School leaders shape the direction of their schools and staffs, yet no principal can do it alone. Leaders need a culture of support and collaboration with other leaders and staff to achieve a vision of excellence for all. Amid an increasingly complex education policy and funding landscape and job demands, leaders must meet these challenges and opportunities and also proactively support their staff to learn, grow in their careers, and contribute to a positive school culture.

Leadership happens at multiple levels within a school, system, and community. With that in mind, Learning Forward co-designed and piloted a multi-district learning network in 2023 in Florida for eight school-based leadership teams. This pilot led to the launch of Leadership Team Institute 2024-25 that is supporting seven vertical teams from five districts in a year-long learning experience structured around developing the individual and collective strengths of each leader and their team.

The current Leadership Team Institute cohort members are principals, assistant principals, teacher leaders, and district-level leaders working to improve their individual leadership skills and team effectiveness and to solve a strategic problem of practice in their own districts. With coaching, evidence-backed programming, and time built in for collaborating with other teams, they are immersed in a supportive environment.

“Reducing staff turnover and improving retention, making sound curriculum, instruction, and assessment decisions, accelerating academic achievement, and ensuring student safety and wellbeing are examples of complex challenges that require the input of colleagues, teams, parents, and the broader community,” according to Paul Fleming, Learning Forward Chief Learning Officer and a former principal and assistant commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education. “A high-functioning leadership team is skilled at bringing multiple perspectives to the table in order to successfully achieve a shared vision and objectives.”

Effective leadership is rarely achieved without intention. High-functioning leadership teams are built, and are, on average, five times more productive than average teams, according to McKinsey & Company research.

Leadership Team Institute participating teams each choose a problem of practice to work on, guided by their strategic priorities. In the LTI 2024-25 cohort, the team from Brandywine School District in Delaware chose providing consistent and actionable feedback to teachers as its problem of practice. Brandywine’s team has benefited from the ideas and strategies shared by other teams.

“You find that all school leaders and a lot of school teams and districts are grappling with a lot of the same issues,” said Kevin Palladinetti, a principal at Brandywine School District. “To be able to collaborate with colleagues across the country and then learn from subject-matter experts, it’s tremendously helpful because the one thing that no educator wants to do is waste their time.”

“We are intentional about bringing teams together in both in-person and virtual settings throughout the year,” Fleming said. “The teams really know each other’s problems of practice. That collegial advice and support has been one of the great takeaways from this year’s program.”

Registration is now open for state, district, and school-based teams interested in joining the next Leadership Team Institute cohort and more information can be found here.

Learn more

Leadership Team Institute web page

Coming up

Leadership Team Institute 2025-26 application deadline is April 30, 2025: Apply here

Next week:

  • Look for our blog previewing the leadership team readiness tool. As an early step in the one-year Leadership Team Institute program, participating teams engage with this leadership team readiness tool to identify their teams’ strengths benchmarked against characteristics of highly effective teams, and pinpoint where there are opportunities to learn from each other and get stronger. It’s an effective and evidence-backed assessment tool, developed by Learning Forward and Florida Atlantic University to help leadership teams who want to improve and perform at higher levels.
  • Look for social media posts on X and LinkedIn from a Leadership Team Institute team meetup we’re hosting virtually.