FOR CURRENT AND ASPIRING SCHOOL LEADERS

Lead for Delaware

The Lead for Delaware Program is a soft skills-focused, school leader experience offering both a certification and non-certification track for both aspiring and seated leaders.

PROGRAM PILLARS

  • Rigorous Reflection: At Lead For Delaware, we expose leaders to themselves. We don’t hold back on engaging in difficult conversations about race, gender, identity or other structural barriers to transformation; in fact, exploration of these concepts is foundational to our program. Leaders who know themselves and seek to understand others have the power to transform communities.  

  • Strategic Discourse: Lead for Delaware fellows regularly engage in problems of practice specific to their everyday work. They explore the common tensions they face in values, beliefs and assumptions through a case-based, dialogic learning model. Our program is noisy with disagreement, debate and creative problem-solving. 

  • Thoughtful Exposure: Throughout the Lead for Delaware program, fellows are asked to put relevant context and familiar experiences aside to engage in opportunities designed to facilitate their growth as individuals and school leaders. Fellows are intentionally exposed to educational models outside their own districts and charters to expand the perspective on what’s possible for schools and the children they serve.

  • Solution Design: LFD prepares leaders to design human-centered solutions to address structural inequities.
WHAT EDUCATORS SAY
“The Lead for Delaware program has allowed me to push past black-and-white answers and ask questions of data, of experiences and of my teachers that elicit information that is more nuanced and information that surfaces larger issues of equity.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant
“It is making me re-evaluate my practices and ponder how to be an effective, just leader who acts in equity as I move forward.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant
“The experiences shared by current school leaders has been very valuable. I have enjoyed the opportunity to be able to visit other schools and get a sense of their needs and what school leadership is doing or has done to address those needs.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant
“It has helped me better understand equity in education and given me tools to address it in my school building.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant
“The program forced us to just get raw with our feelings and allowed us to be honest and vulnerable in starting hard conversations.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant
“Hearing the history of de/resegregation resonated with me. It is Day Two and I already feel as though I've gained valuable information and perspective.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant
“Being able to observe classrooms that are outside my current grade level is helpful to understand the differences, especially doing so with teachers that better understand that level.”
LFD Participant
LFD Participant

GETTING STARTED

Whether you are an aspiring or seated leader, the Lead for Delaware Program can support your professional goals towards equity-based leadership through one of two ways: 

  • Lead for Delaware Principal/Assistant Principal Alternative Route Certification Program
  • Lead for Delaware Professional Development for Aspiring and Seated Leaders

Please complete this interest form for more information!

Interest form

Video: Wilma shares about her experience with Lead for Delaware