Next Level Leadership Course Launches - Marketing Your School - Who’s Telling Your Story?

“If you’re not telling your story – who is?” Doug Kaplicky, Award-Winning Administrator asks.

Next Level Leadership Course Launch - Marketing Your School – Who’s Telling Your Story?

This course is the first of many planned through a partnership between CEE and Randy Russell to provide a suite of courses that tackle a range of thorny topics head on. These Next Level Leadership Courses are designed to elevate the skills of educational leaders and provide participants with the confidence and evidence they need to take their leadership to the next level.

Where did the partnership idea come from? Randy Russell pointed to the high level of trust already evident in his work with CEE as a valued partner in his role as an educational leader. “The idea for the partnership really just flowed out of an already existing partnership with CEE. As superintendent in Freeman School District, I have partnered with CEE as a customer since 2016-17 to continuously build my district culture. I rely on CEE’s tools to gather data, gain insights, and engage students, parents and staff around our district’s mission, vision and values. I’ve benefitted from CEE’s expertise which serves as the foundation for this current effort to co-develop high quality, standards-aligned professional learning opportunities in the form of online courses.”

“Exactly” echoed John Steach, CEO of CEE. “We jumped at the chance to partner with Randy Russell in the creation of something we understand busy educational leaders really need as they work to continuously improve their systems while contending with a constant flood of change and complexity. We wanted to cut through that and get to what matters most. We are excited to partner with Randy to positively impact educational leaders in any setting nationally.”

Course participants will appreciate the connection in all of the Next Level Leadership courses to professional standards for educational leadership. John explained, “Since we designed our L360 around the PSEL (formerly known as ISLLC) standards and the School Leader Paradigm (SLP), it made tremendous sense to extend that commitment to high-quality professional learning through our course content.”

Randy echoed, “Without some type of professional leadership standards to connect to, a course can just become a list of great ideas. We decided that if we were going to provide online professional learning courses, we would make those connections explicit.”

What Matters Most?

There are so many competitors for the attention of educational leaders at all levels – but especially at the school level. We set out to design courses that would be relevant for leaders in any context, but especially for school principals.

This is in response to national trend research conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics on the alarming rate of principal attrition. It should concern us all that 1 in 10 (11%) public school principals left the profession during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years.

More recently, an article in EdWeek to kick off the 23-24 school year indicates that framing principal attrition as a “principal pipeline” issue is misguided. Instead, the authors suggest that leadership development through pathways is needed to attract, grow, and individualize the leadership journey for current and aspiring leaders. As the authors assert, “Think about it, whatever commodity enters a pipeline at the beginning (e.g., water) is the exact same thing that exits the pipeline at the end. There is no growth or change. This can’t be the way we think about leadership development.”

The partnership between CEE and Randy Russell to develop high quality learning opportunities is in direct response to what matters most to current and aspiring leaders.

For more information visit www.randyrussell.org.