain a shared vision
- Develop deep and sustained practices to cultivate relational trust among key members of the community and school
- Develop systems and structures that support collaborative leadership, shared power, and voice
- Apply practices for shared data collection and analysis.
These key ideas, practices, and concepts are built into each course:
- Relational trust: Cultivate a critical necessary condition for action through storytelling, equitable discourse, and shared power and decision-making.
- Equity: Achieve equitable outcomes for families and students and process for engaging families, students, staff, and community organizations.
- Model: Exhibit proficient use of tools, practices, and protocols that support Community Schools.
- Qualitative and quantitative data/evidence: Gather and analyze evidence with particular attention to local data/evidence.
Key Components of each course include:
- A cohort of 8-10 school leaders
- An experienced leadership coach for each cohort
- An inquiry cycle that includes group sessions with your cohort to learn new ideas and practices, and independent practice time at your school site to apply your new learning.
- A set of tools to support implementation
- A set of practices and protocols that are modeled during group sessions
The following courses are available in 2023-24 and all synchronous sessions are on Zoom and led by your coach:
Course | Description |
Reimaging Leadership as Collaborative | This course focuses on how leaders facilitate the design of a culture of collaborative and shared leadership. Participants experience protocols and practices for co-designing, facilitating, and supporting shared and collaborative system and structures |
Forming enduring relationships with families and community organizations | This course focuses on developing and maintaining relationships with key members of the community. Participants use IEL-developed tools and protocols to extend and enhance their partnerships with families and community organizations. |
Leading for Equitable Academic Improvement #1: Calling on Strategy | The focus of these two courses is on instructional leadership practices to support teachers as they cultivate equity-based classroom discussions. Leaders use tools such as evidence-based observation protocols and a discussion guide to support evidence driven collaborative conversations between teacher and school leader. |
Leading for Equitable Academic Improvement #2: Question Form and Level |
Typical Course Design Model
Week | Session | Notes |
#1 | Group Session | Facilitated by Coach |
#2 | Independent practice session | Coach meets 1:1 with each participant |
#3 | Independent practice session | |
#4 | Group Session | Facilitated by Coach |
#5 | Independent practice session | Coach Meets 1:1 with each participant |
#6 | Independent Practice Session | |
#7 | Independent evidence collection | |
#8 | Participants present evidence of success and quality implementation | Facilitated by Coach |
Key Partners
East Carolina University (ECU), Department of Educational Leadership
IEL has developed a successful partnership with the Department of Educational Leadership at ECU. Our 2 courses on collaborative instructional leadership (Leading for Equitable Academic Improvement #1 and #2) were collaboratively developed with ECU. These courses have been completed by over 250 school leaders in the last 4 years. We are currently offering these courses in District Two, New York City public schools.
Participate
Our coursework lives on a platform developed and managed by Participate (Participate.com). The platform hosts multiple communities of practice in education as well as coursework for micro-credential and digital badges. After completing a course, participants receive an IEL micro-credential and digital badge from Participate.


Who We Work With
- State Departments of Education seeking to provide deeper professional engagement in key areas of school leadership and support school leaders to meet re-licensure requirements.
- School districts seeking to align professional development needs of principals with district initiatives.
- Individual school and district leaders seeking to continue building their professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions. This includes:
- Principals
- Teacher Leaders
- Community School Coordinators
- District Administrators