Our Mission.
The mission of School Leader Lab is to support schools and their networks in sustaining and growing high-quality schools through one of their most important assets — leaders. We partner with schools to strengthen their instructional leadership bench – by developing exceptional teams, made up of diverse leaders reflective of our community’s students, and by building organizational capacity for leader development.
Our Story.
Based on strong demand from DC charter leaders, we came together in the spring of 2016 to incubate a new leadership development program model. During the 2016-17 school year, we held four local Learning Labs, piloting a model that complemented and supported charter leaders as they completed Relay GSE’s year-long National Principal Academy Fellowship. Due to the success of, and learning from this pilot work, our model is designed to be rooted in practice, integrating instructional, adult leadership, and equity/cultural context in the training. Our early pilot work also substantiated the need for internal talent management capacity to support and extend leader development within charter organizations.
Our Values.
Equity. We devote significant time, energy, and resources to build our muscle and that of our partners in using an equity lens to better identify, discuss, and build equitable practices into our work, and the schools and community we serve.
Integrity. We hold ourselves to a high bar of excellence and are principled in our approach and interactions with our partners and each other.
Partnership. We believe that exceptional leadership requires deep collaboration, with school leaders and with each other, and that working together will always yield better results than when we work alone.
Impact. We use data and rapid cycle feedback to learn, to drive our decision making as well as our resource allocation to ensure that our programming and organization yield excellent results – to strengthen the sustainability of the schools with which we work.
Our Partners and Supporters
This website was created by Sheyla Gyles and Zoë Valladares, two students attending
Washington Leadership Academy.
(c) School Leader Lab 2018