Additional courses support participants in leading effective teams, improving teaching quality, negotiating, managing organizational systems and leading change within a district.
“The best professional development education is job-embedded,” said David Brazer, an associate professor of education at Stanford GSE and instructor for the program’s “Leading for Opportunity” course. “With Stanford EdLEADers, the research you learn, you can practice in real time. It’s relevant the next morning.”
A lonely job
An important component of the program is the relationships superintendents build while working together in small groups on specific exercises and challenges.
“Participants are learning not only from Stanford faculty but from each other,” said Nereyda Salinas, executive director of GSE’s EdCareersand program director for Stanford EdLEADers. “Their positions can be very lonely, and the program builds camaraderie and a culture of sharing struggles and best practices.”
Because the virtual program draws participants from across the country, it provides school system leaders with fellow strategists whose distance can be an asset. “To be frank, there’s sometimes safety in being able to talk and be vulnerable about your leadership with people who aren’t colleagues within your district or even within your state,” said Brackett.
What’s more, the diversity of districts represented by program participants—geographic location, size, urban or rural—offers a variety of viewpoints on mutual challenges.
“Interacting with people in different states, in different roles, builds a strength of perspective,” said Jim Lianides, a Stanford EdLEADers advisor and longtime superintendent in the San Francisco Bay Area, now retired after 39 years of working in education. “The relationships that participants create in this program can last and become a networking group for many years.”
That support is critical and can be hard to cultivate otherwise, said Libia Gil, former chief education officer for the State of Illinois and former assistant deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, who serves as an advisor for Stanford EdLEADers.
“There aren’t that many opportunities for aspiring or even current superintendents to have this kind of network,” she said. “The program is carefully designed to encourage cohort learning, engagement with each other—continuous reflection and feedback that you don’t get in real life. It’s powerful learning that can elevate, and maybe even redefine, the possibilities of school system leadership.”
Learn more about Stanford EdLEADers and sign up for updates at edleaders.stanford.edu.