The Courageous Leadership Academy (CLA) is a long-term, district-wide program that uses best practices to create “Professional Learning Communities of HOPE” among school leadership teams. The process is job-embedded and structured to create truly collaborative cultures that honor what teachers already know, while injecting new learning principles into daily practice.

The program serves as a catalyst for positive change in school culture, beginning with shared leadership and accountability.  Accelerating and sustaining student success are the ultimate goals of the CLA, and each step of the process takes school leadership teams deeper in understanding and closer toward becoming courageous leaders.

With a Courageous Leadership Academy, you get:

• A one and a half-day Leadership/Principals' session on a lateral leadership and how to support a professional learning community
• District Steering Committee needs assessment and planning meeting
• Four full-day sessions for School Leadership Teams in which collaborative capacity building activities are modeled by HOPE faculty
• Job-embedded homework assignments School Leadership Teams complete with their staff
• Collaboration and knowledge building through team-to-team and peer-to-peer debriefing of Re-entry plans and lessons learned from completed assignments
• Periodic meetings with the district steering committee are held to assess progress and adjust future sessions to assure success

With a Courageous Leadership Academy, your district can:

• Improve instruction – Teachers learn to work collaboratively to measure and study instruction; create and implement and monitor interventions, in a continuous improvement cycle

• Facilitate change – School leadership team members are responsible for transferring knowledge to colleagues and facilitating the implementation of new practices

• Develop professional development plans – Build capacity school wide for instructional improvement. By using protocols to study current instructional practices, teachers determine the most appropriate successful practices for instructional interventions. Teams learn how to design professional development plans to support new instructional practices based on data analysis and SMART goals that are aligned with your school improvement plan.