Empower Your Leadership, Boost Student Success

Dana Rappaport • Cahn Fellow 2023

How do we build leadership capacity to create a more cohesive team of grade leaders who have a shared sense of purpose and ability to effectively guide their team? How can we support teachers to use grade meeting time to develop their ability to plan in response to student work and the curriculum to make strategic decisions so all learners are appropriately challenged?

These were questions that guided us through our journey to create a strong team dedicated to planning for student achievement.

Through our work with the Cahn Fellowship program, we were able to learn how to delve into the heart of our adaptive problem, understanding that the development of leadership requires teaching, planning and collaboration skills, giving time and effort to unfolding a problem of practice with a team, working on solutions, and creating practices and procedures to help the team with an efficient and effective work model for accomplishing goals.

Our journey led us to discover surprises about leadership, including how to plan a meeting or series of meetings to get the most effective results from a team and how to navigate the push and pull of telling a team what to do versus leading a team to draw their own conclusions. After this year of study, we are now on a path to empower our grade leadership team to build sustainable structures, tackling challenging problems of practice with confidence and innovation.