Career Academy Leaders' Collaborative
Program Overview (enrollment now open!)
The Career Academy Leaders' Collaborative is a powerful new opportunity for school district leaders and educators to develop adaptive leadership capacity, build knowledge, and enhance skills to create and enact transformative ideas that empower their community. The program consists of a year-long fellowship built on in-person and virtual collaborative experiences. The overarching goal of the Career Academy Leaders Collaborative is to develop leadership capacity to grow school-community networks that harness the power of collective impact, ultimately improving the economic and life chances of all youth.
The Collaborative
The Career Academy Leaders' Collaborative will be supported by a partnership between two organizations:
- The Education Development Center (EDC)
- The National Career Academy Coalition (NCAC)
Intended Participants
Participants in the Leaders’ Collaborative will be selected based on their experience and demonstrated capacity to support the National Standards Of Practice for Career Academies and community transformation through the academy model. Registration of leadership teams is encouraged; these could include teachers, coaches, guidance counselors, school and district administrators, and advisory board members.
Program Outcome
Situated in both physical and virtual space, the Career Academy Leaders’ Collaborative (CALC) will function as a professional network of role diverse leaders implementing the NSOP for Career Academies. Central to the work will be growing and sustaining career academies as job-embedded structures for rigorous and ongoing educator learning and development deliberately focused on equity, excellence, and the measureable growth of each student.
Program Goals
Through a year-long series of seminar and practicum experiences, CALC Fellows will pool collective organizational knowledge and applied experiences, draw on a resource bank of experts in a variety of cross-sector contexts to inform innovation designs, explore best practices for transformative change and scale, and apply their learning to support youth success. CALC Fellows will work as members of a community of practice dedicated to supporting and sustaining community change through the academy model.
More specifically, CALC Fellows will:
- Assess the nature and purpose of the NSOP for Career Academies.
- Employ the NSOP to enhance the current state of leadership necessary to sustain and deepen professional learning and development within the career academy model.
- Apply leadership/coaching models associated with collaborative professionalism, facilitating transformational change and innovation, and cultivating individual and collective efficacy and accountability.
- Develop a theoretical and practical understanding of the various forms and characteristics of high quality job-embedded professional learning and development and consider its implications for their leadership practice.
- Design and implement a school and/or academy-wide mini-inquiry cycle on a selected problem of practice directly related to the NSOP and their specific professional school/academy roles and responsibilities
Cost per participant is $4,000.
Application Deadline is June 15, 2018.
Three Face-to-Face Meetings: July 25-27 in Tampa, FL; November 3-4 in Houston, TX adjacent to the NCAC Conference; February 13-15 in Atlanta, GA
