Follow the Leaders: A New Year of Insights and Inspiration to Meet Today’s Challenges

School and district leaders today face enormous challenges: from supporting their staff to deliver rigorous instruction that meets students’ needs, to addressing the trauma and disruption of a worldwide pandemic, to creating equitable and inclusive communities. Principals and their staffs, principal supervisors, and central office administrators are all wondering:

What are inspiring, equity-centered leaders doing to address these massive challenges? What’s working? Why?

For over ten years, we at Relay Graduate School of Education have had the privilege of working with inspiring leaders from around the country. Through such programs as the Leverage Leadership Institute, National Principal Supervisors Academy, the National Principal Academy Fellowship, the Inclusive Schools Leadership Institute and more, we’ve learned from and with cohorts of leaders who use data, research, empathy, and experience to lead for student achievement, equity, and wellness.

In this series, Follow the Leaders, we share their stories. Last year, we profiled how eight leaders addressed equity and representation, improving instruction, communicating with teachers, and leading school-wide change. All of these leaders did so while adapting to hybrid and virtual learning in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

The pandemic has shifted, and most students and teachers are back in schools. But that has only increased the importance of providing all students with engaging, rigorous instruction and empowering communities. That means supporting teachers with the professional learning, resources, and culture in which they too can thrive. Great leaders learn from the challenges of the past and build on our collective strengths.

This moment provides us with an opportunity to reimagine the way we do school, developing new skills for a more inclusive, empowering, and flexible school model.

The leaders we’ll profile over the next year will offer us all examples of the hard work of leading school communities in this new era — and remind us of what’s possible.

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